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Reviews
Land without Nightingales Music in the Making of German-America
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Edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel
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(Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute for German American Studies and the University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Pp. xix, 301. Compact disc, notes, illustrations, bibliographies, tables, appendix, figures, index. $49.95.)
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| Contemporary popular music in America reveals an ever-increasing indebtedness to international influences. This anthology, an outgrowth of a 1992 conference at the University of Chicago, reminds us that this process is part of a long tradition. What was sung and played in America involved an internationalization with roots going back to the earliest days of settlement in the 1600s when Britons, Germans, and others began coming to America. |
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In their introductory essay, Philip V. Bohlman and Otto Holzapfel indicate that their major goal is to define German-American ethnicity by studying its music. The effort is unusually complex and problematic as it often involves assessing the assimilation of non-German musical elements. By showing the fluidity of the making of German-American ethnicity, the essayists put to rest the older folkloric notion that an ethnic group's music was homogeneous and static. It was, to the contrary, a mixture of internal and external influences even before it arrived on these shores. |
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