Struggling to define a nation : American music and the twentieth century

✍ Scribed by Garrett, Charles Hiroshi

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 308
• Series: Roth Family Foundation music in America imprint.; ACLS Humanities E-Book.
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres--including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music--and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.  Read more...

✦ Table of Contents

Charles Ives's Four ragtime dances and true American music --
Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish tinge --
Louis Armstrong and the great migration --
Chinatown, whose Chinatown? Defining America's borders with musical orientalism --
Sounds of paradise: Hawai'i and the American musical imagination --
Conclusion: American music at the turn of a new century.

✦ Subjects

Music -- United States -- 20th century -- History and criticism;Nationalism in music;Music;United States