AMERICA'S MUSICAL LIFE: A History.(Review)(Brief Article)

In 1846, the director of the Paris Opera told American composer William Henry Fry that Europeans "looked upon America as an industrial country-excellent for electric telegraphs, but not for Art." Over a century and a half later, Crawford (The American Musical Landscape), a professor of music at the University of Michigan and former president of the American Musicological Society, has thoroughly debunked that myth, at least in regard to music. In this ambitious, comprehensive history, Crawford speaks with equal authority on colonial psalmody and ragtime, minstrelsy and Gilded Age classical, and in an effort to highlight forgotten history, sketches biographies of influential …