This collection of essays, published four years ago, is a Festschrift for John Graziano, who retired in 2007 as music professor at the City College of New York, but who continues to be professionally hyperactive as president of the Society for American Music (2007–2009); series editor of Recent Researches in American Music (1977–); and director of the Music in Gotham project (2002–); which this year has made its exhaustive documentation of the mid-nineteenth-century musical life of New York City available online (http://www.musicingotham.org/).

Music American Made is a large collection of current scholarship in U.S. music—733 pages comprising essays by twenty-nine authors. Most of the articles are new (i.e., not reworked from material published elsewhere), and many are of high quality. The book has been painstakingly edited by John Koegel: the tone of the prose is uniform across the many contributions; the illustrations, musical examples, and tables are well produced and well integrated into the essays that they illustrate.

Although Music American Made covers a wide range of subjects and the authors span at least three generations of scholars, the book projects a unified point of view. Most of the essays share two or more of the following features:

1. a) They begin with documents—a score or a group of scores, reviews of performances, a publisher's catalog, an archive of recordings—and work outward from these documents toward general propositions.

2. b) They focus on music in its social contexts rather than on music as individual works of art. Perhaps as a result, there is little or nothing in the collection that could be called “music analysis.”

3. c) They tend to avoid value judgments, both general and particular, that one sort of music is more interesting or more worthwhile than another, that one work is better than another.

4. d) The authors eschew hermeneutics. They make few statements about what a piece or a musical style “signifies” or what it “means.”

This is a style of musicology that Joseph Kerman in his 1985 survey of the field might have called “positivist,” a term that for him had negative rather than positive connotations.Footnote ¹ Kerman might have considered the focus on social contexts to be a welcome departure from positivism, but he would likely not have been pleased by the absence of analysis and the avoidance of judgments that characterize most of the contributions to Music American Made because, for Kerman, criticism, broadly construed, was an essential obligation of musicology.Footnote ²

“Positivist” does not have to be pejorative. Music American Made shows that this style of evidence-based, minimally interpretive musicology remains strong and productive in U.S. music studies. There are competing tendencies, particularly in jazz and rock studies, but the positivist style retains among Americanists a credibility that it seems to have lost in the scholarship on European music. That can be explained in part by the fact that a U.S. music canon is still in the early stages of creation and consolidation. Denkmäler of American music and Gesamtausgaben for U.S. composers did not begin to appear until the 1970s.Footnote ³ A critical language for jazz began to form in the 1970s; it coalesced for film music and hip hop in the 1990s. The recently minted classics of U.S. music do not press down on musicologists with nearly as much weight as the canon of European music. Relatively little critical and scholarly accretion has attached itself as yet to U.S. classics, and as a consequence, these works (whatever they may be) still seem relatively transparent. There is little received opinion to refute, no need to look for hidden meanings in sacred texts. The study of U.S. music seems to retain an optimism about facts that has become almost quaint in other branches of musicology. Music American Made, in its overwhelmingly positivist point of view, is an appropriate tribute to John Graziano, who as editor of RRAM, as director of Music in Gotham, and in his own writings, has been deeply engaged in the positivist enterprise over the length and breadth of his career.

A few of the essays in Music American Made stand out as especially important, informative, and readable. Interestingly, all are by scholars of Graziano's generation. Wayne Shirley's article on “The Jenkins Orphanage Band and Porgy and Bess” demonstrates that in the first production of George Gershwin's opera, a stage band appeared in Act II scene 1, where it accompanied the chorus in “Oh, I can't sit down.” The music that this band played is preserved in a Gershwin autograph at the Library of Congress, but it was not included in the rental scores and parts, and an onstage band is rarely heard in productions of Porgy and Bess. Raoul Camus's contribution on “Music at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915” is a comprehensive presentation of the ensembles that performed there (including the Boston Symphony, the Sousa Band, the Creatore Band, the Hurtado Brothers Royal Marimba Band, and Henry Kailimai's Hawaiian Quintet), the composers and performers who appeared (Amy Beach, Camille Saint-Saëns, Victor Herbert, Karl Muck, and others), the repertory they played, and the physical settings in which music took place, beautifully illustrated with photographs from published and unpublished sources. “Performing Foster” by Deane Root is a survey, at once magisterial and loving, of the social contexts in which Stephen Foster's songs were performed during his lifetime—on the stage, in domestic settings, and in altered and parody versions in churches, taverns, mining camps, and fields, from Maine to California. Other essays deserve mention because they present new information about U.S. music and musical life: Jennifer C.H.J. Wilson on minstrelsy in Lynchburg, Virginia, before and after the Civil War; Orly Krasner on Reginald de Koven's ill-fated Washington Symphony Orchestra (1902–1905); Tom Riis on the recently discovered music to Cole and Johnson's A Trip to Coontown (1898); John Koegel on the world of Cuban émigré musicians in New York City in the 1890s. Music American Made will be consulted, mined, and cited for many years to come.

One last characteristic of the scholarly style in Music American Made is the absence of nationalism. Historians and critics of U.S. music often seem eager to validate works by U.S. composers and U.S. performers and to highlight what is “American” about this music. In the process, they tend to downplay or disparage music linked to and performers engaged in European traditions. By contrast, most of contributors to Music American Made seem comfortable with the obvious importance of European works and European performers to U.S. musical life in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several of the essays are about European repertory and performers in the United States. Ora Frishberg Saloman surveys the reception of Beethoven string quartets in New York, and Matthew Reichert writes about the introduction of Liszt's orchestral music in the United States. Conversely, Stephen Banfield discusses the introduction of American music in England. Michael Pisani draws parallels between European and U.S. modernism in the early twentieth century. Scholarly nationalism was understandable and perhaps appropriate as a way of creating a place for U.S. music (especially popular music) in the repertory and in critical discourse, but it obscured the importance of transatlantic musical culture from the eighteenth century to the present, and it undervalued U.S. musicians who participated in this culture. Music American Made suggests that this parochial nationalism will no longer be necessary in the twenty-first century.