Struggling to Define a Nation

American Music and the Twentieth Century

Charles Hiroshi Garrett

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780520254862
• eBook ISBN: 9780520942820
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Identifying music as a vital site of cultural debate, Struggling to Define a Nation captures the dynamic, contested nature of musical life in the United States. In an engaging blend of music analysis and cultural critique, Charles Hiroshi Garrett examines a dazzling array of genres—including art music, jazz, popular song, ragtime, and Hawaiian music—and numerous well-known musicians, such as Charles Ives, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, and Irving Berlin. Garrett argues that rather than a single, unified vision, an exploration of the past century reveals a contested array of musical perspectives on the nation, each one advancing a different facet of American identity through sound.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Charles Ives’s Four Ragtime Dances and “True American Music”
• 2. Jelly Roll Morton and the Spanish Tinge
• 3. Louis Armstrong and the Great Migration
• 4. Chinatown, Whose Chinatown? Defining America’s Borders with Musical Orientalism
• 5. Sounds of Paradise: Hawai‘i and the American Musical Imagination
• Conclusion: American Music at the Turn of a New Century
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index