Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear.

By Court Carney.

Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, November 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0700616756, $34.95. 219 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

While much ink has been spent on the role of jazz in America, its broad cultural and societal influences within cities other than New York, Chicago, and New Orleans has not received such extensive treatment. Court Carney’s new book, Cuttin’ Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear, has ventured beyond existing work in the field of jazz studies. Carney’s study synthesizes and reconciles the basic information about the origins and cultural implications of jazz in a clear and convenient manner. The book spans the 1890s to 1930s, combining both musical and historical analysis in order for the reader to gain a greater understanding of the larger cultural and social issues that contributed to the birth of the genre. The primary objective of the study is to “establish an emphasis on the shifts in American culture as well as the process of diffusion” (7), and it does so by discussing the broader cultural aspects of the dissemination and acceptance of jazz in the United States during the latter part of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth. He does so by diving the book into three parts and further dissecting it into six chapters. The essential details in each chapter are supplemented by focusing on a particular jazz musician within that geographic area during that time. Part 1: Creation, consists of Chapters 1 and 2; Part 2: Dispersion, consists of Chapters 3, 4, and 5; and Part 3: Acceptance, consists of Chapter 6 and the Conclusion. The book also contains an index of all the songs written during the time span that the book covers. Part 1 discusses the origins of jazz from ragtime and the blues and its earliest versions within New Orleans. Part 2 is dedicated to the way in which jazz was disseminated in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. Changes in society led to corresponding changes in taste, and these changes are an important key to establishing a greater understanding of the dissemination and acceptance of this new musical genre. Part 3 examines jazz as the new American music, concluding with the contributions of Benny Goodman.

The greatest strength of this study is that it is based on a much more thorough discussion of the cultural implications of jazz in various cities than has previously appeared in print. Carney’s writing style is clear, succinct, and accessible and avoids the use of jargon, making the book easy to read for both the expert musician and the layman without seeming simplified. My one main criticism of the book is that at times, Carney seems to do what he says in the introduction he does not plan to do: to “retell the totality of the early jazz narrative” (4). In some instances, especially in the early chapters, it seems as if he is attempting to reinvent the wheel and writing a jazz history textbook rather than composing a cultural history.

This book is a fascinating study of jazz in its earliest forms and how the music, contemporary culture, and society were intertwined. The information presented in Carney’s book asks new questions and reinforces the need for a more holistic approach to the study of early jazz than has so far been the case. Such a vast amount of information is provided in this book that it is impossible to do it justice in such a brief review. For any scholar undertaking research in jazz and early American music, this book is an invaluable source of information. Carney’s study brings a new perspective to musicological and cultural studies and deserves a central place on the map of jazz studies and studies of early American music.

Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France.

By Jann Pasler.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, July 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-520-25740-5, $60.00. 817 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

There is no better summary of Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen than the one she herself writes: “In Composing the Citizen, I investigate how French citizens thought music could contribute to the formulation and health of their democracy, and why they embraced musical progress as emblematic of national progress. I explore the musical education they envisaged, from thinking a child’s first intellectual efforts should involve singing to devoting a significant place to music in the Universal Exhibitions. I examine the shifting beliefs and conditions that led to and then mitigated the pervasiveness of republican ideology in French culture” (31). Pasler examines the roots, implications, and consequences of music as public utility in Third Republic France (1870-1940), “a time when politicians intent on creating a lasting democracy in France saw music as integral to the public good—a way to imagine the future voice diverse aspirations, and discover shared values,” examining social practices across cultures through the lens of music’s usefulness (xii).

The author’s main argument is that “music, musical instruments, performing situations, and images of these—often associated with race, ethnicity, class, gender, and culture—helped people become aware of their positions in the debates about identity and nation” (645). She argues throughout that music helped to form a commonality and establishment of a national identity within French society, through its “public utility,” since “generally speaking, in France, the useful in music is what links sound to society, music to the community” (83). The study is motivated by the author’s personal interest as a woman of French descent who spent a great deal of time working in the French archives, a biographical aspect which I feel is useful in order to understand the incorporation of the fruits of her copious research.

Pasler’s book is an in-depth explanation of utilité publique and the government’s role in it, identifying that “the idea that the social utility of goods and services should take priority over their personal utility, provides a key to understanding French notions of government up to the present” (70). The study includes plentiful discussion of French history, politics, law, and philosophy, to place the concept of utilité publique within proper context, while outlining music and the establishment of community, as well as the types of music important in the revolutionary tradition and the challenges presented to composers to write such music. There is a heavy emphasis on French conceptions of both moral and musical progress, as well as the author’s notion of composing the citizen. Music as resistance is also an important component of the book, including an appropriation of music’s utility for non-republican purposes. The role of Wagner’s music for this purpose is examined in detail, but the book also concentrates on the role of composers such as Delibes, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Satie- composers that we don’t typically equate with music and political activism. The role of opera, its prohibitions and characteristics, are discussed at length, as well as the use of older—or as she deems them, “ancient”—forms of music in modern compositions is also discussed at length. In total, the book serves as a gateway to the author’s next books, providing an introduction to their subjects and as a result examines on a broad basis “how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspective of race, class, and gender” (645) and focusing on what music has done and what the Third Republic has shown us. Pasler concludes the book by connecting her research of this period to its applications in modern France and our globally interconnected, finance-driven world.

Pasler’s study is divided into four parts consisting of twelve chapters plus an introduction and coda, and three appendices. Part I: Forming Public Spirit and Useful Citizens, Part II: Shaping Judgment and National Taste, Part III: Instituting Republican Culture, and Part IV: Shifting Notions of Utility: Between the Nation and the Self, together create a chronological study of the use of music in France during this seventy-year span. Quotes of varying size are interwoven throughout the work and in between the pictures and musical examples. Both the abundant illustrations and musical examples featured throughout the book are helpful to the reader, though it is not necessary for the reader to be able to read music for the author’s point to be clearly understood. Each of the appendices contain the important political and musical events in the Early Third Republic, as well as the music’s varying appearances in publications of the day.

The book is dense and sometimes seems quite convoluted in terms of information. The reader may feel bogged down, because it seems as if the author included every single primary source and piece of evidence, which has both its plusses and minuses. Pasler uses specific pieces of music to illustrate points and as case studies throughout the book and talks a lot throughout the book about public policy in France. The chapters are long, often encompassing many different topics, making them sometimes difficult to follow the author’s train of thought. The book includes little analysis of the implications of the conception of music among the presentation of an ample amount of facts. The writing is clear but definitely not concise.

While the book falls into the area of music, readers interested in history, public policy, and philosophy will find much to grab onto. There is no other book like it that has been published in the field of musicology, and Pasler’s study gives the reader a glimpse into the musical life in a single part of Europe that has largely been ignored for the time period that the book covers. As an interdisciplinary work, Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen is a model for contemporary scholarship.

Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940.

By John Koegel.

Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, June 2009. Cloth with CD: ISBN 9781580462150, $80.00. 620 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

Of all of the academic treatment in the area of cultural and immigration studies, one area that has largely been ignored is musical theater during the height of immigration to the United States. Although recently this has been remedied somewhat in the form of conferences and articles on related topics regarding various immigrant groups, there is still a large gap in this area of study. John Koegel’s book, Music in German Immigrant Theater: New York City, 1840-1940, chronicles the performances of German-language theater in New York City’s Klein Deutschland (Little Germany) at the height of German immigration, when New York City was a hub for the newly-immigrated gentry from Germany.

The book forms an inventory of the musical plays, farces, operas, and operettas performed in New York’s Kleine Deutschland, as well as the different theaters in which they were performed. It allows us to examine this output in the context of the larger history of the American musical theater. The scope of this study is broad, as much as it focuses on specific case studies. Koegel did a fantastic job with this study, considering the abundance of primary public source material and lack of private documents of the actors, musicians, composers, authors, and impresarios of the German American stage. Much of the discussion focuses on the background of the various musical plays, often with a synopsis, and paired with primary source reviews of the performances. The book abounds with statistical data, both performance-wise and monetary. A variety of photographs and reproduced programs and advertisements allow the reader to contextualize these performances into the time and environment in which they occurred.

Koegel’s study is divided into eleven chapters with thirteen appendices representing the core of the author’s thorough research. The book is further divided into three parts. Part I presents a chronological history of the German American theater from its inception in 1840 to 1918, examining the various performance spaces, impresarios, repertory, and audiences. Part II closely examines the careers of some of the principal performers on the German immigrant stage, as well as the portrayal of German Americans in literary, theatrical, and popular musical culture and how these portrayals affected the German American immigrant stage. Part III is almost solely dedicated to Adolf Philipp, his career and his contributions to German American musical theater. The book’s conclusion discusses the German American Musical Stage of the 1920s and 1930s, post-Adolf Philipp, and its subsequent decline. Koegel’s copious translations allow the non-German speaker to understand the titles and texts. A CD accompanies the book and is filled with much of the music described in the book.

The author’s main goal is to depict the German American theater in the United States as a method of acculturation for immigrants. More than 80 American cities and towns had German stages, and many of these were of a professional or semi-professional nature. While his study focuses on New York, he peripherally discusses equivalent examples from German American theater in other cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee, which is helpful for putting the performances in New York City into a larger cultural context. The book shows the versatility of each of the theater companies, each having the ability to stage operas, operettas, farces, and musical plays, all within the same season. Copious reconstruction of extant archival sources and documents allow the reader to see the bigger picture. Additionally, the book contains biographical profiles of the various theater owners relevant to the study, but the main biography that the book contains is that of Adolf Philipp.

Some of the songs are described using musical terminology, but for those who have had no musical training, this method is not detrimental to understanding the author’s point since it is these pieces that are found on the book’s accompanying CD. Koegel includes musical examples beginning in Chapter 8 (Part III), when he delves specifically into the works related to Adolf Philipp. These examples printed in piano and vocal transcription would be handy for the musicologist or music theorist intending on performing an in-depth analytical examination of the songs, but are not necessary for the non-music reader to understand the author’s point. They are also all included on the CD.

My main critique of the book is that it is almost exclusively about Adolf Philipp and his German American theatrical career, so much so that nearly half the book focuses on this subject. It is almost as if Parts I and II combined and Part III could have formed two separate books since there is virtually no overlap between the former two parts and the latter part. Additionally, the author spends most of his time on the historical and contextual elements of the plays rather than on the actual music; the music then almost seems a minimal component of the book and disproportionate to the discussion in the rest of the book, besides contrary to the title. The only music discussed is that of Philipp, and it is only found in Part III of the book. John Koegel’s book fills the gap in studies of music, theater, and immigration. This book will be of interest to readers interested in music and theater history and cultural studies. Scholars exploring the significance of turn-of-the-century immigration from Europe to the United States, its implications, and its resulting cultural creations will find much of interest in this study. Koegel’s study is as comprehensive a treatment as you’ll find on this little-studied subject and is a starting point for more involved and focused work on the subject. Hopefully it will form a gateway to similar studies of the contributions to musical theater of other immigrant groups.

Sounds of the Modern Nation: Music, Culture, and Ideas in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.

By Alejandro L. Madrid.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, November 2008. Cloth:

ISBN 978-1592136940, $54.50. 224 pages.

Review by Russell Cobb, University of Alberta

The work of twentieth-century Mexican painters looms large beyond the borders of Mexico. Indeed, many of the images we associate with Mexican identity were created by iconic artists such as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. When it comes to modernist Mexican music, however, there is a rich and varied tradition that gets little attention outside its country of origin. In Mexico, meanwhile, this music has been overdetermined by the rhetoric of Mexican nationalism, according to Alejandro L. Madrid. In this book, Madrid examines the intersection of twentieth-century Mexican classical music and politics, a fertile terrain left largely unexplored by scholars. Madrid's ability to draw on theorists from anthropology, literary studies, and history lends the book breadth and depth, despite a rather jargon-laced, wordy style that bogs down the reader.What makes this terrain interesting, Madrid argues, is that Mexico produced at least three extraordinarily complex composers whose fates depended on their relationship to the emergence of a post-Revolutionary state in the 1920s. The Mexican Revolution began with the overthrow of the Europeanizing dictator Porfirio Díaz in 1911, but took so many twists and turns during the following violent decade that even scholars of the field have trouble keeping the names, dates, and factions straight. Unfortunately, Madrid does not help clarify matters, and readers are left to piece together the Mexican Revolution through outside reading. A brief overview of the Revolution would certainly have helped since, as Madrid says, the development of Mexican high culture depended upon the connections artists had to the emergence of a nationalist state that created the paradox of an "institutional revolutionary party," which would go on to dominate Mexican political life for over 50 years.
Madrid focuses on three composers, all of whom produced most of their work after the armed phase of the Revolution ended and the nationalist state consolidated its hegemony. These three composers represent different approaches to politics, aesthetics, and Mexican identity. The first, Julián Carrillo, was, perhaps, the most pro-European of the bunch. Carrillo identified his work with what he called "the glorious German music tradition." This was a tradition that was at the fore of the atonal music revolution in the early 20th century. Carrillo, with his Sonido 13, brought the atonal revolution to Mexico, while avoiding a simple mimicry of European innovations. Using Nestor Garcia Canclini's idea of hybrid cultures, Madrid argues that Carrillo was more than an imitator of Europe but that, in a chaotic society struggling with modernity and dominated by a Hispanic-Indigenous nationalism, there was no space for Carrillo. Indeed, Madrid provides a consistent critique of Mexican nationalist rhetoric in the arts. The writer-politician-educator José Vasconcelos is at the heart of this critique. Vasconcelos believed strongly in the idea of the Mexican race as a "cosmic race" and that artistic expression should reflect Mexico's "authentic" indigenous cultures. For Madrid, this quest for authenticity is an essentializing move, one that has the power to include and exclude works of art along purely ideological lines.

The one Mexican composer non-specialists may recognize is Carlos Chávez, the second of Madrid's subjects. Chávez towers over other musicians, Madrid suggests, because he was closely connected to powerful people, including Vasconcelos. Chavez attempted to synthesize Mexican folkloric music with European art music, and achieved international recognition for his works, including Energía and Exágonos. Chavez's career, in many ways, parallels that of Diego Rivera. Early on, they circulated in cosmopolitan avant-garde circles, then moved on to experiment with indigenous themes. Madrid argues that both Rivera and Chávez were canonized in official Mexican cultural history as nationalists, but their work contains "multiple identities." It is a compelling argument, but it remains unclear who is responsible for the one-dimensional legacy of these artists.

Finally, there the figure of Manuel M. Ponce, known as the "paladin of musical nationalism." Ponce is best known for compositions written for the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. Ponce's connections to Europe (he also spent time studying the latest in musical modernism in France) "cross-fertilized" his interest in Mexican folklore, creating a distinct hybrid sound. Ponce believed that reorganizing and reprocessing Mexican folks songs would "dignify" and "elevate" them as art music. It is an interesting story, and one that fits within the larger context of Mexican nationalism, which, at this time, was creating an idealized Indian mythology to represent that Revolutionary state. In this chapter, Madrid makes a curious digression into a discussion of Hispanic modernismo, claiming that it shares with European modernism a "crisis of language." This is quite a stretch and one that ends up confusing, rather than contextualizing, Ponce's contributions to the Mexican cultural scene.

The most serious flaw of the book, however, is stylistic in nature. Rather than launching into a discussion of music history, Madrid constantly describes the nature of his research. It is an annoying trope that is often found in dissertations; the author tells his readers that he will perform such and such an analysis rather than simply doing it. Furthermore, the book is weighted down by unnecessary trendy jargon that will likely sound dated in ten years. The effect of so much description is such that the entire book reads like an introduction. This reviewer was reminded of the old writing workshop adage: show, don't tell. For a story as interesting and vital as Madrid's, this is especially important, since the polemics and controversies of twentieth-century Mexican art music are not well known outside of Mexico. A tighter narrative with accessible prose would have done much to rectify this problem.

Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound.


By Alan Govenar.

College Station: Texas A&M University Press, December 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1-58544-605-6, $40. 624 pages.

Review by Jonathan Hill, National University of Singapore

Anyone picking up Alan Govenar’s magisterial new book expecting a straightforward history of the blues in Texas is in for a surprise. Its modest title underplays the scope and importance of the book. This is no simple musical history, but a multifaceted retelling of the blues’ place in Texan life through interviews with the people who have made it what it is today. Some are famous – with obvious inclusions such as Albert Collins, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, and Stevie Ray Vaughan – but most are relatively obscure. Over a hundred individuals are featured in the book, mostly telling their own stories in their own words, unencumbered by editorial comments. As such, the book builds upon the style Govenar developed in his Meeting the Blues (Taylor, 1988), and African American Frontiers: Slave Narratives and Oral Histories (ABC-CLIO, 2000), but on a grander scale. His earlier blues-related interviews reappear here, alongside a wealth of new material, lavishly illustrated in color throughout. The result is an enormous volume, weighty in every sense, but never intimidating. The photographs, many of which are by Govenar himself, are nothing short of magnificent. They include a great deal of archive material which is often as fascinating as the interviews themselves.



The book’s introduction goes over the much-trodden ground of the early history of the blues in a fresh way, paying due and welcome attention to the preconceptions of early researchers which influenced the material they collected. But this is preliminary scene-setting, since the bulk of the book focuses on the 1960s and later. Unfortunately, Govenar says little about his methodology, which is a missed opportunity. What are the strengths and weaknesses of presenting the words of the interviewees alone, with little overt editing, commentary, or other authorial voice? On what basis were these subjects and not others included? Some discussion of such methodological questions would have been extremely valuable to help locate this book in relation to the wider anthropological literature.



Much of the book’s uniqueness comes from the fact that not all of the people featured in it are primarily musicians. The first interviewee in the book is Osceola Mays, the subject of Govenar’s earlier book for children Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter (Jump At The Sun, 2000) and a traditional songster and storyteller rather than a professional musician. Another subject, Mariellen Shepphard, seems not to be a musician at all: her interview consists solely of a description of a raucous T-Bone Walker concert. And Big Bo Thomas gives a fascinating account of his career as a club operator and record promoter in Dallas in the 1950s and 60s. Many interviewees testify to the toughness of a life devoted to music largely out of the limelight, but others spin their tales from quite different yarn – as in Lightnin’ Hopkins’s magnificent interview, mostly devoted to outrageous musings on love and women. Much of the interest in reading such things lies in guessing where veracity gives way to hyperbole or deliberate image creation.



The inclusion of such a variety of people helps to ground the music in its context more fully, and in more variety, than an exclusive focus on performers could. It reminds us that music is not merely something that musicians do: it is something that people listen to, or dance to, something which plays a central role in a community. It also reminds us that the blues means different things to different people. If, as Clifford Geertz famously argued, every participant at a Balinese cockfight interprets the event differently, so too does everyone at a juke joint dance, or a street singer’s performance, or a studio recording. This book, with its variety of voices and their sometimes quite contradictory stories, illustrates this powerfully.



Somewhat disconcertingly, the material is not always consistently presented. Most of the interviews begin on a new page with a new heading, but those in the “Zydeco” section are all run together in a single block, making it hard to tell where one voice stops and the next begins. Many interviews are preceded by introductions giving information about the interviewee, but others have none, presenting the interviewee’s words entirely unmediated. And for some artists there is no interview at all, the book instead changing to a more conventional third-person narrative to describe their role. The effect is somewhat puzzling, perhaps testament to an identity crisis at the heart of Texas Blues. What does the book want to be? Is it a collection of oral histories, presented merely to allow the subjects to tell their stories directly to the reader? In that case, it is hard to see why there are entries for musicians for whom there is no interview material. Alternatively, is it an exhaustive cultural history of Texan blues, told partly in the first person and partly in the third? In that case, the non-interview material does not go far enough. T-Bone Walker and Freddie King, for example, deserve more than just a page or two in such a history. The book would have been more clearly focused had the third-person narratives been restricted to the introductory material, with the bulk of the book devoted only to the interviews.

Nevertheless, the overall focus is clear enough: it is not on Texan blues as a style of music (it is questionable whether such a style even exists), but on the role that the blues has played, and continues to play, in Texan communities. This book conveys that role brilliantly, and with more conviction and integrity than any conventional history could. Through it, we learn not simply facts (and perhaps a few fictions) about what actually happened. We learn what it meant to people. Govenar conveys the importance of this movingly in the prologue, describing his search for information about Blind Lemon Jefferson, the first great Texan blues singer. When he finally tracks down an old woman who knew Jefferson, she smilingly comments that he has been dead for fifty years, before closing the door in Govenar’s face. And Jefferson drifts through the book like a literary ghost, the subject of anecdotes told by many interviewees, more myth than man. The message is subtle but powerful: whatever facts one might glean about Jefferson’s actual career are less important than the continued effect his story, and even his mere name, have upon people today. Sometimes, what people believe is more important than what actually happened. Some blues scholars, such as Marybeth Hamilton in In Search of the Blues (Cape, 2007) have begun to draw attention to this fact and its role in the creation of blues as myth. By devoting the bulk of Texas Blues to the voices of those involved in the blues at all levels, Govenar does the same thing, though in a very different way. It is this, as well as the sheer quantity and variety of material, that makes this such a valuable book, and one which will undoubtedly be required reading (and a mine of primary sources) for students of the blues for many years to come.

Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power

By Suzanne G. Cusick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, July 2009. Cloth with CD: ISBN 9780226132129, $60. 488 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

Francesca Caccini was one of the most prolific female composers and performers of the seventeenth century, and recently, musicologists and interdisciplinarians have generated an extensive body of literature on the role of women in early modern Europe, mainly in Italy. Suzanne G. Cusick’s study of the composer eloquently situates itself within that realm. This, Cusick’s first book, has been long awaited. A scholar known for her enlightening and engaging articles on subjects such as feminist perspectives on early music and the use of music as torture in terrorist containment camps, it is high time for a book by this talented scholar. Additionally, hers is the first extended and in-depth study of one of the most influential female Italian musicians of the Baroque. Cusick deliberately avoids the technical language that pervades most musicological scholarship while still conveying her ideas and analysis of Caccini, her role as a female in a predominantly male world, and her compositions. The author’s copious research brings to light a new side of Caccini that has been neglected far too long; she is portrayed not just as the daughter of famed composer Giulio Caccini, but as a composer, performer, and teacher in her own right, no longer studied in the shadow of her father. Cusick’s study illuminates the life of Francesca Caccini, placing her life within the context of family dynamics, societal norms, and economic implications.

The reader will immediately respect the clarity of Cusick’s prose, as well as her meticulous attention to detail. The book contains a CD to accompany and complement the study. There is plentiful incorporation of musical examples to demonstrate specific musico-textual instances in the music that are of the utmost value to those who can read music, but do not make understanding the book difficult for those who cannot. The book discusses and places into context the role of the professional musician, and Cusick frames her study with contemporaneous events in Florence during Caccini’s compositional activity. The book is organized into twelve chapters with three appendices including Francesca Caccini’s known performances and compositions. Cusick’s meticulousness has been extended into her careful transcriptions of Caccini’s extant letters, also found in an appendix.

Cusick’s desire to examine music “as a set of actions rather than as a set of works” (xxii) forms the basis of her study, and she succeeds brilliantly. The author confesses that the personal nature of this endeavor was spurred through observing and experiencing the effects of misogyny both in the classroom and in academia as a whole, but she confines this narrative only to the introduction, thus allowing the book to be focused on her research. Chapter 1 chronicles the birth and early life of Francesca, noting the special influence that her father and his music had on her and hers. Chapter 2 discusses Francesca under the employ of Christina de Lorraine, depicting Francesca as a commodity. Chapter 3 gives an in-depth look at the court of Christina de Lorraine and the environment in which Francesca worked. Chapter 4 discusses Francesca’s early service to the Medici Court as both composer and performer of court spectacle. Chapter 5 discusses Francesca’s home and the work ethic to which she subscribed. Chapters 6-8 introduce her first masterpiece of music, her first book of madrigals (Primo libro delle musiche, 1618), its contents, and the circumstances by which the pieces were composed. Cusick also analyzes the secular songs, some of which incorporate Marian tunes, in the first half of the book, in terms of their dialogic relationship to one another and the anxiety of voice that they express. She also outlines the second half of the first book of madrigals, but here instead of a collection of secular songs, we now have songs that while not sacred, are rooted in the sacred and sometimes liturgical tradition, such as psalms. Unlike those songs contained in the first half of the book, those in second half are not gendered. While Cusick proposes that the songs in the first book of madrigals are gendered, I question whether or not Caccini herself intended for such a reading of her music. Chapters 9-10 examine the circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of Francesca’s opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero, the only entertainment Francesca wrote to survive nearly whole. Cusick situates La liberazione di Ruggiero in relation to Maria Magdalena d’Austria’s regency and its relation to her political agenda. Chapter 11 discusses Francesca’s life post-Liberazione and the culmination of her public career after becoming widowed. Chapter 12 discusses life in Christina’s court after Francesca, as well as Christina’s interest in the Monastero di Santa Croce. Francesca’s life during the 1630s is also examined in this context, as well as her life after her patron’s death.

The major criticism of this text is the incorporation of sometimes seemingly trivial or supplementary information, for example the first part of Chapter 12. Additionally, Cusick’s book does not contain any particular argument, but rather is more of a contextual biography than a thought-provoking study. While Cusick’s explanation of the history of Christina and the Medici Court is both interesting and necessary, and she deals conscientiously with the dearth of archival materials available to her, there are some instances, mainly in Chapter 3, where I feel such copious detail seems at times both unnecessary and irrelevant and as a result detracts from the book’s purpose.

Suzanne Cusick’s groundbreaking study represents an important addition to recent musicological scholarship on the lives of female composers, particularly those of the seventeenth century; a field that only recently has been burgeoning. This book will be of interest to readers interested in music history, cultural studies, and the role of women in early modern Italy. By examining the historical and cultural elements, the author brings new, exciting, invigorating, and much-needed in-depth analysis, and provides a more accurate portrayal of the composer and her works than has been seen before.

Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York

By Joseph G. Schloss. New York: Oxford University Press, March 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0195334050, $74; paper: ISBN 978-0195334067, $19.95. 192 pages.

Review by Tara Jabbaar-Gyambrah, State University of New York, Buffalo

Joseph G. Schloss’s Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York brings new, invigorating, exciting, and much-needed in-depth analysis of hip-hop culture’s ethnic origins specific to b-boying. By examining the historical and cultural elements of b-boying and b-girling in New York City between 2003 and 2008, Schloss highlights the significance of the transmission of cultural ideas from one place to another by mapping the experiences of dancers in the field . While hip-hop has been labeled a “problem” by mainstream popular culture, Schloss posits that one of its cultural forms, b-boying, embodies a plethora of cultural traditions such as Afro-diasporic competitive dance, battle tactics, acrobatic power moves, and martial arts that live in the Afro-Caribbean, African American, and Latino communities today. He posits that “hip-hop’s strength lies precisely in the diversity of its concepts and practices” (7). In other words, Schloss suggests that hip-hop cannot be understood in terms of “good” versus “bad,” but each of its components should be viewed as representing an artistic flair that should be examined more specifically through ethnographic methods. One of the reasons he cites that b-boying has been often overlooked in scholarship is because it operates “within the framework of literary analysis and culture studies” (8). It is not theory alone that assists in the full understanding of b-boying and b-girling culture, but it is the voices of the dancers themselves that should be a part of scholarship. Moreover, Schloss suggests that if scholars immerse themselves within the communities in which b-boying has emerged and continually transforms over time, they will be more engaged and create research that represents the reality of the culture itself. In the end, literary and culture studies alone cannot holistically represent the voices of the people; however, when it is combined with ethnographic methodology, the voices of the people shine through and create a remarkable presence.

The book’s title, Foundation: B-Boys, B-Girls, and Hip-Hop Culture in New York, focuses on its core by illuminating the definition of foundation as “a term used by b-boys and b-girls to refer to an almost mystical set of notions about b-boying that is passed from teacher to student” (12). With a total of 8 chapters Schloss eloquently situates b-boying as its own unique cultural form within hip-hop by analyzing the philosophies, practices, and experiences of b-boys and b-girls. In chapter 2, “The Original Essence of the Dance: History, Community, and Classic B-Boy Records,” the author examines the relationship between music and dance. The premise is that a relationship between music and choreography exists that allows b-boys and b-girls to transfer historical associations of the music to their dance movements (38). One of the remarkably interesting ideas that materialize in this chapter is that b-boys and b-girls make almost spiritual connections to classic songs such as “Apache” and “Give It Up or Turnit Loose” as a principle that brings to light the bond shared between “modern proponents and the historical essence of the dance, giving strength, energy, and legitimacy to modern devotees” (39). Essentially, b-boying and b-girling becomes a venue by which culture and history meet, sort of like a spaceship traveling in time.

The next chapter, “Getting Your Foundation: Pedagogy,” builds on this idea by solidifying the foundation of b-boying as the combination of the artist’s mentorship, mental approaches, philosophies, attitude, rhythm, style, and character, as well as b-boys’ and b-girls’ ability to recognize another’s dance lineage from his/her style (51). Although it may be assumed that b-boys and b-girls are from a specific geographic area, they are not; b-boying is a collaborative culture that reaches across states and cities. In the words of Schloss, “a b-boy or b-girl is representing a relationship between dance and musical form (a ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ who dances on the ‘break’ or to the ‘beat’ of a record), a reaction to the psychological stress of poverty (one who ‘breaks,’ emotionally), symbolism of the dance over commercialism (b-boy versus breakancers) a commitment to dance over other aspects of hip-hop (as in the Source Manifesto), and a sense of geographical and class pride (‘Bronx-boy’ versus, presumably, ‘Manhattan-boy’)” (64). Despite the fact that there are contradictions in the way that b-boying is defined, for example, “breakdancing” is not seen as “authentic” b-boying culture, as it is connected to commercialism. Furthermore, what is even more intriguing is the idea of b-boying as an expression of gender identity. One of the female artists, Seoulsonyk, describes what she does as b-boying; but male dancers will never call what they do “b-girling.” Schloss suggests that at times, this contradiction can force b-girls to be at odds with their identity. This brings up the idea of masculinity not just in b-boying but hip-hop in general as a representation of male standards. In his film Hip-Hop Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Byron Hurt posits that hip-hop is a reflection of American society’s view on gender roles, wherein men’s roles are pushed to the forefront more often. Even though the author tackles the idea of masculinity and femininity somewhat in this chapter, I believe that there is room for a more focused study on gender roles within “b-girling” culture.

Chapter 4, “We Have to Be Exaggerated: Aesthetics,” integrates the aesthetic principles of b-boying as an art form that provides insight into the communities’ abstract understanding of, and approach to, those conditions. What I loved most about this is that it builds on the idea of locality and/or space, which is called by b-boys and b-girls “cipher” – a circle that encapsulates the dancers while they perform. Not only is this space a sacred entrance into the world of b-boying, but in many instances, it is a place where b-boys and b-girls are given their code names.By and large, Schloss’s book Foundation is a wonderful masterpiece that outlines the historical and cultural experiences of b-boys and b-girls in New York. I highly recommend this book as required reading for scholars in the field of popular culture (i.e., hip-hop) and for students in the classroom.