Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nicholas E. Tawa, the prolific author of over a dozen works on mostly American music history, now offers a study of that subject in the antebellum era. His particular objective is to show how people used music in their daily lives in the first decades of the nineteenth century and the significance of that cultural activity. The goal is certainly a laudable one, but its sweeping character presents a monumental challenge. Tawa's success is a rather limited one for students of our cultural history. The major deficiency is the lack of any overarching interpretation and a neglect of relevant secondary studies. This book's real value is its wide but still incomplete coverage of where one would find musical song and performance in pre-Civil War American society.

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Tawa partially justifies his reticence to theorize and produce any synthesis by his initial determination not to "urge any particular cultural or social view on the reader" (p. x). The result is the presentation of a huge amount of detail on sites of musical activity, not only in the opera house and the concert ball but also at home, at work, in church, in a saloon, and out of doors on trails and the street. Tawa does offer some conclusions, largely celebratory, about the popular need for music and especially its culturally unifying property among all groups, based on a democratic character that allowed for autonomous, creative expression. But despite these theoretical observations, the work really is a vast listing of when and where music was produced, taken chiefly from the observations of European visitors and middle-class reporters. This kind of evidence, however, still does not provide a sufficient basis for Tawa's conclusion about music's homogenizing impact. He gives, for example, insufficient attention to music's intensification of social friction.

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