American Music articles from September 1996

American Music archives from September 1996

Mrs. Belmont, Matthew Perry, and the "Japanese minstrels."(Eleanor Belmont)
September 22, 1996... Some look at America and see only diversity, conspiracy, and struggle. When I look at America, especially its music history, I am struck by the interrelationships among its diverse personalities. Sometimes these are obvious, but more often they...

A sense of place: Charles Ives and "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut."
September 22, 1996... Browsing through Charles Ives's autobiographical Memos, a reader becomes increasingly aware of Ives's use of place to record early performances, to date compositions, and to reconstruct events. Dozens of references to specific churches, home...

A national band from the southwest: the Don Albert Orchestra.
September 22, 1996... From 1929 until 1940 New Orleans-born trumpet player Don Albert (190-80) led a jazz band based in San Antonio, Texas, known first as "Don Albert and His Ten Pals" and later as "Don Albert and His Music, `America's Greatest Swing Band.'" Within...

Balancing local and national approaches at American fiddle contests.
September 22, 1996... American fiddling, for centuries among our most energetically cultivated oral traditions, now flourishes in a revival centered on carefully structured contests, a revival that was sparked in the late 1950s to early 1960s by fiddlers in the...

Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971.
September 22, 1996... By Dorothy Lamb Crawford. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. ISBN 0-520-08891-3. Pp. 335. $34.95. Evenings on the Roof, the monthly chamber music series that is famous for its advocacy of high modernism in Los Angeles, has...

The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches.
September 22, 1996... By Beverly Bush Patterson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. ISBN 0-252-02123-1. Pp. x, 238. $37.50 (cloth), $10.95 (accompanying cassette), $45.00 (book and cassette set). The thesis that musical timbre can function as a marker of...

Adolescents and their Music: If It's Too Loud, You're Too Old.
September 22, 1996... Ed. Jonathon S. Epstein. New Directions in Sociology, vol. 1; Garland Reference Library of Social Science, vol. 804. New York: Garland, 1993. ISBN 0-8153-0614-8. Pp. xxxiv, 401. $55. It is truly a fortunate occasion when a field once barren...

Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture.
September 22, 1996... Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. Ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose. New York: Routledge, 1994. ISBN 0-415-909074 (cloth); 0-415-90908-2 (pbk.). Pp. ix, 276. $49.95 (cloth), $16.95 (pbk.). It is truly a fortunate occasion when a...

The Music of Ruth Crawford Seeger.
September 22, 1996... By Joseph N. Straus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-521-1646-9. Pp. xii, 260. $59.95. The evolution of Ruth Crawford scholarship has been, to some extent, a history of unavoidable ambivalence: scholars have had difficulty...

Dockstader: Water Music, Two Moons, Quatermass.
September 22, 1996... Tod Dockstader. Introduction by Edward Tatnall Canby. Liner notes by the composer. 1992. Starkland St-201 AAD. In 1991 I taught electronic composition at Drew University (Madison, N.J.). Although at first daunted by the thirty-year-old Moog...

Rainforest Images.
September 22, 1996... Priscilla and Barton McLean. Rainforest Images, incorporating digitally processed live performance on voices, violins, wooden recorders, and clarifute (clarinet mouthpiece, recorder body) with nature sounds and electronics; Priscilla McLean,...