Douglas Bomberger's compact study of the year 1917 didn't quite make it into print before the centennial of the armistice (it was released on December 18, 2018), and this review follows more than a year later, but in no sense is the volume passé. Unlike many of the music-in-WWI titles that have been issued over the past three years, its subject is neither the war itself nor the music issued in response to it.Footnote ¹ Rather, Bomberger's topic is, as his subtitle indicates, the cultural transformations that occurred before, during, and immediately after the United States entered the formerly European conflict. These transformations were facilitated in some respects by the political and economic changes that accompanied US mobilization, but many of their antecedents and proximate causes were extramilitary. At the close of his epilogue, Bomberger offers a grand assessment of “the sweeping changes that occurred in 1917”: they characterize “a year like no other in American musical history” (214). Though certainly accurate, this remark invites comparisons with 1862, 1956, or 1968, but Bomberger's clear and thoroughly engaging account nonetheless demonstrates well the importance of the major developments that occurred in this twelve-month period.

Bomberger structures his book “like a novel” (xi), with eight protagonists’ lives unfolding month-by-month over eleven chapters (July and August are combined, and the whole is preceded and followed by chapters on New Year's Eve, 1916; on New Year's Day, 1918; and an extensive “Afterword”). His protagonists come in pairs: two German-American conductors, Karl Muck and Walter Damrosch; two jazz musicians, Freddie Keppard and Nick LaRocca; two German-American performers, Ernestine Schumann-Heink and Fritz Kreisler; and two American performers, Olga Samaroff and James Reese Europe. In a conventional novel, the protagonists’ lives would wind inexorably towards a joint denouement—but Bomberger is, after all, constrained by historical fact, and so the “plot” is more diffuse, made up of separate strands that often interconnect only obliquely.

More of the book is devoted to one principal narrative—and four protagonists—than to the others: the evolution of American attitudes towards German musicians and German music, evidenced especially in the persecution of Muck and the forced retirement of Kreisler, on the one hand, and the strategic positions adopted by Damrosch and Schumann-Heink, on the other. This narrative accelerates through the volume, and it climaxes, in a sense, in the sequel: Muck was ultimately arrested near the end of March 1918. A second narrative is also pervasive: the introduction of jazz as a performed and recorded phenomenon, presented in the contrasting careers of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (personified by LaRocca) and the Original Creole Ragtime Band (personified by Keppard). That narrative begins explosively in March 1917 and gradually decays over the rest of the year into haggles over copyright and business deals, also ending (in part) in March 1918, when the Creole Band dissolved. In a sense, then, a more plausible “year” would have spanned March 1917 through March 1918—less neat, perhaps, but possibly more satisfying for the reader.

Underlying both narratives is what may be the most persistent controversy in US music: the nature of authenticity. Whether a truly “American” art music could be built upon European—specifically, upon German—antecedents had been debated for most of a century and, arguably, remains controversial even today; the xenophobia that accompanied the war only sharpened (or perhaps caricatured) the argument. And whether an “authentic” musical experience requires live performance—that is, whether recordings are an art or a commodity, and what interconnections between market and aesthetic value follow from mechanical reproduction—grows ever more subject to dispute. Bomberger is exceptionally skillful in drawing out the pervasiveness and interconnectedness of these controversies, for instance in linking the revolutionary impact of the first jazz recordings to the production and marketing of the first records made by US symphony orchestras six months later.

Two protagonists—Samaroff and Europe—are less probingly treated, in part because both are seen in large part through their associates. Samaroff's story is inevitably entangled with, and ultimately eclipsed by, that of her husband, Leopold Stokowski; and Europe's narrative depends in large part on the recollections of his musical partner, Noble Sissle. Both individuals are the subjects of substantial biographies that contextualize their wartime activities more satisfactorily, and their roles in Bomberger's story are somewhat sketchy. Europe, of course, serves to embody the entire African American experience during the war; but this, too, is better treated elsewhere. It's just possible that Bomberger's book might have been more tightly focused had he limited himself to six individuals.

Bomberger wisely does not attempt an overview of all music; indeed, his protagonists include no composers and no figures from publishing, manufacturing, or recording industries. To a slight extent, then, he inevitably privileges the conventional assumption that music is made by talented individuals, singly or in ensemble. With that comes a tendency to allow concert music, especially as reported by erudite critics, to dominate the discourse; jazz, too, is given a kind of art music status, with critical reception a measure of its impact. A social or economic analysis of 1917 might, in contrast, contend that war, like most of US life, is best viewed as a balance sheet of gains and losses, and that marketing, more than artistry, provides the essential motivating power for the success of what is, after all, a business venture. But that would be a different volume altogether; and Bomberger, to his credit, does draw out some of the economic forces at work in, for instance, the economics of the Boston Symphony.

This is not a volume that reveals new sources or freshly analyzes old ones; for the most part, Bomberger seems to have relied on newspaper searches, memoirs, and existing scholarship in constructing his account. The exceptions are largely archives associated with concert music—the Boston Symphony, George Chadwick, Library of Congress collections, and so forth—though information from Tulane's Hogan Jazz Archive and occasional forays into the National Archives demonstrate that Bomberger has done his homework. Footnotes are adequate but not overly imposing; the bibliography is thorough but largely unsurprising. But extensive primary research is not the point; every one of Bomberger's protagonists has been written about extensively.Footnote ² The value of this volume lies in the dialogue created between figures and events who are normally kept apart; in fact, Bomberger's “novel” seems already to have been adapted for film—replete with cuts, flashbacks, reverse shots, and voice-overs. The camera (and Bomberger's witty, light-handed prose) takes us from Boston to San Diego, from New York's Carnegie Hall to Indiana's three-a-day vaudeville halls; and the juxtapositions, the recurrences, the contrasts tell us more than any single scene or person. The result adds much to our apprehension of the changing currents in US society, many of which are still stirring the waters today. Making Music American should and will be read with pleasure and gain for many years to come.