The Cambridge History of American Music, first published in 1998, celebrates the richness of America's musical life. It was the first study of music in the United States to be written by a team of scholars. American music is an intricate tapestry of many cultures, and the History reveals this wide array of influences from Native, European, African, Asian, and other sources. The History begins with a survey of the music of Native Americans and then explores the social, historical, and cultural events of musical life in the period until 1900. Other contributors examine the growth and influence of popular musics, including film and stage music, jazz, rock, and immigrant, folk, and regional musics. The volume also includes valuable chapters on twentieth-century art music, including the experimental, serial, and tonal traditions.

An illustrated history of America's musical heritage ranges from the earliest examples of Native American traditional song to the innovative sound of contemporary rock and jazz.

Cumulative index to all three volumes of Literature of American Music in Books and Folk Music Collections.

This volume honors and extends the contributions of educator and scholar Dr. Michael J. Budds to the field of musicology, particularly the study of American music. As the longtime editor of two book series for the College Music Society, Budds nurtured a wide range of scholarship in American music and had a lasting impact on the field. This book brings together scholars who worked with Budds as a colleague, editor, or mentor to carry on his legacy of passionate engagement with America’s rich and varied musical heritage. Ranging through jazz, gospel, Americana, and film music to American classical, and addressing music’s social contexts and analytical structure, the research gathered here attests to the diversity of the mosaic that is American music and the numerous scholarly approaches that have been taken to the subject.

In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals. Much as been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, but very little on concert music of the era. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer culture is a vibrant and rapidly evolving segment of the American mosaic. This book gives students and general readers a current guide to the people and issues at the forefront of contemporary LGBTQ America. Included are more than 600 alphabetically arranged entries on literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual issues, and numerous other topics. Entries are written by distinguished authorities and cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students in social studies, history, and literature classes will welcome this book's illumination of American cultural diversity. LGBTQ Americans have endured many struggles, and during the last decade in particular they have made tremendous contributions to our multicultural society. Drawing on the expertise of numerous expert contributors, this book gives students and general readers a current overview of contemporary LGBTQ American culture. Sweeping in scope, the encyclopedia looks at literature and the arts, associations and organizations, individuals, law and public policy concerns, health and relationships, sexual practices, and various other areas. Entries cite works for further reading, and the encyclopedia closes with a selected, general bibliography. While extensive biographical entries give readers a sense of the lives of prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Americans, the many topical entries provide full coverage of the challenges and contributions for which these people are known. The encyclopedia supports the social studies curriculum by helping students learn about cultural diversity, and it supports the literature curriculum by helping students learn about LGBTQ writers and their works.

New in Paperback 2004. Probably the most comprehensive work on the American art song ever available, this book considers the lives and contributions of 144 significant composers in the field, including many for whom information has been extremely scarce. Most composers' entries consist of a biographical sketch; a brief discussion of his or her song writing characteristics (with emphasis on performers' concerns); a partial or complete listing of annotated songs; recording information; and the composer's individual bibliography. Song annotations include poet, publisher, date of composition (when known), voice type, range, duration, tempo indication, mood, subject matter, vocal style, special difficulties, general impression, artists who have recorded the song, and any other pertinent information. Thirty composers whose contributions are deemed of lesser import are summarized in brief essays. Appendixes include a supplement of recommended songs; a listing of American song anthologies and their contents; and the most recent information regarding publishers cited in the guide. There is also a general discography, a general bibliography, and indexes for both titles and poets. Documenting the most important 110 years in the development of American art song, this book is an indispensable tool for singers, teachers, coaches, accompanists, and libraries.

A Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic presents an unprecedented collection of the writings of the great composer-critic and father of American classical music, Virgil Thomson Following on the critically acclaimed edition of Virgil Thomson’s collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America and Pulitzer Prize–winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson’s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America’s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson’s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic—here presented in its revised edition of 1962—discusses the commissions, jobs, and other opportunities available to the American composer, a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that, today as much as in Thomson’s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomson’s autobiography, Virgil Thomson (1966), is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer, it is an intellectual, aesthetic, and personal chronicle of the twentieth century, from World War I–era Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters, from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir, it is marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomson’s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English—especially American English—to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomson’s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984—thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.