America's Musical Life: A History

Rating:
Summary: History of American Music
Review: Crawford's superb book presents the whole sweep of US cultivated and traditional musics--from 16th-century Native American music through late 20th-century hip-hop culture. The author (Univ. of Michigan) approaches America's music from the standpoint of "composer's music," i.e., classical music in which the performer rather strictly follows the composer's intentions; "performer's music," popular music where the "notation is intended as an outline to be shaped by performers as they see fit"; and folk music, music handed down through oral tradition. Crawford has the ability to make broad connecting leaps between and among his subjects, and his felicitous writing style invites the listener deep into his narrative. Abundant illustrative materials and a sweeping, inclusive bibliography add substantially to this excellent history. John Tasker Howard's Our American Music (1931), Gilbert Chase's America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (1955; Crawford wrote the introduction for th e third revised edition, 1987), and Charles Hamm's Music in the New World (CH, Jun'83) stand as early models of studies of music in America. Crawford's book is every bit their equal and, in its own way, it establishes a new model for inclusiveness. An impressive summation of the vast musical "stew" that constitutes American music, this book is indispensable for all music collections.

Rating:
Summary: "It wasn't like that"
Review: In the 1980s I was a graduate student in musicology at the University of Toronto, specializing in Canadian music. A visit by Richard Crawford was one of the galvanizing moments in my education. He spoke on the theme of "Studying American Music" (the talk was later published in the Newsletter of the Institute for Studies in American Music, vol. XIV, no. 2, May 1985), but his ideas proved to be applicable to any field of music study. I know I have certainly made generous use of them in my own work. So it was with particular interest that I turned to this book, his magesterial (nearly 1,000 pages long!) summing up of a career devoted to the subject.

In the epilogue to the book, Crawford states that the historian is motivated by a disagreement with received ideas - "the gut-level feeling that says, 'It wasn't like that.'" In 40 chapters covering the entire history of music in America chronologically, from pre-historical to modern times, Crawford tells us how it really was. One tribute to the quality of this book is that the chapters on music in which I thought I had no interest (e.g., 18th century psalmody or 19th century minstrel shows) I found to be every bit as engaging as those on music that I love and cherish.

Crawford establishes his theoretical basis in a section titled "Notation, the Great Divide, and American Musical Categories" (p. 227). Previous historians (notably Charles Hamm and H. Wiley Hitchcock) have proposed a binary opposition in American music between Classical and Popular, or Cultivated and Vernacular. In place of this dualism, Crawford proposes a richer three-tiered categorization: Composers' music, which aims for TRANSCENDENCE (i.e. lasting value); Performers' music, which values ACCESSIBILITY; and Traditional music, ruled by CONTINUITY. The first two are notated traditions, the last is transmitted orally. These categories arise initially from considering the classical, popular, and folk traditions respectively.

Crawford later develops his thesis to show that considerable overlap and bleeding between categories has been characteristic of American music, especially in the 20th century. A chapter on the Beatles (No. 38, which otherwise seems glaringly out of place here - why an entire chapter on a British group?) makes the point that popular music since the 1960s has achieved transcendence. At about the same time, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and other composers in the Classical sphere were aiming for accessibility in preference to transcendence. Similarly, jazz arose from popular roots but achieved transcendence, primarily through recordings rather than notation, however.

Crawford's democratic approach gives equal time to the most widely varied styles and genres of music. He treats everything, from hymns to hip-hop and beyond, with scholarly attention that is balanced, scrupulous, and passionate. In the Epilogue, he admits to a grounding in the Classical sphere (and relays a charming story about travelling to a small town to hear his wife Penelope Crawford perform as piano soloist with a community orchestra), but he obviously has a passionate interest in jazz and a respectful attitude towards all types of music. You might want to turn to Hitchcock's *Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction* for a shorter treatment of the subject, or Hamm's *Music in the New World* for a more argumentative approach, but I feel that Crawford's book in time will take its place as the most thoughtful and the most comprehensive of all surveys of American music.

Rating:
Summary: A panoramic view
Review: Richard Crawford's ambitious book seems a culmination of his previous work, attempting to encompass the whole of American musical activity since the birth of the nation. His basic methodology of dividing American music into three spheres, classical, popular and folk, is a successful tool for making a gargantuan subject more manageable. His chronology makes an attempt to at least cast a glance at each of these areas as it progresses through the centuries.

Some of the individual chapters are, in my opinion, among the strongest essays available on their particular topics. Due to my own lack of previous knowledge in these fields I particularly enjoyed the chapters on the beginnings of organized music making in America, through the church. In particular, the split between the Methodist ideal of polished musical performance and literacy, and the more fundamentalist view that music in worship was direct communication with God, communication hindered by too much technical knowledge--this is a schism whose echoes are still apparent today.

Later on, the chapter on Ives takes a very small corner of the composer's output--six songs--to give a lucid and comprehensive survey of his style, a ingenious solution to the problem of how to give an accurate picture of an enormous, heterogenous body of work in a limited space.

Occasionally during the course of such an enormous work Crawford struggles with his task. At times one has the impression that topics and personages are being included and examined out of a sense of duty rather than real conviction about their significance; one can also quarrel with the choice of emphasis as Crawford approaches the present day. Nor do I think his surprising conclusion, which examines an actual, recent concert performance in which he was personally involved, succeeds in his goal of synthesizing his overall points by looking at them in microcosm, as it were. Still, he hits the the mark at enough points in this sweeping chronology to make it one of the finest works yet to appear on this topic.