One of the most original and insightful surveys of American music
is now available in a revised edition. Published to wide acclaim in
1965, Music in a New Found Land, in its original edition,
selectively reviewed the development of American musical traditions
from the 1600s to the early 1960s. With the addition of a new
afterword and a revised bibliography, Wilfrid Mellers brings his
book up to date, discussing the important developments in American
music in the past 20 years.
A British musical scholar and composer, Wilfrid Mellers brings to
this work not only his musical scholarship but the objectivity of a
European writing about American music. "As an outsider," he writes,
"I may see and hear things that cannot be experienced from within
the American context." Mellers explores the development of unique
musical traditions within the confines of America's shores,
dividing his work into two parts, the first concentrating on
"serious" art-music, the second on "popular" music, jazz, and show
tunes.
Beginning with the "primitives" (the New England hymnodists), the
section on "serious" music shows how the styles of all the great
American classical composers developed. Mellers uses as examples
only those composers whose work he considers to have had a lasting
effect on the history of American music. Among these are Charles
Ives, "the first authentic American composer"; Carl Ruggles; Aaron
Copland, "the first artist to define precisely, in sound, an aspect
of our urban experience"; Charles Griffes; and John Cage, who took
abstraction to an extreme, considering each sound an audible event,
with no past and no future. He also examines the importance of
Samuel Barber and Virgil Thomson, decidedly non-avant-garde
20th-century composers, whose works are popular, he claims, because
they appeal to Americans' regressive tendencies.
The second section charts the development of "pop" music, jazz,
and musicals from parlor songs, work songs, and spirituals. Here,
Mellers examines the appeal of Stephen Foster, Louis Moreau
Gottschalk, and John Philip Sousa; tells the fascinating story of
Tin Pan Alley; and traces the development of jazz from its
beginnings in the smoke-filled bars of Storeytown to a music that
encompassed barrelhouse piano, piano rag, and blues and was played
in Chicago, New York, and the Far West. George Gershwin, Mark
Blitzstein, and Leonard Gernstein all receive their due, as do the
jazz greats, band leaders, and showmen.
Mellers weaves into his study of American music discussion of
American intellectual traditions, including Puritanism,
transcendentalism, abstraction, and Dadaism--so that we have a
history not only of American music, but of the way that music has
fit into the intellectual preoccupations of the country. Also
included are excerpts from American literature, samples of musical
scores, references to specific recordings, and a selected
bibliography. Updated through the 1980s, Music in a New Found Land
now offers a new generation of scholars and music lovers an
absorbing and authoritative study of the development of American
music.
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