bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Fully Interactive (Bill Charlap)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

In making his brief for Kipling, Randall Jarrell wrote of those oppressively mighty figures in politics and art upon whose leave-taking the world—”tired of being their pedestal”—gives “a great oof of relief,” only to elevate its own personage of equal weight. Jazz’s last Napoleonic (or Kiplingesque) figure was Miles Davis, and no one since has offered a plausible succession—certainly not Wynton Marsalis, whose musical impact withered in direct proportion to his aspiration. Yet if jazz no longer presents an orderly chain of command, it holds out the possibility of contrasting empires. During the past couple of decades, the best and largest part of jazz struck with teeming, clamorous urgency: the legacy of hard bop as multiplied by the avant-garde, fusion, and the swinging strut of recycled repertory. The net effect was to drown out, marginalize, and even belittle middle-aged desires like Lyricism, Sentiment, and Nostalgia.
Almost Peas in a Pod (Tony Bennett / Sarah Vaughan)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Tony Bennett is a pop singer who records extensively with jazz musicians but always comes off as a pop singer with a keen appreciation of jazz. Sarah Vaughan was a jazz singer who made dozens of pop records but always came off as a jazz singer who could never quite take pop machinations seriously. I don’t mean to use the terms qualitatively, not here anyway, because Bennett and Vaughan are among my favorite singers and I’m less inclined to endorse their separate pigeonholes than recognize their many similarities. Although Vaughan’s career is associated with the obstetrics of modern jazz (1944) and Bennett with the post-noir hit parade (1951), she was only two years his senior; both came of age with the big bands and the seminal trinity of Armstrong, Crosby, and Holiday. They sang the same songs and shared the same arrangers and musicians, recorded for Columbia in the period of novelties and schmaltz, worked with Basie on Roulette. They came from solid, New York–area working-class backgrounds (he Astoria, she Newark) and never lost an innate skepticism for the romance of stardom—she protecting herself with wicked irony, he with ingenuous geniality. Both walked away from major record companies when they could no longer abide compromises; both subsequently triumphed on their own terms.
Lionel Hampton, 1908–2002
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Putting aside the probability that in the fullness of time every musician, from Palestrina to Perry Como, will be looked upon as a precursor of rock and roll, in the instance of Lionel Hampton the claim has much validity—indeed, it’s surprising to discover that he isn’t yet acknowledged in most reference works on the subject. Along with Lucky Millinder he practically invented orchestrated rhythm and blues. Both men arrived at Decca in 1941, two years after the label signed Louis Jordan, and restructured swing to accommodate voluble rhythms, raucous blues, and shameless showmanship. Millinder, however, had nothing like Hampton’s breadth or appeal. Nor did he have “Flying Home”: The moment Illinois Jacquet began his tenor saxophone solo with an extended quote from the 1847 opera Martha, jazz and pop were headed for a new kind of conciliation. The age of the honking tenor had arrived; on its heels came the JATP jousts, to one side, and, to the other, Tiny Bradshaw, Johnny Otis, Earl Bostic, and others, all (like Jordan) undistinguished veterans of swing bands who found their places in the sun with r&b. In 1954, Decca would seal the deal by signing Bill Haley.
Genius (Charlie Christian)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

“Legend” is the tribute we pay artists we’d prefer not to confront. A universe of legends and living legends inclines us to feel less awed than fatigued, and hyperbole ultimately masks indifference. In the absence of divinity and heroism, of a demiurgic unreality, even dictionaries surrender to fashion and concede that a legend may be merely a “superstar” or “celebrity.” Thus we are brought short in the presence of the real McCoy. Charlie Christian, like other world-shaking artists who died absurdly young, radiates a mythological aura. It isn’t that we lack biographical specifics. But the growing multiplicity of facts and dates do not bring us any closer to knowing the laconic, universally liked and admired, but strangely passionless Prometheus who took hold of electricity and gave it a voice. In a career of Orpheic brevity (23 months in the national limelight, 1939–41), Christian utterly transformed the DNA of jazz and popular music, and his innovations are matched by the stillwaxing power of his art.
Christmas Gilt (Ella Fitzgerald / Johnny Smith / Grant Green / Others)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The annual profusion of Christmas albums suggests a bottomless appetite for the same dozen or 15 songs done in every conceivable fashion, and a hapless record industry eager to oblige. When in doubt, shake up the backlist, develop a seasonal pun, and leave the rest to nostalgia. It is often noted that most of the good American Christmas songs, beginning with Berlin’s “White Christmas” (1942, not so very long ago) are by Jewish composers. They have secularized the revelry to the point where even unlapsed Catholics must at times struggle to recall that all the fuss commemorates their Savior’s birth and not merely ASCAP and BMI annuities involving sleigh bells, drummer boys, chipmunks, reindeer, chestnuts, Santa, Frosty, and, most crucially, snow—of which there was a dearth in Galilee. Why those songwriters could not bestir themselves to write a decent Hanukkah song is a mystery for the ages. Hath not a Jew snow, snowmen, bells, singing animals, Buddy Rich? Secularist that I am, I don’t need chain-rattling Marley to muster my belief in miracles, for example, the sound of Ella Fitzgerald’s voice in 1960, when she recorded Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas, recently reissued by Verve. Her instrument was pearly—perhaps at its apogee— and her time, well, what is there left to say of her time, a musical Greenwich Mean? “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is near perfect, so near that for the duration of her vocal I am inclined to close the book on singers and concede that paradise is lost.
Everything That Rises Must Converge (The Best Jazz Records of 2002)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

As the wheels of Capital grind remorselessly to the tune of impossible profit projections, jazz grows increasingly irrelevant to the dominant record labels. Atlantic vanished; Columbia recycled Miles; Concord Jazz did singers; BMG and Warner hardly mattered; and even Verve tightened the noose. Blue Note kept the faith, revived by the improbable triumph of Norah Jones in a non-jazz setting. Yet good jazz records proliferated, some better than good, and often on labels like Palmetto, Justin Time, Pi, Aum Fidelity, and others yet more obscure. Something like consensus coalesced around half a dozen titles. One dares to imagine the divided jazz tribes rising above ever-thinner layers of air to converge. For example, if the audience for Bob’s Pink Cadillac were also to buy The Music of Bob Haggart, and vice versa, two little tribes might surprise themselves and turn into one with clout. Shhhhh—let me dream, albeit alphabetically. Five entries are asterisked: CDs that, like it or not, you must hear.
Hot (Louis Armstrong)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

The Complete Hot Five & Hot Seven Recordings, Vol. 1 If Louis Armstrong had never lived, the world would be a different place—as radically different as if, say, Archduke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated or the United States hadn’t unleashed nuclear weaponry. In recounting those who shaped history, we invariably focus on conquerors or politicians. But cultural heroes also define our lives. Born to severe poverty in New Orleans, in 1901, and armed only with his cornet, voice, and personality, Armstrong conquered American music, erecting the foundation for the prevailing music of the last century. Before Armstrong, jazz was perceived as a clamorous urban folk music, wedded to duple rhythms that had more in common with parade bands and African polyrhythms than the clear-sailing of what we call swing. It was a social music that favored collective embellishment over solitary virtuosity. To many, it wasn’t an art at all, only a resource from which “legit” composers might borrow a thumping beat (as in Rite of Spring) or a blue note (as in Rhapsody in Blue). Jazz would surely have developed eminent soloists without Armstrong (it already had in Sidney Bechet), but its progress as an art in its own right would have been slow and chaotic. Armstrong was the visionary who grounded jazz as the music of a new world. In his hands, it became a calling of unlimited potential and universal appeal.
Aqui Se Habla Espanol (David Murray)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

No career in jazz during the past 30 years has proven more consistently unpredictable and rewarding than that of David Murray. When he first showed up in New York—a 20-year-old student on furlough from Pomona College, playing “Flowers for Albert” in Stanley Crouch’s Bowery loft—he had two big things going for him. First, he didn’t sound like anyone else, certainly not Albert Ayler, though one could imagine that Ayler’s example encouraged his penchant for the split-tones and squeals of the so-called hidden register. The classic Texas tenor Buddy Tate, who also favored upper-register cries, once advised young musicians to find their own sound, which isn’t only easier said than done but almost impossible to do. The sound is you and not something out there awaiting discovery. But Tate came up in the ‘20s, when every saxophonist—every musician—of note had a distinctive sound. That Hawkins, Webster, and Young existed in the same world indicated the tenor saxophone’s extraordinary range; if those three and others (like Herschel Evans, Bud Freeman, and Chu Berry) represented unmistakably distinctive attacks, the spaces between them offered all kinds of possibilities. Tate, for one, started out blending Evans and Hawkins before finding his own place. The ‘70s offered a parallel challenge: the post-war tenor hierarchy had handed down alternatives no less distinct in the work of Gordon, Gray, Getz, Rollins, and Coltrane. Yet for a while it looked as if the tenor would be buried in a welter of Coltrane imitators. Murray, however, proved to be merely the youngest in an influx of musicians who demonstrated that many “sounds” were yet to be had—especially, for some reason, on alto sax (no fan could confuse Anthony Braxton, Arthur Blythe, Julius Hemphill, and Oliver Lake), but that’s another story.
French Music, Not Necessarily Freedom Music (Louis Sclavis)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

A certain kind of melody is embedded deep in the DNA of silent movies. It’s a melancholy diatonic waltz, the love child of “After the Ball” and Charlie Chaplin, whose genius extended to sentimental themes that nudge us to smile through our tears. The living master of the idiom, which is not so much composed as recycled, is the born-and-bred New Yorker Carl Davis, a workhorse of ‘70s British cinema who scored several new films while finding his true métier in re-scoring silents and TV series about the silents. The last place you expect to find an outstanding example of that kind of melody, which has done more for Kleenex than the flu, is in the work of a musician and composer closely associated with the European jazz avant-garde. And my first response to Louis Sclavis’s Dans La Nuit, his commissioned score to Charles Vanel’s longforgotten 1929 film, was indifferent disappointment.
Masters of Time (Roy Haynes / Max Roach)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

At 78, Roy Haynes is only a year younger than Max Roach, yet jazz history pigeonholes them, respectively, as secondand first-generation bebop drummers. Each was a wunderkind who initially made his reputation with swing titans: Roach with Benny Carter, Haynes with Lester Young. But Roach was the first to assimilate Charlie Parker’s radical redesign—”Koko” was as much a coming out for him as for Parker and bop itself—and by 1949, when he asked Haynes to replace him in Parker’s quintet, a chair Haynes held until 1952, Roach’s influence was pervasive and absolute, as Haynes readily acknowledges. Roach had changed everything. It took nothing away from Sid Catlett’s rolling authority or Buddy Rich’s heart-stopping stickwork or Jo Jones’s majestic hi-hat tattoos to realize that they were all inadequate to a music that demanded the drummer’s increased collaboration in shaping themes and propelling soloists. Stylish timekeeping was now supplemented by simultaneous rhythms (and independent limbs that made them possible), which redefined and deconstructed time while keeping it steady and resolute.
Overview and Meditation (Art Ensemble of Chicago)
Authors: Giddins Gary
Published: November 2023

Nearly four years ago, Lester Bowie blew his last blat and took with him a sensibility that is as much mourned as his trumpet playing. With no worthy heir to his white lab coat, jazz suffered an irreplaceable loss in theatrical wit, surgical strikes, massed brasses, pan-generic repertory, and nostalgic caprice. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, however, refused to lay down its little instruments, appearing periodically as a trio and, with the return this year of founding member Joseph Jarman, a quartet. Ending the post-Lester recording drought, two new CDs, one by each configuration, have now shown up at the same time. True believers will want both; those, like me, with limited patience for plunking and grinding percussion melees, will rejoice without cavil at the arrival of the majestic Tribute to Lester (ECM). Recorded two years ago, it is unlike anything else in the AEC’s catalog, beginning with a compact summary of the band’s first 30 years. Famoudou Don Moye’s “Sangaredi,” first recorded in abbreviated form in 1987, is treated to a definitive rendition, its African rhythms smartly bubbling from the start and quickly weighted with bass, gongs, and bass saxophone. Percussion feature though it is, the piece builds with compositional discretion until the chiming close, which suggests Big Ben tolling for the dead. An extended silence leads to Roscoe Mitchell’s “Suite for Lester,” a tripartite masterstroke of concision that opens with an allusive, poignant soprano saxophone melody reminiscent of his “For Lester B,” recorded in three variants in 1997, most memorably as a hymn on Mitchell’s Nine to Get Ready. This melody, backed by empathic drums and the bowed bass of Malachi Favors Maghostut, gives way to a serene full-bodied flute invention in the manner of Bach, complete with variation, that is in turn supplanted by a partying swing number on bass sax—all this in little more than five minutes.
Jumping Off
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Sitting in her tent on the soft grass of a prairie spring, Tamzene Donner contemplated the vast expanse of wilderness she was about to enter and decided to bid her sister one last goodbye. She reached for a fresh sheet of stationery and carefully noted the date—May 11, 1846—and the location: Independence, Missouri. The next day she would begin a journey as exciting and dangerous as any that could be imagined.
Pleasure Trip
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Virginia Reed swung into the saddle of her pony and galloped out onto the prairie. She loved getting away from the dull plod of the wagons, out into the high grasses where the wind whistled through a girl’s hair as she rode. She stopped from time to time and gathered wildflowers, the bright sunshine glinting off a dazzling palette of colors in her growing bouquet.
A New and Interesting Region
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

The young rider bounced off his mount and thudded sickeningly into the hard earth of Wyoming. The fall knocked Edward Breen out cold, and when he regained consciousness his left leg throbbed with pain. Adults arrived and examined the boy and found a bad break between the knee and ankle. There was no doctor in the company, but they were only a little ways beyond Fort Bridger. Perhaps someone there boasted medical training. A rider galloped off, and in time he returned with the nearest thing to a doctor the fort had to offer, ‘‘a rough looking man with long whiskers’’ who had probably acquired what medical knowledge he had through long experience on the frontier. He unrolled a small bundle he was carrying and produced a short saw and a longbladed knife, obviously the tools of amputation.
Unearthly
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

If the Donner Party received any brief encouragement as it struggled against the Wasatch Mountains, it must have come from the startling realization that other emigrants were even farther behind. At some point during the Wasatch ordeal, newcomers unexpectedly rolled up from the east. The three wagons belonged to Franklin Graves, a big, amiable man whose life had been a fitting prelude to the deprivations of the California Trail. In Illinois, where Graves and his wife had carved out a hardscrabble life in a one-room cabin along the banks of the Illinois River, Graves had gone shoeless in summer and hatless in winter. The family kept chickens and bees, and every morning Graves crossed the river in a handmade canoe to trade game, furs and buckets of honey with settlers in town. In the afternoon, the equally resourceful Elizabeth Graves showed up in the same boat with butter, eggs and soap. When the river froze, she kept up her errands by walking across the ice. They were cheerful, happy people, and it isn’t entirely clear why they decided to make the journey west, especially since Franklin was in his late fifties.
Abandoned
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

The old man struggled to keep up. The sterile terrain and the long journey had weakened the draft animals until they could no longer bear the extra weight of passengers in the wagons, so everybody was walking, even children and the elderly. Hardcoop, a Belgian whose first name is lost to history, was struggling along as best he could, but the muscles and bones and joints that had carried him through sixty hard years were finally giving way.
The Mouth of Hell, the River of Life
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Down the dwindling waters of the Humboldt, they set their course by taking aim toward Lone Mountain, a desert butte that reminded some emigrants of pictures they had seen of ancient Mayan pyramids. A broad, open meadow provided good fodder for the stock—the coarse grass ‘‘as thick as hair on a Dogs back’’—and then they were at the Sink, the strange and somber spot where the river died. In wet years it formed a broad, shallow lake; in a drought it simply vanished into the desert. Most years it was something in between, a boggy marsh that one slightly poetic Gold Rusher described as ‘‘a veritable sea of slime, a slough of despond, an ocean of ooze, a bottomless bed of alkaline poison,’’ all of which created ‘‘the appearance of utter desolation.’’ Given the conditions of 1846, the Donner Party almost surely found little or no water in what was sometimes called, too optimistically, Humboldt Lake.
This Prison
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

James Reed reached Sutter’s Fort just as his family and the others were approaching the Sierra. The first storm of autumn greeted Reed’s arrival, sending a torrent of rain down upon John Sutter’s keep. At the fort, Reed found William McCutchan, the tall, bushy-haired man who had left his wife and daughter with the main party six weeks earlier to ride ahead for supplies with Charles Stanton. McCutchan had been too sick to go along when Stanton returned, but now, his health restored, he was ready to go back for his family. He talked with Reed, and the two men—both fathers with children in the mountains—decided to set out on a desperate mission of rescue. Sutter offered a discouraging assessment.
The First Death
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Patrick Breen took out a few sheets of paper that had somehow survived the cross-continental journey and folded them so as to fashion a small booklet. Inevitably, human beings record the circumstances of their existence—we paint our stories in caves or write them in books or record them on film—and Breen had decided to make himself the chronicler of the Donner Party’s entrapment.
Our Present Calamity
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Patrick Breen began the new year with a plea for divine relief: ‘‘We pray the God of mercy to deliver us from our present Calamity if it be his Holy will,’’ he wrote in his diary on New Year’s Day. But the failure of the Reed family escape attempt soon dimmed whatever flickering optimism the holidays had generated, and on Friday, January 8, the day after the bold little group returned to the lake camps, Breen summed up the company’s situation with candid pessimism: ‘‘prospects Dull.’’ A new blizzard started cascading snow upon them, and by the fifth day of steady accumulation the threatening walls of white had climbed higher than the cabins.
None for Tears
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Nicholas Clark, the sturdy rescuer detailed by James Reed to stay with the Donner families, made sure he was out of earshot of the tents. He was outside with Jean Baptiste Trudeau, the teenager who had also been taking care of the Donners. Clark confided that he planned to leave, perhaps at the arrival of the next rescue party, perhaps even sooner. Nobody could blame him. George Donner was already half dead, and surely incapable of ever leaving the mountains. The three little Donner girls had been sent off with Stone and Cady, and Clark, who was at Alder Creek, had no way of knowing that the tots had been abandoned at the Truckee Lake cabins. The girls’ mother, Tamzene, was healthy enough to go whenever she wanted. The only other people at Alder Creek were Betsy Donner and two of her children, Samuel and Lewis, but they too were all but dead. For Clark to stay any longer would be to risk his own life just so he could chop firewood for people who were going to die anyway. He admitted he was afraid he might starve to death, a reasonable fear given the struggles faced by the other rescuers in getting back down to civilization.
A Day of Renown
Authors: Rarick Ethan
Published: November 2023

Sometime in early April 1847, shortly after most of the survivors had been brought down from the mountains, an editor in the San Francisco offices of the California Star peered through a green eyeshade and a wafting helix of cigar smoke and approved a story for that week’s paper. Typesetters bent over their trays, and ink-stained fingers soon began laying down the metal letters that would spell out the horrors of the Donner Party.
The Sacred World of Black Slaves
Authors: Levine Lawrence W
Published: November 2023

The Africans brought to the English colonies as slaves in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not carry with them a network of beliefs, customs, institutions, and practices constituting what might be called with accuracy a unified “African” culture. No such monolithic cultural entity existed. The peoples of Africa created a myriad of languages, religions, customs, social, political, and economic institutions which differentiated them and gave them separate identities. These marked differences have been cited frequently to illustrate the insuperable obstacles slaves in the British colonies of North America faced in keeping a semblance of their traditional cultures alive. With few exceptions-the most notable being W. E. B. Du Bois and Melville Herskovits-most scholars until very recently have assumed that because United States slavery eroded so much of the linguistic and institutional side of African life it necessarily wiped out almost all of the fundamental aspects of traditional African cultures. “The Negro,” Robert Park wrote in 1919, in a statement that typifies much of twentieth-century scholarship on this question, “when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. Coming from all parts of Africa and having no common language and common tradition, the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.” This inability to transmit and perpetuate African culture on American soil, Park maintained, made the Negro unique among the peoples of the United States. “Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people.”
Black Laughter
Authors: Levine Lawrence W
Published: November 2023

In the early 1890s James Weldon Johnson spent three months teaching in the backwoods of Georgia-an assignment that brought him closer to the rural black folk than he had been before. Years later he summed up his experience in the form of a conundrum: “The situation in which they were might have seemed hopeless, but they themselves were not without hope. The patent proof of this was their ability to sing and to laugh. I know something about the philosophy of song; I wish I knew as much about the philosophy of laughter. Their deep genuine laughter often puzzled and irritated me. Why did they laugh so? How could they laugh so? Was this rolling, pealing laughter merely echoes from a mental vacuity or did it spring from an innate power to rise above the ironies of life? Or were they, in the language of a line from one of the blues, ‘Laughing to keep from crying’? Were they laughing because they were only thoughtless? Were they laughing at themselves? Were they laughing at the white man? I found no complete answer to these questions.” In Negro Dancers the black poet Claude McKay expressed the same perplexity.
A Pantheon of Heroes
Authors: Levine Lawrence W
Published: November 2023

The legends and stories of antebellum blacks lived on well past their generation. They were to be found throughout the twentieth-century South and North-wherever Negroes were. Black storytellers still told and black audiences still relished supernatural tales, moral and didactic tales, human and animal trickster tales, tales centering on both real and apocryphal personal experiences-indeed, the entire range of tales that slaves had told and retold. The art of story telling retained its importance and continued for many to be a prime means of entertainment.
Introduction: The Nationalist Garden and the Holy Book
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the early nineteenth century in America, nature couldn’t do without God, and God apparently couldn’t do without nature. By the time Emerson wrote Nature in 1836, the terms “God” and “nature” were often the same thing, and could be used interchangeably. The transcendentalists accepted God’s immanence. More orthodox religions, which had always insisted on a separation of God and nature, also capitulated to their union. A “Christianized naturalism,” to use Perry Miller’s phrase, transcended theological boundaries, so that one could find “sermons in stones, and good in every thing.” “Nature,” wrote Miller, “somehow, by a legerdemain that even so highly literate Christians as the editors of The New York Review could not quite admit to themselves, had effectually taken the place of the Bible. . . .”
Grand Opera and the Still Small Voice
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the mid-nineteenth century the American preoccupation with nature manifested itself in several distinct types of landscape painting. Two of these may now be seen as polarities, though it can also be claimed they shared similar goals. The large-scale, popular landscapes by such artists as Church, Bierstadt, and Moran seemed to satisfy the myth of a bigger, newer America. But a more modest kind of expression, practiced by some of the same artists, and by others who dealt more exclusively with this idiom, may have indicated some of the nineteenth century’s profoundest feelings about nature. The recognition of this polarity now seems a central issue in understanding nineteenth-century American painting.

Both modes continued the late-eighteenth-century notion of America as the “Virgin Land,” a world unsullied by civilization. In expressing this idea, the larger, more operatic paintings tended to impose older European conventions. The smaller paintings seem to have formulated their own conventions by a more original transformation of European models—tempered perhaps by paradigms of order established by the industrialism rapidly eradicating the primordial wilderness.
The Geological Timetable: Rocks
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

The Trinity of God, Man, and Nature was central to the nineteenth-century universe. Nature itself was illuminated by another trinity: art, science, and religion (fig. 4.1). Nature’s truths, as revealed by art, could be further validated by the disclosures of science, which revealed God’s purposes and aided the reading of His natural text. At mid-century, landscape attitudes were firmly based on this unity of faith, art, and science—a precarious unity, as we shall see. Common to all three was an idea that obsessed the period: Creation.

Behind much landscape art in America was a desire to approximate the moment of Creation itself. This was so whether the artist respectfully duplicated nature in the work of art (Durand), or whether his aim was to imitate the creative powers of God (Cole). Cole’s reference to “those scenes of solitude from which the hand of nature has never been lifted”—his concern for these “undefiled works” of God—partly reflected the ideas of Rousseau and the late-eighteenth-century sublime. But the urge to touch origins became a quest for primal truths that would redeem the present.
The Primal Vision: Expeditions
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

The landscape artist’s prominent role in the exploration of the American continent was as diverse as that great adventure itself. In style, it ran the gamut from the simple topographical description of the earlier western expeditions to the baroque glorification of the great surveys of the seventies. The locale ranged from desert heat through the climatic extremes of the South American tropics to the icy expanses of the Arctic. The artist was explorer, scientist, educator, frontiersman, and minister. He ran arduous risks and suffered extreme hardships which certified his “heroic” status. This heroism became a kind of tour de force in the vicinity of art.

In Europe, the tour de force generally received its scale from the artist’s Ambition, set resplendently within a major tradition. In America, it consisted in simply “getting there.” The artist became the hero of his own journey—which replaced the heroic themes of mythology—by vanquishing physical obstacles en route to a destination. For the ambition of the artistic enterprise was substituted the ambition of the artist’s Quest—itself a major nineteenth-century theme. In this displacement of the heroic from the work of art to the persona of the artist lay, perhaps, part of the attraction of unexplored territory for the American artist at mid-century.
Gesamtkunstwerk
Authors: Millington Barry
Published: November 2023

The German term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, meaning ‘total work of art’, was used by Wagner for his notion, formulated in his theoretical essays of 1849–51, of an art form that combined various media within the framework of a drama. Harking back to ancient Greek drama, he suggested that there the basic elements of dance, music, and poetry had been ideally combined. Their division into separate genres had diminished their expressive force; only in the total work of art could they regain their original dignity. Similarly, the arts of architecture, sculpture, and painting would recover their classical and authentic stature only as constituents of the ‘artwork of the future ’.
Asher B. Durand: Hudson River School Solutions
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

In the hands of Thomas Cole’s successors, the development of an official Hudson River style seems to have been the natural result of the general public pressure for fulfillment of the hybrid aesthetic of the real-ideal. Some critics, such as Jarves, would have preferred the idealism of Cole: . . . in all his work we find the artist actuated rather by a lofty conception of the value of art as a teacher than by an ambition to excel in mere imitation. With him American landscape art began its career with high motives. Progress in this direction requires no ordinary degree of thought and imagination. It is, perhaps, on this account that he is not popularly estimated at his right value, and has left no followers to carry forward the beautiful significance and lofty suggestion with which he aimed to endow landscape art.
Fitz H. Lane: A Paradigm Of Luminism
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

When Emerson wrote this famous statement in Nature in 1836, Fitz H. Lane (1804–65), a native of Gloucester, was in Boston serving as an apprentice to the lithographer William S. Pendleton. The following year, he worked with the Boston publishers Keith and Moore, and in 1845 formed his own business with John W. A. Scott. He returned to Gloucester about 1848. Shortly after, he built a stone house with a southeast studio and a view of the harbor, and he lived there until his death, apart from short trips to Maine, New York, Baltimore, and probably Puerto Rico.
Martin Johnson Heade: Haystacks And Light
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

There is little evidence that Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904) knew Fitz H. Lane or even that he was acquainted with his work. Yet his painting The Stranded Boat (1863; fig. 7.1) is so similar in mood, feeling, and style to Lane’s Brace’s Rock of about the same time (see fig. 6.3) that it further substantiates the idea of luminism as an indigenous mode of seeing that characterized much pre–Civil War art without, however, taking on the communal aspects of an acknowledged school or movement.
William Sidney Mount Monumental Genre
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

As Tuckerman’s comment indicates, William Sidney Mount (1807–68) was appreciated in his own time as a local genre artist of considerable merit, who satisfied further the need for “truly American” scenes that characterized the concurrent taste in landscape painting.
Albert Pinkham Ryder: Even With A Thought
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

Thomas Cole had complained that the American public wanted “things, not thoughts.” Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) can be said to have made thought into a thing, into a substance built up of innumerable layers of paint. In his awareness of the expressive potential of paint, Ryder recalls the romanticism of Allston earlier in the century. Both artists have links to the coloristic tradition of European art, from the Venetians through Rubens, into Delacroix’s romanticism, Impressionism, and ultimately into Expressionism.
The Painterly Mode in America
Authors: Novak Barbara
Published: November 2023

If the dominant indigenous mode of expression in America was linear and conceptual, it would be an oversimplification to deny the existence of an ancillary painterly mode that was largely the result of European contact, training, and influence. To follow the many variations on this painterly theme requires another, separate volume, but perhaps a few ideas can be advanced here.
On Orchestrators and Orchestration
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Theatre orchestration is the art of—well, is it a creative art? Or is it the work of skilled craftspeople? This question shall be addressed again and again over the course of this book. As shall the question: what precisely does the orchestrator do? And even trickier, I suppose, is: what does the orchestrator do that the composer doesn’t?
Twelve Major Orchestrators
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

Robert Russell Bennett—the so-called president of the Broadway orchestrators—resounds through the history of the American musical, seeming to go back almost to the Mayflower. Bennett did, in fact, go back to the Mayflower; his mother was a direct descendant of William Bradford, who came over on the first boat and later served as governor of the colony of Massachusetts. Paternally, Bennett came from the brass section; his father and three uncles were professional musicians, with papa Bennett on the trumpet. Bennett tells us in his autobiography that upon his birth on June 15, 1894, his mother named him after the writer James Russell Lowell. His father, just as definitely, insisted that he was named in honor of the comedian Sol Smith Russell. In light of the general confusion about his name—he was credited for much of his early career as Russell Bennett—Bennett points out that “Robert” was a family name but “Russell” was the name he was always called.
Putting It Together
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

The accompaniment, melody, and decoration join together, sometimes inseparably, to create the overall effect; in special cases, some of the layers are missing altogether (by design) from an orchestration. Let us now attempt to illuminate the discussion by examining twelve specific orchestrations, which have been selected not only for general interest but on the assumption that readers most probably have the relevant original cast albums on their CD shelf. Or should, anyway.
Sweeney in the Pit with Steve
Authors: Steven Suskin
Published: November 2023

We have discussed orchestration at length, and virtually all readers of these pages have experienced the sound of theatre music from a seat in the auditorium. But what is it like to watch—or, rather, hear—the orchestrations, in performance, from the pit?
Overlooked and Underappreciated: The Human Potential for Peace
Authors: Fry Douglas P
Published: November 2023

Although war and other types of violence may be very noticeable, a close examination of cross-cultural data reveals that people usually deal with conflict without violence. Humans have a solid capacity for getting along with each other peacefully, preventing physical aggression, limiting the scope and spread of violence, and restoring peace following aggression.1 In this chapter we will consider a couple of ethnographic cases that illustrate this human potential for peace-the nonwarring, nonfeuding Siriano and Paliyan.
Void if Detached ... from Reality: Australian “Warriors,” Yanomamo Unokais, and Lethal Raiding Psychology
Authors: Fry Douglas P
Published: November 2023

In the previous chapter, I mentioned that the Murngin of Arnhem Land in northern Australia engaged in a ceremonial peacemaking fight called the makarata. Warner explains, “It is a kind of general duel and a partial ordeal which allows the aggrieved parties to vent their feelings by throwing spears at their enemies or by seeing the latter’s blood run in expiation.” Whereas the ceremony did not always succeed in restoring the peace, over the twenty-year period of Warner's study, no one was ever killed during a makarata. During the expiation ceremony, the elders continuously reminded those throwing spears "to be careful not to kill or hurt anyone." Clearly the makarata was not warfare,-it was an example of conflict resolution, Australian Aborigine style.1 Exquisite rock art showing animals, humans, and mythological beings is spread across Arnhem Land.
Darwin Got It Right: Sex Differences in Aggression
Authors: Fry Douglas P
Published: November 2023

In this chapter and the next, we will consider an evolutionary analysis of the patterns of interpersonal aggression in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. I will suggest that the forces of natural selection and sexual selection have shaped such behaviors in humans as they have in a great number of other species. Evolutionary theory, models of aggression based on game theory, studies of animal aggression, and data on nomadic band societies converge toward a similar assessment: During human evolution, restraint and limited interpersonal aggression have been favored by selective forces over more extreme aggression. This assessment pertains to interpersonal aggression. If we shift the focus to warfare, neither the observable facts nor the application of evolutionary principles supports the notion that war is an evolutionary adaptation. In short, widely publicized assertions by some evolutionary psychologists that war has evolved through natural selection cannot be substantiated by the evidence from nomadic forager studies.
A Macroscopic Anthropological View
Authors: Fry Douglas P
Published: November 2023

Anthropology offers a broad perspective on humanity that spans evolutionary time and crosses cultural space. In this sense, anthropology is macroscopic-it helps us to see the big picture. A macroscopic view, for instance, leads to insights about how cultural belief systems affect our thinking. We have examined how individuals tend to accept the belief system of their culture without much question. Widespread beliefs that war is natural and acceptable hinder the search for alternatives-and thus the inevitability of war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Enhancing Peace
Authors: Fry Douglas P
Published: November 2023

Anthropology provides many insights on war and peace, but by far the most important, for it pertains directly to the future of the species, is that war, like slavery before it, can be abolished. With wars continuing to erupt in different quarters of the planet, this idea might seem implausible. The elimination of war, however, is starkly realistic in two senses of the word. First, an anthropological perspective suggests that the human species, realistically, has the capacity to accomplish this goal. Second, the serious challenges facing humanity, including the spread of weapons of mass destruction, suggest that realistically we must abolish war before it abolishes us. Replacing war with alternative ways to insure security and resolve conflicts is the only rational way to proceed into the twenty-first century and beyond.
“A Vote of Thanks”
Authors: Symonds Craig L
Published: November 2023

By Midsummer Of 1864, the U.S. Navy had more than six hundred warships in commission, and more on the way. A handful of older sailing vessels maintained a minimal American presence overseas in those parts of the world where Union merchant ships still carried on a global trade. They were augmented by several newer and faster steam frigates that hunted the elusive rebel commerce raiders, such as the Alabama and Florida, which threatened that trade.
Forms: Phrases and Sections
Authors: Everett Walter
Published: November 2023

What provides the shape of musical matter? What are the fundamental ways of establishing repetition and contrast? What gives us the sense that some musical ideas lead logically to others? What creates a sense of balance and what puts it in peril? These are some of the questions that lead us to consider music’s formal structure—how phrases are constructed, how they are grouped together to form sections, and how sections relate to each other to form complete songs. Our earlier coverage of the fundamentals of rhythm and harmony, along with our detailed understanding of texture and color, will be quite useful as we approach these issues.
Engineering the Master
Authors: Everett Walter
Published: November 2023

Once the artists, producer, and any session musicians have arranged their song as a composition to be performed, a studio’s recording engineers, tape operators and disc cutters play a large role in creating the sound as heard on record. Their chief responsibility, of course, is to record what the artists play so it will sound its best when reproduced, but because every step in the recording process can affect the resulting sound, the final product may range from a relatively neutral reproduction of a song as performed in an ideal environment to a highly colored and even profoundly changed reading of what had been done in the studio. Aside from live concert performances, which make up a small percentage of our listening, virtually all music recorded for radio programming and home listening in the 1950s and ‘60s was produced in acoustically designed sound studios, with sound waves converted by microphones to analog electrical signals that would be routed through processors and controllers of various types (often laid out on a mixing board) and recorded on a multitrack magnetic working tape, to be manipulated still further in the creation of a monophonic or stereo master that would then be subject to dynamic alteration in the cutting of the prototype for the making of the metal parts that would stamp the record’s groove into thousands of vinyl consumer copies. Traditional music recordings, in the way of classical music, Broadway shows, jazz, and folk songs, tended to be transparent, relying on the studio’s ideal neutrality as a way of preserving the original sound. After all, a violinist might have spent tens of thousands (today, millions) of dollars for an exquisitely crafted instrument because of its sonic properties, and moreover would have worked for decades developing a technique that would permit the control of every nuance of the resulting sound, and would then depend upon an engineer to reproduce as close a likeness to the original as the medium would permit. Rock musicians, by contrast, began to find an aesthetic potential in the manipulation of sound for its own sake, discovering that the studio would provide an ideal blank canvas upon which to work, and so the engineers who could develop and control circuits that would shape every imaginable facet of a sound became an artist’s collaborator, often contributing much more than a final scrub and polish. Thus this chapter is devoted to engineering, which would not very likely find a place in a book structured like this on classical music but is crucial in our domain.
Creating an Interpretation
Authors: Everett Walter
Published: November 2023

Once a listener has a working knowledge of the basic properties of the musical languages within rock, one can begin to tie together relationships, and form a critical response a bit deeper than “it’s a good song.” When the listener can hear how rhythms, harmonies, melodic and contrapuntal ideas, tone colors, and formal schemes work with the ideas in the lyrics, he or she can begin to understand the song as a composition in a much more satisfying way than ever thought possible before, building a personal interpretation that makes that song more and more one’s own. Part of the process involves listening to the lyrics themselves at a level beneath the surface, thinking about the characters who populate the song, their relationships, the situations and imagery by which character traits are amplified, remaining sensitive to possible references to other texts, to the ways in which language is poetically manipulated to suggest meanings beyond the words themselves, to the ordering of presentation, to the attitude of the narrator, and to possible thematic meanings of social or cultural interest. All of these poetic components can be compared to their songs’ musical settings to see whether all is mutually supportive, or whether a new level of commentary is revealed by examining apparent contradictions.