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  • Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860 by Ann Ostendorf
  • Mark McKnight
Sounds American: National Identity and the Music Cultures of the Lower Mississippi River Valley, 1800–1860. By Ann Ostendorf. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-8203-3975-7. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-8203-3976-4. Paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8203-136-1. Ebook. Pp. xii, 250. $69.95/$24.95/$24.95.

Research in nineteenth-century American music, once pitiably underrepresented in American music scholarship, has exploded in recent years; regional studies have likewise grown as well. Ann Ostendorf’s Sounds American thus joins an ever-expanding list of works dealing with both of these aspects of American [End Page 505] music. As a cultural historian, rather than a musicologist, Ostendorf states that her principal aim is to understand contemporary perceptions of ethnicity, race, and nationality. Because it is such an integral aspect of culture, she has identified music as the lens through which she examines these perceptions.

While music may be the center point of what she calls her “case study,” she focuses not so much on music itself, but rather on how different music practices serve as markers of culture (“music ways,” she calls them), and how, in this case, these music ways helped establish an American identity. Moreover, she has selected the Lower Mississippi River Valley as the location and the early republic and antebellum eras as the time span for her study. Ostendorf notes that this particular region often was dismissed as too far removed from the East Coast center of power and too demographically varied. She argues, however, that it was precisely the region’s ethnic and cultural diversity—and the profound changes the region experienced during this period—that makes it useful for examination. She cautions, however, that she does not intend to compare in her study the Lower Mississippi River Valley with any other region, though she assumes (perhaps dangerously so) that “many traits put forth to prove regional distinctiveness were actually shared with other places as they too became part of the United States.” Ostendorf adds that the methods residents of this region used to cope with changes in ethnic and racial diversity, as more and more outsiders moved in, may be seen as exemplifying “what made this place distinctively American, rather than peculiarly regional” (12).

Although Sounds American is a rather slim volume (just 177 pages of text), Ostendorf lists in the introduction several ambitious aims and goals for her book. She writes that her work is “about how Americans . . . thought about themselves in relationship to the diverse and changing others surrounding them within the United States—but only incidentally.” She adds that her “ultimate goal is to explore how individuals, of whatever heritage or identity, considered those who were not like themselves culturally, whatever that might mean to them” (6). The work is not simply an ethnographical survey, however; her argument hinges, rather, on perceptions of difference and how these perceived ethnic dissimilarities (her “music ways”) helped eventually to form a distinctive American music culture. These various processes by which an American culture came into being through an increasing cultural diversity occurred as some people were brought in, while others remain excluded.

In her research for this book, adapted from her 2009 dissertation, Ostendorf has drawn deeply on an impressive array of primary-source materials from significant archives throughout the region to support her thesis. While her scope as stated is the Lower Mississippi Valley, defined as the area south from Cairo, Illinois, and Saint Louis to the Gulf of Mexico, it is New Orleans that dominates her narrative. Although there may be some validity to her arguments for including so broad a regional expanse, she in fact provides only occasional references to music ways in places other than New Orleans—Baton Rouge, Natchez, and Vicksburg are the other cities most frequently mentioned, and even then these other references are relatively limited. Since most of her discussion centers on New Orleans and its immediate environs, restricting her case study explicitly to the Crescent City would not, I think, have diminished the strength of her...

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