The Colonial Music Institute
Bringing History to Life Through Music

CONSULTING SERVICES David and Ginger are available on a per-project or per-hour basis. Please let us know what you have in mind and we’ll promptly get back to you with a quote. Here follow some details about the kind of work they’ve done.

FILM AND VIDEO SOUNDTRACKS:
David & Ginger work as consultants on a variety of film projects, from commercial and public television to special non-broadcast videos. In some cases they arrange and record special music, and generally they work with producers in making important decisions about which music is appropriate to certain scenes. Among the more notable past projects are:

Liberty! The American Revolution (1997; six, one-hour segments, produced by Minnesota Public Television and Middlemarch films). The Hildebrands’ music figures in each segment of this successful documentary, and they provided the ideas and raw musical materials that resulted in the soundtrack CD (Sony Classical SK 63216). While bigger-name musicians Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, Wynton Marsalis and Mark O’Connor were brought in late in the process, David and Ginger’s music from Over the Hills and Far Away and Music of the Charles Carroll Family intermingles throughout. This film continues to be broadcast here in the U.S. and in Europe, and over 50,000 copies of the video set have sold to date.

Re-Discovering George Washington (scheduled for July 4, 2002; 90 minutes). Producer Michael Pack (Manifold Productions) worked very closely with David to assimilate this soundtrack from a variety of musical genres. While leaning heavily on the Hildebrands’ 1999 release George Washington: Music for the First President, also included are some specially-recorded arrangements of “Over the Hills” and “Brave Wolfe” as well as David’s composition from the early 1980s, “Ragette.” Other appropriate music from New World Records and Colonial Williamsburg were included, too.

Washington Square (1997, Touchstone Pictures, available on home video). The Hildebrands provided advice about mid-19th-century American music, and David appears on-screen briefly in a party scene playing the piano and leading a group of singers. He arranged (and pre-recorded the piano part) a chorus from Gaetano Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment,” an opera quite popular then in New York. The singing is in English because most operas were given that way during this period.

Music of DeToqueville’s America was a special, half-hour live broadcast by C-SPAN Television in the fall of 1997. David and Ginger were broadcast from their studio near Annapolis, performing samples of music popular during the 1830s as well as being interviewed by host Brian Lamb and fielding call-in questions.

Other notable projects David & Ginger worked on include: Jefferson: A View from the Mountain and West Virginia (both aired on PBS first in the mid-1990s) and C-SPAN’s recent series American Presidents; David and Ginger arranged and recorded “Washington’s March,” which was commissioned by ABC News for its coverage of the 2001 Presidential Inaugural. Maryland Public Television drew on Hildebrand music for their documentaries on Prince George’s County and Anne Arundel County, the latter of which was re-broadcast on the History Channel. Music by the Hildebrands can be heard on documentary videos prepared for the following historic sites: Octagon Museum, Mount Clare Mansion, Dumbarton House, Philadelphia’s Historic Neighborhood Consortium, and a preview film for Mount Vernon. The documentary Chesapeake: Great Shellfish Bay includes a humorous scene accompanied by the song “Back Creek Crab,” from David and Ginger’s first album, Out On A Limb — Traditional Folk Music (1984). The educational CD-Rom “Digging Into George Washington” (produced by Mount Vernon) includes some of David & Ginger’s music as well.

MUSEUM EXHIBITS:
Music can play an important role in teaching at museums, especially when linked interactively to exhibits. For example at the Octagon Museum and Anacostia Museum, both in Washington DC, an interactive touch-screen takes visitors through images with appropriate music, including that of the Hildebrands. In 1996 David wrote the research report for, and later served as a consultant for an exhibit on Revolutionary period music at the Yorktown Victory Center. The Historic Annapolis Foundation and Gibbes Museum of Art (Charleston, SC) are among other organizations that have had the Hildebrand's research, record or perform exhibit-related music.

RESEARCH & SCHOLARLY PROJECTS:
Given the research and writing work done for his Master’s and Doctorate degrees, David has spearheaded scholarly outreach in a variety of ways. He has presented scholarly papers to the Society for American Music (formerly the Sonneck Society for American Music), the American Musicological Society, the Maryland Historical Society, and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic. He has written articles and/or reviews for the William and Mary Quarterly, the Maryland Historical Magazine, the Sonneck Society Bulletin, and The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography.

A significant project, in terms of potential impact upon young people learning about American History, is called Voices Across Time (University of Pittsburgh). Along with Kate Van Winkle Keller and other scholars for later periods, David helped coordinate appropriate music to teach specific points in the high school curriculum. One can find out more about the final product, a set of 6 audio CDs with detailed lesson plans, by visiting: www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/VAT/index.html

During the late 1980s and early 1990s David & Ginger arranged and recorded over twenty folk songs for the World of Music Series (Silver Burdett & Ginn). This material is used in primary schools nationwide.