High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800-1861 (review)

High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800-1861. By Nicholas E. Tawa. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000. [xiii, 350 p. ISBN 1-55553-443-0 (cloth); 1-55553-442-2 (pbk.). $50 (cloth); $20 (pbk.).]

Perhaps no living scholar has read more primary source material on nineteenth-century American music than Nicholas Tawa. High-Minded and Low-Down is unusually rich in its documentation of musical life during the important and formative period from 1800 to the beginning of the Civil War.

The stated goal of this book is to discover what people from that time "[had] to say about themselves and their relation to music" (p. 3). Toward this end, Tawa combed through hundreds of nineteenth-century books, journals, diaries, and articles for their references to music; he then perused thousands of pages in important periodicals devoted to cultural matters. With a storehouse of information in hand--gleaned over more than thirty years--Tawa asks some fundamental and important questions about antebellum music and musical life: Why would Americans be interested in music? How were people (especially children) educated about music? What role did professional performances play in the development of the musical culture? And, finally, how did music function in the lives of Americans? Tawa addresses these issues by letting those who lived through the period in question do the speaking. His search through the archives is intended to find voices and allow them to be heard.

Tawa makes it clear to the reader from the first that he is not interested in cross-examining his sources, for their words "deserve respect" (p. 3). "Under no circumstances do I wish to urge any particular cultural or social view on the reader. I would rather, if I can, see matters as contemporary men and women saw them. What did they have to say about themselves, is the question I ask myself" (p. x). High-Minded and Low-Down is thus a kind of sourcebook, filled with new information on music, page after page of it, gleaned mostly from obscure and hard-to-find sources. As such, the volume is important, for scholars must always start with what people said and did. If it is to be most valuable as a sourcebook, however, it should have a sophisticated and complete indexing system. Unfortunately, the index is not a tool that allows the reader to navigate through the material efficiently and easily. For instance, someone (like myself) interested in how the guitar works in "the lives of Americans, 1800- 1861" (from the book's subtitle) finds no quick help, for "guitar" does not appear in the index. Reading page by page, however, one discovers mention of the instrument dozens of times. Any scholar working on music during the antebellum period has to go through this book for its new documentation. Unless the subject is someone or something with a proper name, though, the work, alas, must be traversed page by page.

Tawa is so intent on liberating the voices of the past that he virtually ignores those of the present. In the last two decades, there has been a spate of scholarship on music and culture in the antebellum period, and surprisingly little of it is used, cited, or listed in the bibliography. The curious refusal to engage contemporary scholarship begins with the book's title: High-Minded and Low-Down. When I first saw Tawa's title, I assumed it resonated in some way with Lawrence Levine's pathbreaking Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially since much of Levine's work overlaps with the period and subject of Tawa's. Although many of the issues Levine discusses in his book crop up here, Tawa never addresses, critiques, or cites Highbrow/Lowbrow, nor does he even include it in his bibliography! And that is just the most obvious instance...