All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century Review

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(More customer reviews)This book receives kudos for the broad range of genres covered, and the open mind that indicates. It also deserves kudos for its actually critical attitude. However, that critical attitude is the main drawback of the book. Nearly every artist presented is set up only to be knocked down. Ernst Krenek goes first and gets the worst treatment, and everyone till at least Ornette Coleman is dismissed by the end of their respective chapters. The goal is to criticize the American music scene through examining individual partcipants, but this seems both inaccurate and unfair and is depressing through its unending negativity.

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John Rockwell, director of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, wrote about music of all kinds for The New York Times for twenty years. Here he delineates the heritage, actuality, and potential of American music, demonstrating not only the possibility but the necessity of dealing with artists as seemingly unrelated as Elliott Carter and David Byrne, Milton Babbitt and Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Neil Young, Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. In twenty chapters that each bring to life the work of a specific composer, Rockwell tells the whole story of American musical composition in our time.