The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (review)

"What do musical commemorations of place tell us?" (2). Musicologist Denise von Glahn asks and answers this question in her long-awaited study: The Sounds of Place. She treats no less than fourteen American composers, ranging from the canonic (Copland, Ellington, Ives, Reich) to the lesser known (Anthony Philip Heinrich, Dana Paul Perna, Robert Starer), and from the most overtly pictorial works (by George Bristow, William Henry Fry, Ferde Grofé, Roy Harris, William Grant Still) to the much subtler evocations of Edgard Varèse and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Her six well-documented chapters offer a rich and sometimes unpredictable tapestry—in her own words "something akin to a collection of postcards related by topic" rather than "a single, linear narrative through a subject" (13); yet frequent recourse to comparison and a loosely chronological organization allow the book to be more than the sum of its parts. Operating with a pleasantly light touch when it comes to critical theorizing about place, Von Glahn illuminates how composers' attitudes toward America shaped their depictions and how the sites composers chose to commemorate reflect a general shift from valorizing unspoiled nature to recognizing (for good or ill) the human impact on the natural and national landscape.

The rare weaknesses and considerable strengths of Sounds of Place spring from the same source: the author's gift for vivid description of the people, places, and themes (both musical and historical) she has chosen. Quite apart from its organizing thesis, this is a very informative book, treating in detail matters of numerous biographies, trends and, of course, musical analyses. (The book is modestly furnished with two color plates but amply illustrated with helpful black and white reproductions and a generous allotment of musical examples.) Von Glahn makes the most of a leisurely structure, opening her discussion of Ives (Chapter 2) with a virtual catalog of methods for relating music and place and constructing her treatment of Varèse's Ameriques around categories ("space, power, perspective, movement, and control," [134]) that might stand as useful rubrics for future investigations of pictorial musical and the ways in which it refashions or departs from the strategies for "representation" offered by the other arts.

For this reviewer, the most successful chapters were the ones focused most closely on particular places. In Chapter 1 (and part of Chapter 4), Von Glahn effectively shows how composers captured the changing status of Niagara Falls—from icon of the sublime, to tourist resort, to index of hydro-electric power; Chapter 3 places side by side reactions to the American metropolis by a Jewish Brooklynite (Copland), a recent emigre to New York City (Varèse), and a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance (Ellington). Although the later chapters seem more idiosyncratic in their selection of material, they present the same fruitful mix of musical analysis and historical observation, touching on such varied topics as western dime novels (Harris), the desert as context for atomic research (Reich), and the laboratory-garden (Zwilich). Moreover, by placing pictorial music front and center, the author makes a substantial but implicit gesture toward correcting a misshapen historiography of American music that typically regards all non-abstract works as peripheral to the postwar "mainstream." In this respect and in its decisive focus on a theme (rather than an individual or an institution), von Glahn's Sounds of Place is a pioneering book.