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Product Description: From America's beginnings, our homes, churches, and public spaces have resounded with music. A preeminent musicologist now explores the relevance of music to Americans during the country's formative years, from the dawn of the nineteenth century to the Civil War...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: In all of the writings about twentieth-century American art music, scarcely any attempt has been made to examine the relationship between the composer and the general audience, and least of all what composers and members of the music public have had to say about each other...read more

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Product Description: In the years following the Civil War, a tradition of American art music arose that has now come to be neglected and almost ignored. This work studies that period of music that preceded Copland, Sessions, and Thomson by focusing on a number of its important composers, as well as the society that produced them...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Book includes Musical scores, index, selective bibliography of songs from 1866 to 1910, from just after the American Civil War to just before the First World War.

Product Description: Tawa considers the musical and social ramifications influencing the American composer between 1950 and 1985. He draws information from composers, music reviewers, and from his own listening experiences. Tawa's common theme is the gulf between what the composer (or critic) says about the music and how the public experiences it...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Tawa examines the musical traditions brought to America by the peasants and urban workers of southern Italy, the Middle East , and eastern Europe, and by the Chinese, Japanese, and East European Jews, and describes their survival within the American context, in often hostile surroundings...read more

Popular parlor songs were the main form of secular musical entertainment in the early years of the United States. They were heard regularly in the homes of our principal statesmen, authors, intellectuals, professionals, and businessmen. Laborers and slaves also sang them. They were the principal fare of concert and stage performances, and were freely interpolated into Italian operas, Shakespearean plays, lyceum lectures, and church services. In short, parlor songs played a dominant role in American cultural history.    This was the music that Jefferson, Lincoln, Longfellow, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson enjoyed. Yet, whether owing to prejudice or misinformation, we still know little about the songs they listened to and sang: why and for whom written; when heard; or how performed.    This book attempts to contribute that knowledge. Contemporary diaries, biographies, fiction, newspapers, periodicals, and books on music were studied and the music itself exhaustively analyzed in order to reach accurate conclusions about the popular culture that emerged between the American Revolution and the Civil War.    The reader comes away with a sympathetic understanding of the human hopes, fears, and joys embodied in the songs, and with a curiosity about the countless melodic gems awaiting exploration.