Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (review)

It was in 1977 that Lawrence Levine famously invited cultural historians who were preoccupied with the ‘movers and shakers’ to consider the mass of mankind and Foucault asserted that histories remained to be written of spaces, which would be the history of powers. Since the 1980s, Marx, Adorno, and Gramsci have held sway over new musicology. And with postcolonial studies, interdisciplinary emphasis has been given to the socio-political ramifications of geography, spatial metaphors (such as boundary, mapping, inner/outer margins, strata, (de)territorialization, anchorage, journey), politics of urban space, narratives of historical experience, and cultural forms of power. As musicological studies became increasingly ethnosympathetic and retrievalist in their interpretations, volumes on American music since the early 1990s have been undergoing a revisionist phase, emphasizing place-conscious narratives and humanistic perspectives. They address themes such as the impact of the music industry and technology, and the commodification of music—as run by human agents. Although still drawn to the ‘movers and shakers’ (Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong), Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s approach is equally committed to these newly emerging, egalitarian perceptions. He affirms that it is almost impossible to imagine the work of academic disciplines ‘without access to epistemological models that detect cultural tensions and unpack power relations’ (p. 9). Following the tack of Jacques Attali, he strives to explore this ‘turbulent interplay between cultural contestation and musical expression’ (p. 4) and treats these notions as a series of conflicts along the lines of power, genre, gender, ethnicity, race, geography, and class. Prominent themes include multicultural conflict, national and immigrant identity, and struggle. The study relies on the work of scholars such as Lawrence Kramer, Peter Burkholder, Judith Tick, Josh Kun, David Ake, Martin Williams, William Kenney, Robert O’Meally, Judy Tsou, and Amy Stillman—to name just a few.

Increasingly, studies in American music celebrate diversity. Garrett focuses on its divisive tendencies and collisions, echoing the book’s epigraph by Heraclitus (that harmony consists of opposites, of things at variance, and that all comes to be with strife). For Garrett, the strength of diversity is ‘further informed by working-class perspectives, the contribution of women, and the insight of musicians hailing from a wide range of racial and ethnic groups’ (p. 6). Fortunately, he does not propose the path of diversity as some kind of methodological replacement but as an additional historiographical model that scrutinizes tensions and limitations. Following scholars like George Lipsitz, Susan McClary, and Tricia Rose, he explores a politically and demographically pluralist and dynamic universe where musical identities converge, clash, exchange, and contest. The distinctiveness of his approach, he explains, ‘is perhaps less its methodological framework than its novel application to the broader field of American music’ (p. 11).

Garrett treats his subjects through temporality and highlights the process of becoming rather than being: journey and change—two frequent themes in the book—point to spatial modes of thought rather than chronological history. American music emerges as instants of participation or as culturally heterogeneous simultaneities. Journey (a favourite theme among Americanists for more than a century) is one of the metaphors in the book for cultural change, adaptation, and expansion. Garrett’s passionate account is preoccupied with the nature of change and difference through fluctuation and open-endedness in twentieth-century America. Its cross-cultural and inter-genre range are exemplified here in five case-study chapters, each of which addresses a question (though all five overlap throughout the book): (1) ‘the expression of cultural debate as it takes form in music’; (2) the racial dynamics of American music understood through a transnational perspective; (3) American music as produced and consumed by an ethnic minority community; (4) why American songwriters ‘worked to define the nation through a strategy of exclusion’; (5) why histories of American music must gauge the effect of musical practices that originated outside its national borders.

The first chapter...