Rethinking American Music ed. by Tara Browner and Thomas Riis (review)

In Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas Riis set out to highlight the expanding field of scholarship on US music of the past thirty years, writing that the volume was “conceived as a series of commentaries or glosses about American music broadly understood and defined by [Richard] Crawford, [Gil-bert] Chase, [Charles] Hamm, [H. Wiley] Hitchcock, [Nadine] Hubbs, [Charles Hiroshi] Garrett, and others” (1). The editors identify four overarching issues in the book: performance, patronage, identity, and ethnography. Each theme encompasses three or four essays. Such an ambitious endeavor is laudable and at times fulfilled, as several of the essays in the collection outline new approaches to issues like class, race, and ethnography. Other chapters use archival research to fill in pieces of historical puzzles. However, despite the part titles, these sometimes bear only a loose resemblance to the chapters.

The first part, “Performance,” illustrates these strengths and weaknesses; each essay presents solid new research or ideas, but none engage seriously with the idea of performance. The part begins with Karen Ahlquist’s broad historiographical investigation of class in US music scholarship, followed by two smaller case studies: Jeffrey Magee’s account of the evolution of a Broadway song type and David Warren Steel’s study of secular tunebooks written in shape notes. Ahlquist questions foundational work by Lawrence Levine, Paul DiMaggio, and others, particularly “the idea that formal musical culture and its music served only elite ownership and control of society” (25). She ends by calling for a more nuanced account of the relationship between power, class, and US music-making. Magee traces the “cozy cottage song” trope from its origins as an emblem of the American dream in the urban milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, to its nostalgic evocation of the dream in the 1940s and 1950s, to the more recent Fun Home (Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori, Broadway, 2015), which emphasizes the emptiness of the dream. Steel analyzes the tensions between music education and hymn-singing in the middle of the nineteenth century. He demonstrates that secular shape-note tunebooks became popular in two related contexts: as pedagogical tools when instructors were reluctant to use hymns to teach the system for fear of profaning sacred texts with wrong notes, and as attempts to prevent communities from singing inappropriate material outside of the church. While each essay is a valuable contribution, Ahlquist’s essay focuses on audiences and patrons, Magee’s on composers and lyricists, and Steel’s on compilers and educators; none address performance.

The “Patronage” part is similarly thematically murky, although better. The first two chapters—Sterling E. Murray’s account of early productions of Isaac Bickerstaff and Thomas Arne’s pastiche Love in a Village and Esther R. Crook-shank’s study of Isaac Watts—have little relation to the financial side of music-making. Indeed, Crookshank’s contribution might have fit better under “Identity,” given that she does not address the economic world of American hymnody but does discuss the varying reasons why different communities of the last two hundred years have been attracted to Watts. Still, the final two essays generate important questions about musical economies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Amy C. Beal investigates composer-driven publishing houses in the twentieth century, illuminating the complex relationship between experimental music and the marketplace. She explores the way composers solved the conundrum of “the disadvantages of isolation while maintaining artistic and aesthetic freedom” (141) by forming their own publication collectives. Among other things, she observes that such publishers often felt it was not their “role to act as controller of quality” but rather to simply “put forth alternatives”; for example, the New Music Distribution Service would publish anything it deemed “independent.” All such collectives attempted to provide “a needed space for creative work that would not survive otherwise in a hierarchically organized and market-driven culture of survival-of-the-fittest economics” (145). Mark Clague’s...