Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century

✍ Scribed by Charles Hiroshi Garrett

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 305
• 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Charles Ives’S Four Ragtime Dances And “True American Music”
2. Jelly Roll Morton And The Spanish Tinge
3. Louis Armstrong And The Great Migration
4. Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining America’S Borders With Musical Orientalism
5. Sounds Of Paradise: Hawai'i And The American Musical Imagination
Conclusion: American Music At The Turn Of A New Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index