RETHINKING AMERICAN MUSIC
Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis (eds.)
(UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS) www.press.uillinois.edu
ISBN 978-0-252-08410-2 Softcover. 355 pp.
This is a collection of academic essays on American music ranging widely across genres, from classical to jazz, musical theatre and Tin Pan Alley. Although they come grouped into four sections – ‘performance’, ‘patronage’, ‘identity’ and ‘ethnography’ – they’re a miscellaneous bunch, and few will read this volume cover to cover. That said, certain themes recur that reflect disquiet in a nation still troubled by its segregated past, themes like minstrelsy and ‘cultural appropriation’.
An informative essay on hip-hop compares ‘turntablists’ and ‘mashup’ artists. Both are making new music out of old but while the former are performer-DJs who proudly claim ‘authorship’ of their work, the latter skulk behind the anonymity of the internet, successfully evading copyright litigation. Another chapter considers how the Native American melodies collected by Natalie Curtis played into the European avant-garde’s fascination with ‘primitivism’ in the early twentieth century, using the composer Busoni as example. Another deals with a 1929 benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that defiantly busted the ‘colour bar’ by featuring a multi-ethnic cast. In lighter vein, a diverting contribution by Jeffrey Magee examines the ‘cosy cottage’ trope in the American musical, tracing its evolution from the comforting promise of ‘Tea for Two’ in the 1920s to Mrs Lovett’s dreams of rural retirement on the profits of cannibalism in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979).
My usual problem with academic writing about popular music is the mismatch between descriptor and described – too often it feels like improvised music created by self-taught musicians unversed in music notation is being crushed under the analytical tools developed for Western ‘art’ music. A final essay on transcribing a Thelonious Monk solo faces this issue head on. If ‘rethinking American music’ means restoring the precedence of historical and evidence-based research over theory, I’m all in favour.
[First published in RnR, March/April 2020]
