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And then, in William Hill’s New York there are the specifics. My favorite: the Daguerreian Gallery of Illustrious Americans, located at 205 Broadway, already present in the city by the mid-1840s. Its inclusion is not incidental. It places this image at the threshold between older forms of representation and the emerging modern world of mechanical reproduction.

As America strove to forge identity through music, literature, painting, and the arts more broadly, a remarkable innovation was quietly reshaping the musical landscape. It was precisely in this context that the piano, transformed by the invention of the iron frame by Bostonian piano maker Alpheus Babcock, entered the scene.

One of the guiding principles behind George Frederick Bristow: American Composer has been to understand not only Bristow himself, but the musical world he inherited. This short sequence from the film, featuring composer and scholar Neely Bruce, helps illuminate that earlier soundscape with remarkable clarity.

And then the Civil War barged in, rude as a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. You can’t tell Bristow’s story without it: 750,000 Americans dead in four years—how many of them might have someday sat in a concert hall to hear one of his symphonies, or become the next generation of musicians carrying his work forward? I hit pause on everything else and started patching together that chapter—still pinning photos to the wall like a detective.

Light & The City will be the first documentary to bring this story to the screen — a film about photography not as an artistic afterthought to European invention, but as a homegrown act of innovation rooted in New York’s workshops, rooftops, and factories.

New York City, January 29, 2026 --- I’m honored to be joining an extraordinary group of scholars and musicians at the Forging an American Identity conference this January in New York City. The conference opens Wednesday, January 28, at Geffen Hall, Sidewalk Studio, Lincoln Center, and my participation will take place the following day, Thursday, January 29, at the Elebash Recital Hall at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

The distinction—between the beautiful and the sublime—was crucial to nineteenth-century aesthetics, and it became the fault line in the cultural dialogue between America and Europe. Europe had the beautiful: cultivated landscapes, historic cities, art that had been refined over centuries.