On the record Music that changed America

Johns Hopkins musicology professor Celenza (Jazz Italian Style) offers an engrossing history of how music has intersected with American politics, policy, and culture. She covers how the law has shaped the musical landscape, citing the 1991 U.S. district court ruling that unauthorized sampling constituted copyright infringement--undercutting "the communicative power of rap," a genre reliant on layering different sounds--and the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which led to the deregulation of radio station ownership, privileging "nationally syndicated content" over "local voices and music styles." On the flip side, music also furthered broader political efforts by both the government--one 1950s State Department project sent "jazz ambassadors" like Dizzy Gillespie abroad to win over "the hearts and minds" of countries believed vulnerable to communist doctrine--and the American people, with songs by Nina Simone and Bob Dylan, among others, spreading the message of the civil rights movement. Celenza also unpacks the complicated roots of classic American music and plays, noting how Martha Graham and Aaron Copland's ballet Appalachian Spring, which was originally set during the Civil War and featured an escaped slave, had become by the time it premiered in 1944 a "mythical narrative of the nation's founding and pioneering spirit." Using such examples, Celenza explains with nuance and care how the history of American music reveals as much about the foundational stories "we choose to protect" as those "we're willing to forget." This hits all the right notes. (Apr.)

A lively survey of quintessentially American songs. It's typically American, Johns Hopkins musicologist Celenza notes, that rebelling colonials adopted the derisive British song "Yankee Doodle" as a badge of pride. But a true anthem was wanted, and it came in the War of 1812 (which "we tend to forget…began as an act of US aggression"): the "Star-Spangled Banner," written by a lawyer (and slaveholder in the "land of the free") who borrowed the barely singable tune from a British men's club. It might have been a handier ditty, such as "My Country 'Tis of Thee" (its tune borrowed from "God Save the King") or "Hail, Columbia," but alas, no. Not long after emancipation, the formerly enslaved and their descendants found an anthem of their own in "Lift Every Voice and Sing," with its resonant cadences ("Lift every voice and sing / Till earth and heaven ring, / Ring with the harmonies of Liberty…"), a song that deserves wider circulation outside the African American church community. Other songs in Celenza's roster speak to other aspirations of freedom: George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which "captured the mechanistic beat of modern life"; the collected works of Duke Ellington, blending jazz with the European classical tradition; Abel Meeropol's antilynching ballad "Strange Fruit" as sung by the great Billie Holiday, who ended her set with it and left the stage immediately after, leaving her audiences stunned by the force of her delivery; Jerome Robbins' musicalWest Side Story, originally meant to tell the story of immigrant Eastern European Jews in New York and seized upon by politicians to denounce juvenile delinquency; and of course that great delinquent Bob Dylan, whose folk anthem "Blowin' in the Wind," Celenza wryly notes, offers "an answer that is equally evasive and profound," like the author himself. Celenza's selections, extending into the era ofHamilton, aren't unexpected, but she has something fresh to say about all of them. A treasure for students of the true American songbook. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.