Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American Symphonic Enterprise
2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 104; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jax047
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)Music History and Culture
ResumoWith Orchestrating the Nation, Douglas W. Shadle has filled an egregious gap in our understanding of American history. In the nineteenth century a national debate raged on the nature of American music and, by extension, American culture. Throughout the century the young country witnessed a parade of composers, performers, and critics all vying to define a national musical style. Much of the repertoire from this period has been summarily dismissed or simply forgotten by historians and musicologists, who have largely focused on crafting a heroic narrative of nation building that culminated in the mid-twentieth century with symphonies by Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, and others. Shadle seeks to correct this error. The book examines symphonic works by several nineteenth-century American composers. Rather than a straightforward series of case studies segregated by chapters, Shadle situates each composer as a noun: the wanderer (the Bohemian-born Anthony Philip Heinrich), the stalwart (George Frederick Bristow), the republican (Louis Moreau Gottschalk), and so on. Using this deceptively simple foil he is able to effortlessly interweave these men, their motivations and philosophies, and their compositions in a way that furthers our understanding of both the chronology of the genre and the tangled nature of the development of the symphonic oeuvre in the United States.
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