An Introduction to America’s Music

xvii

PREFACE

I

n revising An Introduction to America’s Music for this second edition, the authors

have sought to strengthen the fi rst edition’s best features while adding new

ones that expand the book’s scope and its usefulness for both instructors and

students.

A few core convictions have shaped our approach to the subject. First, we aim

to tell a story that embraces many aspects of music making. It encompasses not

only the  creation of music but also performance, teaching, and an ever-changing

music business—with a scope ranging from publishing and recording to instrument

manufacturing and technological developments such as radio, television, and the

Internet. Second, our story describes the musical activities of both musicians and

their audiences. We are interested in how people use music socially and culturally to

enhance a sense of individual and group identity. Third, we continually probe the

boundaries drawn to separate different types of music and, by implication, different

groups of listeners from each other.

The book’s organization refl ects the importance of this third point. While rec-

ognizing the neatness of splitting a narrative account of America’s music into three

stories—those of the classical, the popular, and the traditional or folk spheres—we hold

that treating those spheres independently risks overemphasizing the boundaries

between them. By maintaining a more-or-less chronological narrative, we show how the

classical, the popular, and the traditional, even as they produce repertories that seem

separate from each other, can also overlap and interact, resulting in music that blends

traits from more than one sphere. Even as the approaches and values of each sphere

evolve from one era to the next, their differences never vanish altogether but re appear

within fresh, sometimes hybrid confi gurations of musical sound. By considering the

range of musical approaches and styles in play during each time period, while tracing

activity from earlier times to the present, we have done our best to write a nuanced

account of America’s music making as a vast playground of musical give and take.

The task of drawing an inclusive one-volume portrait of such a wide-ranging

and diverse musical culture has not been a straightforward process. But, by taking

that diversity seriously, we offer a certain kind of fi r s t word on the subject—which,

after all, is the purpose of an introduction. Once the preliminaries are enacted, the

acquainted parties may or may not choose to take their connections further. It is our

hope that this book w ill ser ve as a framework that students—who likely already know

a good deal about America’s music—will fi nd useful in deepening their connections

with that music and the life that surrounds it.

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