American Musical Life Before 1900

Extract

The Journal of the Society for American Music is the official organ of the Society; as such, the articles published in its pages deal with a wide range of topics that both reflect its mission and illustrate the incredible diversity of music and musical styles composed, performed, and heard in the Americas. A glance at the tables of contents for issues published in the last three volumes of the journal (February 2011 through February 2014) provides an illuminating snapshot of the wondrous multiplicity that characterizes American music history. The thirteen issues published during that time include articles on popular music (hip hop, ragtime, swing, jazz, rock, country, soul), musical theatre, teachers, conductors, works by composers ranging from Ives and Copland to Feldman, Harrison, and Reich (and many in between), performers (Heifetz, Robeson, Zappa), jam sessions, ethnomusicological topics; in other words, the journal reflects in a truly impressive manner the rich and varied musical culture of the Americas. What is seriously underrepresented in this panoply of musical multiplicity, however, is the rich, diverse, and similarly wondrous American musical culture of any time before the twentieth century. Of the forty-two articles published over this three-year period, only two (5 percent) deal with American music or musical life before 1900, both of them on nineteenth-century topics.