“Rethinking,” especially in book-length form, carries academic cachet. Under this rubric, academic fields can take stock of their pasts and, often in a collection of essays, project forward: introducing topics of new interest, crossing disciplinary boundaries, and seeking new grand unifying (or disunifying) theories. To publishers it can also be a productive brand. Oxford University Press, to give but one example, engaged in Rethinking Music in 1999, launched a composer-based “rethinking” series in the 2010s (thus far including Robert Schumann, Gustav Mahler, and Steve Reich), and produced education-based volumes subtitled Rethinking Musical Ability, Development and Identity (2012) and Rethinking Music Teaching and Learning (2014). Many other presses’ titles also feature “rethinking” both left and right of the scholarly colon, broadcasting points of rhetorical transition, a willingness to interrogate past orthodoxies, and interest in opening a given field to previously excluded streams of research—and possible course corrections.
Such a spirit also pervades Rethinking American Music, a collection dedicated to Richard Crawford and the late Judith McCulloh, whose foundational work and core publications helped establish American music as a discrete field of study (McCulloh curated the University of Illinois Press’s prestigious Music in American Life series, where this book also appears). Editors and senior scholars Tara Browner and Thomas Riis, who connect classic concerns of the field with the renewed potential of ethnomusicology and theater studies, respectively, embody this forward-seeing point of view. The wide range of perspectives on “American music” that they corral into one space, however, can seem alternately accepting and ambivalent about such a change, reflecting a heterodox state of the field that could be subtitled “Where We Are Now, c. 2015.”
Browner and Riis’s organizational approach honors the book’s title: rather than arranging the essays in a general chronology, they group the fifteen chapters into four topics of recent interest titled Performance, Patronage, Identity, and Ethnography. Their curation follows suit, with a brief welcome and framing discussions in each section replacing a formal introductory essay. This strategy allows the editors to play gregarious hosts to a wide range of writing styles, which can feel at times self-contained, introverted, and reluctant to mix. When the editors’ voices go quiet, consequently, the book’s unity wavers. Particularly after the final contribution—a short, posthumously published jazz transcription by Mark Tucker (prefaced by Jeffrey Taylor)— the lack of a concluding note left me with more of a question mark than a clear path forward.
Browner and Riis deserve credit for letting their contributors present materials from their comfort zones, whether as source studies, literature critiques, sociomusical analyses, accounts of signal historical events, or topic-based histories. At its most effective, this variety of approach opens direct challenges to existing perceptions of American music, dissolving barriers between established conceptual categories and amplifying selectively marginalized voices. Karen Ahlquist upends entrenched class-based assumptions about the “high culture” status of art music production during the nineteenth century. Riis asserts that blackface performance around the turn of the twentieth century opened more opportunities for African-American performers than we currently acknowledge. Guthrie Ramsey proffers an extra-textual language for describing the role music plays in African-American populations. And the entire ethnography section highlights American music’s potential to reduce artificial boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology, while thinking about such issues as transcription, musical interpolation, and research with human subjects. As calls for reconsidering the field, these essays stimulate.
But that same quality can make other essays in the volume less user-friendly, especially to readers who want to understand the full spectrum of approaches on display. In some entries, long excurses on historical books or manuscripts seem to supersede the direct, incisive arguments that a “rethinking” volume might welcome. Others, including Riis’s and Browner’s contributions, lack the subheadings that might help curious readers navigate unfamiliar scholarly territory. The meticulous detail that Esther R. Crookshank places into her extraordinary chronicle of Isaac Watts’ hymns in America seems better suited for specialists than a general readership. And the ethnography section, while perhaps the book’s most significant effort at expanding the discipline, contains some of the shortest entries. As exercises in erudition, these essays showcase the contributors’ mastery of their respective subfields; but they can also come off as blunting the clarity of the book’s presumed mission.
Some Journal of Folklore Research Reviews readers may find this “rethought” model of American music promising, while others will see lacunae. Although the entries highlight an expanded openness toward ethnography, African-American narratives, musical theater, economics, pop music, and jazz, they largely overlook the folk, country, and related musics that have factored centrally into American music research; the musics of immigrant communities continue to struggle for entry; heteronormativity remains dominant; and the volume’s “America” remains more or less strictly bounded by continental US borders, with a few quick trips to Europe. Granted, no book can cover everything, but given recent energetic efforts to address these lacunae at conferences of the Society for American Music and the review section of its journal (among other places), their absence here can make the volume feel dated (most chapters’ cited sources only peek into the 2010s, if that). Similar critiques, however, inevitably burden any work that purports to rethink a field, given the term’s broad claims and the time lag built into peer-reviewed scholarship. More effective, perhaps, would be to view the book as a solid collection of ideas that encourages further conversation: in that frame, Rethinking American Music succeeds by honoring forebears, emphasizing areas of strength, reconfiguring some foundational narratives, and proffering some new scholarly directions. And if another set of scholars wishes to publish a successor “rethinking” volume, chances are an interested publisher stands at the ready.
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[Review length: 935 words • Review posted on April 24, 2020]