Showing papers in "Journal of the Society for American Music in 2010"

“Dixie Carmen”: War, Race, and Identity in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones (1943)

Abstract: In December 1943, an all–African American cast starred in the Broadway premiere of Carmen Jones, Oscar Hammerstein II's adaptation of Georges Bizet's Carmen. When Hammerstein began work on Carmen Jones a month after Pearl Harbor, in January 1942, Porgy and Bess was just being revived. Hammerstein's 1942 version of Carmen, set in a Southern town and among African Americans, shows the influence of the revised version of Porgy and Bess, with Catfish Row echoed in a cigarette factory in South Carolina and the Hoity Toity night club. It took Hammerstein more than eighteen months to find a producer, and when the show opened by the end of 1943, the setting in a parachute factory and urban Chicago reflected new priorities brought on by wartime changes. Commercially one of the most successful musical plays on Broadway during its run of 503 performances, Carmen Jones offers a window on the changing issues of culture, class, and race in the United States during World War II. New archival evidence reveals that these topics were part of the work's genesis and production as much as of its reception. This article contextualizes Carmen Jones by focusing on the complex issues of war, race, and identity in the United States in 1942 and 1943.

Cultural Diplomacy as Cultural Globalization: The University of Michigan Jazz Band in Latin America

Abstract: From January to May 1965 the University of Michigan Jazz Band traveled extensively in Latin America for the State Department's Cultural Presentations Program. This tour serves as a case study through which we can see the far-reaching effects of cultural diplomacy. The State Department initially envisioned its cultural and informational programs as one-way communication that brought ideas from the United States to new places; yet the tours changed not only audiences, but also the musicians themselves and even the communities to which the musicians returned. Both archival and oral history evidence indicate that the Michigan jazz band's tour succeeded in building vital imagined connections across international borders. The nature of these connections demonstrates that the cold war practice of pushing culture across borders for political purposes furthered cultural globalization—even though the latter process is often regarded by scholars as a phenomenon that began only after the end of the cold war. The jazz band's tour highlights the essential role of music and musicians in fostering new transnational sensibilities in the politicized context of the cold war.

In Pursuit of Authenticity: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Postwar Folk Music Revival

Abstract: This article explores the discourse of authenticity, which has become central to our understanding of twentieth-century folk music revivals in the United States. The process of musical revival, that is, the self-conscious restoration of musical systems deemed in danger of decline or extinction, has been closely tied to perceptions of exactly what constitutes authentic, or genuine, folk tradition. The term tradition, like authenticity, is a slippery concept based on a self-conscious interpretation and selective editing of the past. The complex mechanism of cultural editing that undergirds the authentication process is fleshed out by focusing on the efforts of one band, the New Lost City Ramblers. During the 1960s the Ramblers introduced northern audiences to what they judged to be authentic southern string-band and bluegrass styles at a time when the urban revival was dominated by popular and artsy interpreters of folk music. The Ramblers' struggles to render accurately southern rural instrumental and singing styles, while maintaining their own distinctive sound, offer insight into the challenges authenticity posed for mid-century folk musicians and their urban audiences, and continues to pose for scholars and cultural workers today.

An Interrogation of Language: “Radical Jewish Culture” on New York City's Downtown Music Scene

Abstract: In April 1993 the Knitting Factory, a small nightclub in Lower Manhattan, hosted a five-day music festival titled “Radical New Jewish Culture.” This event was part of a multifaceted creative endeavor undertaken during the 1990s by composer/improvisers on New York City's downtown music scene and dubbed “Radical Jewish Culture” by its main protagonist, saxophonist John Zorn. RJC brought Jewish music and heritage into the purview of a polycultural experimentalist scene shaped by jazz, rock, free improvisation, and avant-garde concert music. Artists downtown also engaged in an animated “conversational community” that spilled over into interviews, program notes, liner notes, and essays. RJC was especially productive as a conceptual framework from which to interrogate the relationship between musical language and the semiotics of sound. Two pieces serve here as case studies: “iBnai!” an Israeli “pioneer song” as interpreted by the No Wave band G-d Is My Co-Pilot, and “The Mooche,” a Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley composition as interpreted by pianist Anthony Coleman's Selfhaters Orchestra.

Wheels of the World: How Recordings of Irish Traditional Music Bridged the Gap between Homeland and Diaspora

Abstract: At the dawn of the twentieth century and the height of the Recording Age, Irish American musicians began to record Irish traditional music on both commercial and subcommercial recordings. Circulated within the diaspora during a changing sense of Irish identity and sent home to a nationalist revival, these recordings had a profound impact on both traditional performance practices and modes of transmission. Quickly accepted by many at the heart of the tradition, these recordings were used by practitioners to bridge vast geographic distances and solidify vital lines of communication, allowing the diaspora to engage actively with the larger tradition.

Henry Ford's Dance Revival and Fiddle Contests: Myth and Reality

Abstract: Henry Ford's interest in reviving the dances of his youth and publicizing old fiddlers was a major media phenomenon of the 1920s. The claims of one fiddler became the source of the often repeated, but erroneous, assertion that Ford sponsored a national fiddlers' contest, which in turn has become a part of country music lore. This article, based mostly on archival sources and newspapers, attempts to describe the particular musical and dance traditions that interested Ford, his personal activities and ambitions in this area, his motivations, and the larger popular interest in the subject itself.

Rekindling Ancient Values: The Influence of Chinese Music and Aesthetics on Harry Partch

Abstract: Scholarship on American composer Harry Partch (1901–74) has long focused on the composer's use of Greek musical ideals as the basis of his aesthetic, but little attention has been paid to China, a nation with which Partch had familial ties and with which he claimed an affinity. Using Partch's published writings, along with unpublished manuscripts, letters, and interviews, this article repositions China's role in the development of Harry Partch's music and aesthetic. By surveying his early experiences with Cantonese opera, his early expositions of his theoretical thinking, and his first full-scale composition, a setting of seventeen poems by Li Po, it demonstrates that China symbolized an alternative path. China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. Through the Chinese musical quotations that reside in several of his works, the article also shows that, despite his later protests to the contrary, Chinese music both informed and shaped his music. Finally, it suggests that only by exploring the implications of China in his music can we fully understand Partch's compositional aesthetic.

Liberal Religion, Artistic Autonomy, and the Culture of Secular Choral Societies

Abstract: U.S. choral societies typically formalize themselves as secular organizations analogous to symphony orchestras and opera companies. Yet choral societies differ from symphonic or operatic organizations because almost all choruses depend on volunteer singers. Part of what attracts singers into choruses is a sometimes unacknowledged affinity between the religious traditions of liberal Christians and Jews and the culture of choral singing as practiced in formally secular choral societies. The liberal tradition in religion encourages a habitus toward music that might be called a “sense of liturgy”: The interpretation of musical works historically and collectively, rather than as didactic works addressed to an individual. Although many canonical choral works are Christian in content, liberal religion encourages distancing mechanisms that allow people from other faith traditions, or none at all, to engage with these works. In short, the posture of artistic autonomy often found within formally secular choral societies, in which there is no overt religious test for membership, owes part of its genesis to the religious habits of liberal Christians and Jews. The present article explores this affinity by drawing on ethnomusicological fieldwork among choral singers in New England, as well as published accounts of a 1996 controversy over the performance of religious music by a public school choir in Utah.

“Some of These Days” and the Study of the Great American Songbook

Abstract: Supporting a new methodology for the study of classic American popular songs, this article offers a history of both the print editions and recorded versions of “Some of These Days” (1910) by Shelton Brooks. This saga commences with a hitherto unanalyzed precursor to Brooks's famous song that shares nearly the same opening words and melody, the 1905 “Some o' Dese Days” by Frank Williams. It continues through nine major print editions and numerous recorded performances, of which this study examines forty-six, including ten as the theme song for Sophie Tucker. Performers are clearly influenced by both performed and printed variations; more surprisingly, print editions are also influenced by performers. Thus, Tin Pan Alley songs are best viewed as products of collaboration within a community of songwriters, publishers, and performers. Brooks fills “Some of These Days” with compositional details that are conducive to effective performance variations. This elusive intrinsic adaptability represents, for 1910, a modern, innovative quality and is central to any understanding of this song genre. Oft-neglected, such early popular standards—poised at the juncture of musical cultures, oral and print, amateur and professional, live and mediatized—help the critical historian pinpoint aspects that make this repertoire valuable.

Irish Music and Musicians in the United States: An Introduction

Abstract: “The Irish came early and often to America,” quipped musicologist Charles Hamm in his landmark book Yesterdays: Popular Song in America. Although the largest waves of immigration occurred during the years of the potato famines in the 1840s and 1850s, the process began long before then and continues to the present day, albeit with many ebbs and flows in the stream. Today nearly 36.5 million people in the United States claim Irish ancestry.

Elias Howe, William Bradbury Ryan, and Irish Music in Nineteenth-Century Boston

Abstract: Ryan's Mammoth Collection is a compendium of fiddle tunes assembled by William Bradbury Ryan. Originally published in Boston in 1883 by Elias Howe, Jr., it has remained in print in one form or another ever since. It has been used as a source of tunes by many generations of fiddlers in different stylistic traditions, but its value as a descriptive document of the repertoire of late-nineteenth-century Boston, particularly the Irish community in that city, has largely been overlooked. Ryan, rather than Capt. Francis O'Neill of Chicago, should be regarded as the first great documentarian of Irish traditional music in the United States.

Paddy Cronin: Musical Influences on a Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Player in the United States

Abstract: In the world of Irish traditional music, Paddy Cronin from Sliabh Luachra in the southwest of Ireland is regarded as one of the tradition's exceptional fiddle players. Although his music exhibits many characteristics of the Sliabh Luachra tradition, it also has other elements and features, primarily from the Sligo style. A pupil of Padraig O'Keeffe (the “Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Master”), Cronin emigrated to Boston in 1949 and lived there for approximately forty years. Before he left Ireland, he had been familiar with the music of the Sligo masters, such as Michael Coleman and James Morrison, who had gone to the United States many years before him. In Boston Paddy met and played with many of the great Sligo musicians, and also had the opportunity to hear music in other styles, including that of Canadian musicians, whose use of piano accompaniment he admired greatly. This article considers his music before and after he left Ireland, and compares him to Coleman and Morrison by considering their respective performances of the reel “Farewell to Ireland.”

Cultural Policy in American Music History: Sammy Davis, Jr., vs. Juvenile Delinquency

Abstract: In 1956 entertainer Sammy Davis, Jr., attempted to organize the music industry in a campaign against juvenile delinquency, using musical public service announcements to encourage teens to stay on the right side of the law. Although popular with the public and some industry insiders, Davis's idea failed, officially because of opposition from the Recording Industry Association of America. Although Davis's campaign went nowhere, we argue that this episode provides an important illustration of the need to broaden our understanding of cultural policy studies in the context of American music history. Specifically, we argue for an approach to policy analysis that draws on poststructuralist historiography to capture the forms that cultural policy takes in the United States, including the specific factors of race, intra-industry struggles, and the persona of Sammy Davis, Jr., himself, a pivotal figure who has been largely neglected by music historians despite embodying many of the key cultural tensions of postwar U.S. society. By examining the case of Sammy Davis, Jr., vs. Juvenile Delinquency, we can achieve a better understanding of how U.S. music, U.S. culture, and cultural policy intersect.

The McNulty Family

Abstract: The McNulty Family was known as the royal family of Irish entertainers. They were the hottest Irish entertainment act on the East Coast, and perhaps in all of North America, from the 1930s through the 1950s. Ann “Ma” McNulty was the leader; her son Peter played the violin and piano, sang, and danced; and her daughter Eileen sang and danced. They also acted and performed skits to accompany their songs and comedy routines. Their shows were a high-energy, fast-paced type of vaudeville event. Ann Burke was born in Kilteevan, County Roscommom, Ireland, in 1887 and emigrated to the United States in 1910. She married John McNulty in 1914 and was a widow by 1928. This emigrant, who played the melodeon, and her two talented children started to entertain people to make a living. At the height of their career in the early 1940s, in addition to appearing at several venues every week, they had two radio shows, wrote a weekly column for the Irish Advocate newspaper, and had released about eighty recordings. Their vaudeville style was an excellent compliment to their talents, where acting and dancing were part of the delivery of a song or comedy routine.

James Tenney: Selected Works 1961–1969. New World Records CD 80570.

Abstract: Many composers living today were “digital children,” needing no transition from the analog to the digital. Such was not the case with James Tenney (1934–2006), however. The works included in New World Records’ reissue of James Tenney: Selected Works 1961–1969—rarely heard until the original 1992 release by Frog Peak/Artifact—chronicle Tenney’s transition from analog tape music to digital computer music. Now known as an influential body of work in twentieth-century experimental music, these works also document the development of several musical ideas that remained central to his compositional output: “variety,” stochastic processes, gestalt principles, and what Tenney referred to as “sound for the sake of perceptual insight.”1 Part of the appeal of these works comes from the fact that Tenney was so young when he created them. They document his exploration and development of a new aesthetic with new media. Indeed, Tenney was among the first U.S. composers working in the field of electronic music, and he was one of the first in the world to create compositions with computers. The first piece on this CD, Collage #1 (“Blue Suede”) from 1961, is a manipulation of Elvis Presley’s recording of Blue Suede Shoes. Tenney created the piece at the University of Illinois, where he studied with Kenneth Gaburo, Lejaren Hiller, and Harry Partch. Collage #1 is one of the earliest sound collages based on tape manipulations of a popular music recording. At first, the source is obfuscated beyond recognition by various techniques, such as tape reversal, speed changes, and echo effects. Suddenly, fragments of the original Presley recording become discernable, clarifying that the prior material was all from the same source. Tenney greatly respected Presley and once stated about Collage #1, “I considered it a celebration of Elvis Presley, and I like to think that it would have pleased him.”2 Later, Collage #1 became a significant influence on composers who sampled and transformed preexisting pop sources, such as John Oswald, who became well known for coining the term “plunderphonics.”3 Analog #1 (Noise Study) from 1961 is Tenney’s first piece generated and composed with a digital computer. It was created at Bell Labs along with the following computer-generated pieces on the CD: Dialogue (1963), Phases (for Edgard Varèse) (1963), Music for Player Piano (1963–64), and Ergodos II (for John Cage)

'Tis Like They Never Left: Locating “Home” in the Music of Sliabh Aughty's Diaspora

Abstract: Abstract This article, which builds on research in the fields of Irish traditional music, place, and diaspora, focuses on a community of diasporic musicians from Sliabh Aughty, an upland region of approximately 250 square miles that encompasses the musical storehouses of east Clare and southeast Galway in the West of Ireland. It examines the importance of home for these musicians, who have been resident in the United States for many decades. Their personal music geographies are explored to ascertain how traditional Irish music plays a critical role in transcending their sense of dislocation and reconnecting them with “home.”

Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art. By Deniz Ertan. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2009.

Abstract: The depth of Daniel Chennevière’s lifelong commitment to Orientalist mysticism is shown in his adoption, in his early twenties, of “Rudhyar,” a name derived from “Rudra,” a Sanskrit word for the Hindu god Shiva. Rudhyar may not have been the only composer to cultivate his own ego while seeking simultaneously to merge it into that of all humankind, but few other creative artists have chosen to assume the name of a deity as part of their search. Born in Paris in 1895, the future Dane Rudhyar suffered bouts of illness in his youth serious enough to exempt him from military service in World War I. He developed a profound interest in the work of Bergson, Nietzsche, and Scriabin. He also studied composition with Debussy; at age eighteen, he produced a biography of his teacher. He came to the United States in 1916, becoming a U.S. citizen a decade later. Some of his contemporaries may have perceived a certain arrogance in his philosophical approach, his self-presentation, or his music. Elliott Carter wrote to Ives of Rudhyar’s Paeans after it appeared in a New Music Edition (vol. I, no. 2, Jan. 1928): “Paeans are good but they seem a little too majestic, too much of his own greatness taken for granted.”1 Rudhyar, an eloquent advocate for his own vision of modernism, joined Varèse and Salzedo in breaking away from Copland and the League of Composers to form the International Composers Guild in 1923. He also carried on a fierce debate with Charles Seeger in the pages of the Aeolian Review during the 1920s. (The unflappable Henry Cowell refused to be drawn into these disputes and presently published several more of Rudhyar’s scores in his New Music Edition.) His early confrontational style, involving flamboyant behavior at a concert in Montreal, is documented elsewhere.2 In 1919 and 1920 Rudhyar published three articles in the Musical Quarterly under the name Rudhyar D. Chennevière. In these three essays he set out his views about the increasing spiritual emptiness, brokenness, and general decay of Western music, using the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as Exhibit A. He saw the Western scale and Western musical instruments, particularly the piano, as

East of Havana. Jauretsi Saizarbitoria and Emilia Menocal, directors. Denver and Delilah Productions, 2009.

Abstract: About six miles east of Havana, just beyond the aquamarine blue of the Caribbean Sea and the low-density shrubs of the flat plains, stand the tall, rectangular buildings of the Alamar housing projects. The fiveand six-story buildings were designed by Soviet architects and built by microbrigades (ordinary people organized into work teams) as a solution to housing shortages in Havana in the 1970s. As part of slum clearance programs, black communities from slum areas such as Llega y Pon, Las Yaguas, and Palo Cagao were relocated to Alamar. The 1970s were a grim era of Cuban history, known euphemistically as the quinquenio gris (gray five years) but that actually lasted closer to fifteen years, when the orthodoxy of Soviet socialism overshadowed cultural and social life on the island. The heavy and somber buildings immortalized the spirit of those years. With a population of 300,000 in over 2,000 buildings, Alamar is the largest housing project in the world. It’s no wonder that Alamar has been called Cuba’s South Bronx. East of Havana is a tribute to the housing projects of Alamar that gave rise to Cuba’s hip-hop movement. Among the plethora of documentaries that have recently been produced on Cuban hip-hop, including La Fabrika (Lisandro PérezRey, 2004), Desde el Principio (Vanessa Dı́az, 2006), Inventos (Eli Jacobs Fantuzzi, 2003), and The Cuban Hip-Hop All Stars (Joshua Bee Alafia, 2004), none addresses Alamar as deeply as this film. From the beginning of the film, the viewer is exposed to the sounds of the unique and diverse genre of Cuban hip-hop. Because of the difficulties of having access to recording equipment for making beats, Cuban rappers have been highly inventive. Some have relied on “pause tapes,” on which they record the break beat from an American rap CD on a cassette, and then manually loop it over and over until they have a complete song. Others bring in live instruments—whether those from pop and jazz such as guitar, keyboards, and drum kit; or traditional African drums such as the ritual bata and the mellow low-pitched bombo andino; the berimbau, a stringed instrument traditionally associated with Afro-Brazilian capoeira; and the woven basket rattle known as caxixi—and rappers will chant and sing in African languages such as Yoruba. Given the deep musical and spiritual influence of Africa in Cuban cultural production, it is not surprising that this influence is also being reflected within hip-hop culture. The film opens with the reggae-inflected rap “Guapo como Mandela” by Anonimo Consejo (Anonymous Advice). We see Miki Flow recording a song with Cuban hip-hop producer Pablo Herrera rapping, “The underground train that won’t stop,” alongside an upbeat salsa background track and punctuated by his cries of “esto

The Foundations of Rock: From “Blue Suede Shoes” to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes.” By Walter Everett. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Abstract: masculinity, or otherwise engaging in a complex transvestism. Rather, those women who survive in a trumpet culture that is suspicious of them find common ground with male players over the sonorous pleasures of the instrument—the achievement of a beautiful sound, soaring lyrically above an ensemble, a dynamic range from a whisper to a roar, and attacks from crisp to smeared. The sensuous pleasures of the mouthpiece as one nails a perfectly centered note is not something that excites only one gender; it’s like kissing intensely, after all. Even the most masculinityobsessed trumpeters I’ve encountered are not constantly prioritizing manhood on stage; rather, most focus first on the sound, the music, and the human emotion that resonates through both male and female bodies. Only if these factors are together can they strut. In his biographical account of Miles Davis, Gabbard complexifies his understanding of the trumpet by addressing Davis’s less macho and more vulnerable style of trumpet playing. The intimate and emotional qualities of the instrument are acknowledged, as well as Davis’s towering influence in changing the direction of jazz by exploring them intensively. He suggests that even in the most macho player, there may be a geeky nerd lurking under the surface. Here he had an opening to deconstruct his own narrative, but chooses instead to say that such softening of the instrument cannot change the instrument’s association over several thousand years with unreconstructed masculinity. The instrument’s symbolics may be ancient, but, as his book demonstrates, they have changed over time and have recently included far more women than ever before. Is there really no opening for a more genderinclusive future? In the final sentences of Hotter than That, Krin gets the handshake of acceptance after playing trumpet well in a Latin band: “Somewhere in the universe of Nuyorican machismo there may now be a tiny place for me,” he writes. It’s not just women, it seems, who struggle to get admitted into the various boys’ clubs. As irritated as I am that Gabbard concludes with the idea that acceptance into the fraternity of men is the ne plus ultra of trumpet playing, I cannot help but love this book, for it bespeaks a deep love affair with a radiant instrument, my longtime companion, that has never before gotten the respect that it deserves.

No Yankee Doodling: Notable Trends and Traditional Recordings from Irish America

Abstract: Abstract The emergence of the compact disc in 1979 was regarded as the likely sales salvation of recorded music, and for many years the CD reigned supreme, generating steady, often substantial, company profits. More recently, however, the music industry has painfully slipped a disc. The CD has been in sharp decline, propelled mainly by young consumer ire over price and format inflexibility and by Internet technology available to skirt or subvert both. Irish American traditional music has not been impervious to this downward trend in sales and to other challenging trends and paradigm shifts in recording and performing. Amid the tumult, Irish American traditional music has nevertheless shown a new resilience and fresh vitality through a greater do-it-yourself, do-more-with-less spirit of recording, even for established small labels. The five recent albums of Irish American traditional music reviewed here—three of which were released by the artists themselves—exemplify a trend of their own, preserving the best of the past without slavishly replicating it. If the new mantra of music making is adapt or disappear, then Irish American traditional music, in adapting to change free of any impulse to dumb down, is assured of robustly enduring.

Votaries of Apollo: The St. Cecilia Society and the Patronage of Concert Music in Charleston, South Carolina, 1766–1820 . By Nicholas Michael Butler. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007.

Abstract: American ethnic musics from ethnomusicological or cultural studies perspectives extensive material for thought-provoking discussions of musical stereotypes and their social and historical impact. Furthermore, this book provides a foundation for future studies of Indianism in music, including the roles that Native artists have played in either overturning the stereotypes or further manipulating them in popular, film, and art music.

An Eventful Life Remembered: Recent Considerations of the Contributions and Legacy of Francis O'Neill

Abstract: Francis O'Neill, one of the towering figures of Irish traditional music, was among the first to collect and publish Irish dance music. His compilations form the most complete glimpse into Irish musical practice at the turn of the twentieth century and are still regarded as the definitive source for traditional tunes. Three recent publications on O'Neill and his times throw light on his life, his passion for the music, and his legacy among today's traditional music community.

An Interrogation of Language: “Radical Jewish Culture” on New York City's Downtown Music Scene—Corrigendum

Abstract: In JSAM 4(2), on page 220, note 17, and on 246, the citation for John Brackett's book is given incorrectly. It should read as follows: John Brackett, John Zorn: Tradition and Transgression. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. The author apologizes for this error.

The Great War: An American Musical Fantasy . Archeophone Records ARCH 2001, 2007.

Abstract: The two-disc set The Great War: An American Musical Fantasy produced by Archeophone Records presents a varied history of American recordings made during and about the First World War. The producers of this disc set have included popular songs recorded by artists ranging from Enrico Caruso to vaudeville singers Nora Bayes and Arthur Fields. To bring the era to life, they have also inserted excerpts from important historical speeches by Woodrow Wilson and General John Pershing and stories told by lesser known performers, such as vaudevillian comic monologist Cal Stewart. The compilation is dedicated to the memory of a specific U.S. soldier, Clarence D. Johnson, whose grandson includes in the notes a “Reflection” about his family singing songs from the First World War. The extensive seventy-three-page booklet of liner notes describes the songs and traces the triumphs and travails of the nascent sound recording industry, using trade magazines and government documents as primary source material. However, the authors avoid positioning these recordings in relation to other common musical practices, for instance, ignoring sheet music sung at the piano and performances on the vaudeville stage. The fiftysix tracks of this collection are sonic traces of an era that tell the American story of the war through sound, but we should remember that they are only a part of the story of music making during the war. Walter Spalding, then chair of the Harvard Music Department, who also served on the National Committee on Army and Navy Camp Music, wrote in the journal The Outlook in 1918, “Our Government . . . wisely holds that music should be just as much a part of the equipment [of war] as weapons, uniforms and rations.”1 Singing was included in army training, and the civilian population purchased large quantities of sheet music for home consumption. Frederick Vogel reports in his bibliography of U.S. sheet music from the First World War that over 35,000 songs were published as sheet music (far outnumbering sheet music publication in other combatant nations), with over 7,000 being directly war related; my own research indicates that the number of songs published in sheet music form is

Imagining Native America in Music. By Michael V. Pisani. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Abstract: Michael Pisani has produced an impressive volume that makes a major contribution to the study of Indianism in music. Culling information from a vast array of materials—including scores and sheet music, archival documents, published historical chronicles, and a large panorama of secondary sources—Pisani carefully disentangles the changing perceptions of Native Americans held by Europeans and North Americans, and the ways in which these perceptions have been expressed through music. In its broadly interdisciplinary design and content, the book is refreshing, engaging, and insightful. Thanks to Pisani’s excellent writing style, the book is also highly accessible and fun to read. It covers roughly 450 years of music history and is richly illustrated with musical examples, figures, and maps. The appendices provide selected lists of parlor songs and instrumental character pieces from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ample footnotes are included as well as an extensive bibliography, and a companion Web site is available.1 The book is divided into nine chapters, which are presented in four parts. Part One, “New World Americans,” discusses representations of Native Americans in European court entertainments, 1550–1760, as well as in British American theater and song, 1710–1808. Part Two, “Exotic Peoples, Exotic Sounds,” contains chapters on imagining the U.S. frontier in music, 1795–1860, and the role of Longfellow’s Hiawatha in North American music history. Part Three, “Nostalgia for a Native Land,” explores the impact of early ethnographic research on composers’ involvement with Native American music, particularly in reference to the development of musical nationalism and the quest for authenticity in rendering the sound of Native America. Part Four, “Americans Again,” focuses on musical representations of Native peoples in opera, musical theater, vaudeville, and film during the twentieth century. A brief conclusion provides final reflections on racial and ethnic stereotypes in American music history, and how these characterizations influence our society as a whole. To explain the ways in which music can be used to express and shape ethnic stereotypes, Pisani explores “music’s metaphorical relationship to representation” (11). He explains that before the nineteenth century, composers used certain

Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music . By Olivia Bloechl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Abstract: “one of the leading publishers of scholarly and reference books in the United States.” Its most obvious failure is to sufficiently vet this book. Once the manuscript reached the production stage, the publisher allowed peculiar editorial practices to slide by. The word “ragtime” consistently receives a capital “R,” even when the word is used in quoted passages that originally, and correctly, have an initial lower-case “r”; the terms “jazz” and “blues” do not receive a special initial capital. In addition, there is no consistency in use of quotation marks or italics for music titles; in the same paragraph, we might read of “Pine Apple Rag” and Wall Street Rag (70). The author is not alone in displaying a lack of attention, and these typographical anomalies top off the failure of the book’s content. Many of the book’s errors, considered individually, might be viewed as trivial. However, the accumulation of them is so overwhelming that, in the absence of any great new revelations to act as a counterbalance, the book is weighed down by a breathtaking ineptitude.

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents. By Felix Meyer and Anne C. Shreffler. Woodbridge, Suffolk: Paul Sacher Foundation and Boydell Press, 2008.

Abstract: Amid the wealth of new materials made available to the scholarly community in connection with Elliott Carter’s centenary year is Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, by Felix Meyer, director of the Paul Sacher Foundation, and Anne C. Shreffler, Professor of Music at Harvard University.1 The stated purpose of this elegant volume is to survey Carter’s career and working methods. The publication of this collection of documents will also certainly serve to alleviate (rather than “remedy,” as the authors propose in their introduction) the lack of accessibility to Carter’s autograph materials, the bulk of which have been held at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, which does not have a published catalog of its holdings. Thus, this book will provide scholars and students with a highly valuable resource in preparing for the study of archival materials and might also encourage others to take advantage of several hundred pages of sketches for fifteen works, from Pocahontas (1939?) to the Double Concerto (1961), recently made available online by the Library of Congress.2 With a total of 195 reproduced items, the book stands as the most comprehensive study of primary sources relating to Carter’s compositional career to date.3 These materials fall into four categories: (1) a relatively small selection of photographs (about thirty-five); (2) diplomatic transcriptions of eighty-five letters to and from Carter (a relatively small number when compared to the Sacher Foundation’s

Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America . By Tara Browner, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Abstract: of James Reese Europe (Oxford University Press, 1995). Likewise Brooks’s chapter on Polk Miller and the Old South Quartette owes a great deal to the research and writings of independent researcher Doug Seroff, whose two articles on this group appeared in the JEMF Quarterly and the 78 Quarterly, which can be found in only a handful of college and public libraries. The real strengths of Lost Sounds clearly lie not only in having so much information in one volume, but also in the author’s solid primary research. Although Johnson leads off the book, the chapters (short as they are) about Cousins and Moss, the Unique Quartette, and Daisy Tarpley provide three examples of the new research that make this book so rewarding. Even with my decades-long interest in the early recording industry, I learned that the Broome Special Phonograph Company based in Medford, Massachusetts, was the first black-owned record company, predating Black Swan’s much acclaimed 1921 debut by about one year. I am also grateful to Brooks for renewing my interest in the early careers of Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, both of whom recorded before 1920. The hesitations that I have in unreservedly recommending Lost Sounds are few and minor. The only real quibble that I have is that Brooks occasionally engages in unnecessary speculation when he might simply let the facts or primary or secondary printed sources do the speaking. One example relates to the death of Charley Case due to what was an apparent suicide. Rather than musing on the reasons for this accidental shooting, Brooks would have been better off quoting from the newspaper accounts and letting readers interpret the facts and draw their own conclusions. Such unnecessary speculation occurs only a few times in this book and rarely distracts from Brooks’s excellent work.

The Legacy of Mary Lou Williams . The United States Army Field Band Jazz Ambassadors [Fort Meade, Md.], 2007.

Abstract: vocal writing is melody. Often the accompaniment takes the starring role, leaving the vocal line disjunct, simply punctuating the piano line with the text. This overall lack of lyricism makes moments where a melody does emerge quite precious and memorable, as in “Penelope’s Song.” Musto’s use of elements from more popular music genres firmly establishes his place among a musically inclusive group of U.S. art song composers (for example, William Bolcom, Ricky Ian Gordon, and Ben Moore). This inclusivity, coupled with the approachable nature of his music for the performer, has led to his considerable popularity. However, the lack of a consistent memorable melody puts Musto at odds with his contemporaries, leaving him in a rather awkward position between the aforementioned peers and composers such as Argento, Hoiby, and Del Tredici, whose difficult music still preserves exceptional melodic vocal writing, perhaps the very place Musto wants to be. Burton and Mason are masterful communicators, delivering every word with care and precision. It is rare to be able to understand every word from a vocalist, particularly in English, and in this regard these two singers are unparalleled. Both of these beautiful voices display fine technique, although Mason occasionally hangs at the lower side of the pitch, especially in his upper range, and Burton has a tendency to croon in melodic expressions such as “Penelope’s Song,” perhaps intended as a way of expressing the popular western feel of the piece. Musto displays his usual impressive skills as pianist and accompanist, both in sensitivity and in technical display, and in doing so is the true star of the recording. The accompanying notes leave something to be desired. Roger Evans provides an untitled and meandering opening essay that fails to address Musto’s works until more than halfway through. He mentions a few songs on the disc in the closing paragraphs, giving very little specific information and leaving the reader wishing Musto had written the notes himself. The poems to the opening cycle are printed in a different order than presented on the recording, but the rest of the texts are printed in the proper order, and all authors are attributed. It is refreshing to have a recording of John Musto’s songs that shows him as more than simply the composer of Shadow of the Blues. This important composer deserves a catalog of recordings that equals the diversity and size of his song output. Hopefully this recording will mark the beginning of such a needed collection.