Description
Book SynopsisIn Rethinking American Music, Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis curate essays that offer an eclectic survey of current music scholarship. Ranging from Tin Pan Alley to Thelonious Monk to hip hop, the contributors go beyond repertory and biography to explore four critical yet overlooked areas: the impact of performance; patronage''s role in creating music and finding a place to play it; personal identity; and the ways cultural and ethnographic circumstances determine the music that emerges from the creative process. Many of the articles also look at how a piece of music becomes initially popular and then exerts a lasting influence in the larger global culture. The result is an insightful state-of-the-field examination that doubles as an engaging short course on our complex, multifaceted musical heritage. Contributors: Karen Ahlquist, Amy C. Beal, Mark Clagu,. Esther R. Crookshank, Todd Decker, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, Joshua S. Duchan, Mark Katz, Jeffrey Magee, Sterling E. Murray, Gu
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"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." --American Music
"Rethinking American Music succeeds by honoring forebears, emphasizing areas of strength, reconfiguring some foundational narratives, and proffering some new scholarly directions." --Journal of Folklore Research
"A marvelous compendium of scholarship in American music, this book illustrates the wondrous diversity of American musical culture from the eighteenth century to today. Essays on classical, sacred, popular, jazz, hip hop, and theatrical styles deal with performance, patronage, identity, and ethnography and illustrate wonderfully the breadth of Crawford's enormous legacy in the field of Americanist music studies."--Katherine K. Preston, author of Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late Nineteenth-Century America
"Stimulating and enjoyable to read. . . . A considerable contribution to studies of American music, not only for the presentation of original research but potentially more significantly for its reflections on research methodology and hermeneutics."--Deane L. Root, Editor in Chief, Grove Music Online
"Rethinking American Music demonstrates the diversity of current scholarship on American music culture. . . . Recommended." --Choice
"Rethinking American Music is engaging and the articles are thorough." --Western Folklore
