COMMUNICATIONS.(Review)

This column provides a forum for responses to the contents of this journal and for information of interest to readers. The editor reserves the right to publish letters in excerpted form and to edit them for conciseness and clarity.

To the Editor:

I want to express my disappointment with Nym Cooke's review of the fifteen-volume series, Music of the New American Notion (ad. Karl Kroeger [New York: Garland, 1996-]) in the March 2001 issue of Notes (pp. 707-17). Although Cooke admits having put "only a small percentage of these many pages to a thorough inspection," most of the review is spent nitpicking the material he has examined. The overall effect is to cast doubt on the quality of the entire series. His most astounding criticism is that "eighty percent of the music... may not be particularly worth study or performance." Cooke is a respected psalmodist scholar, his principal work to date being Timothy Swan, Psalmody and Secular Song (Music of the United States of America, 6 [Madison, Wisc.: Published for the American Musicological Society by A-R Editions, 1997]). Couldn't we at least have had some description of the twenty per cent of the music under review that he does find worthy of consideration? Don't reasons exist, other than esthetic, for havin g an overview of a huge body of music that is just as important as any other in our heritage, including jazz? And shouldn't we be grateful for having the number of scholarly editions in this field more than quadrupled during the past five years? This writer would welcome the opportunity for Kroeger and the other editors of this impressive series to respond to Cooke's specific criticisms of editorial procedure. Those of us outside the field could learn much from such an interaction.

WILLIAM KEARNS

University of Colorado at Boulder

The author responds:

I am sorry to have distressed Bill Kearns, whom I like and respect, with my review of the Music of the New American Nation series. But I don't see how I could have reviewed the series otherwise Does Professor Kearns expect me to have checked all, or most, or even more than a sample of the pages of this fifteen-volume edition thoroughly, note against note? And when a relatively small but representative ...