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Review: Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America, by Katherine K. Preston

Review: Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century... Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America , by Katherine K. Preston. AMS Studies in Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxix, 618 pp. Nineteenth-century music has never faded as a foundational subject of inquiry among musicologists nor has its popularity waned in the concert hall or college classroom. Since at least the 1980s, however, musicologists have begun to question the prominence given to the repertoire presented in these spaces and, more broadly, the influence of the canon on modern perceptions of music of the past. Critical interrogation of musicology and its historiography has yielded an expanding list of composers, provided a more balanced view of compositional practices, and opened the door to reconsiderations of performance, circulation, and reception. This type of research provides a more holistic approach to Western music and allows for new examinations of old concepts and innovative interpretations of familiar repertoires. Music in the United States presents special challenges to traditional methodologies. Its historiography is too young to have many old concepts, and its repertoire hardly familiar. Tensions that may be discerned among those who focus on more conventional fields of study (such as German Romanticism) are amplified among Americanists because of the long shadow that European music casts over the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, Hugh Macdonald's Music in 1853: Biography of a Year , which documents the interactions of Brahms, Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, and Joachim.1 While Macdonald's book is a fascinating study of men who figure in nearly every history of nineteenth-century music, these men hardly represent music heard in the United States in … http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Musicological Society University of California Press

Review: Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America, by Katherine K. Preston

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2019 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions.
ISSN
0003-0139
eISSN
1547-3848
DOI
10.1525/jams.2019.72.2.581
Publisher site
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Abstract

Opera for the People: English-Language Opera and Women Managers in Late 19th-Century America , by Katherine K. Preston. AMS Studies in Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xxix, 618 pp. Nineteenth-century music has never faded as a foundational subject of inquiry among musicologists nor has its popularity waned in the concert hall or college classroom. Since at least the 1980s, however, musicologists have begun to question the prominence given to the repertoire presented in these spaces and, more broadly, the influence of the canon on modern perceptions of music of the past. Critical interrogation of musicology and its historiography has yielded an expanding list of composers, provided a more balanced view of compositional practices, and opened the door to reconsiderations of performance, circulation, and reception. This type of research provides a more holistic approach to Western music and allows for new examinations of old concepts and innovative interpretations of familiar repertoires. Music in the United States presents special challenges to traditional methodologies. Its historiography is too young to have many old concepts, and its repertoire hardly familiar. Tensions that may be discerned among those who focus on more conventional fields of study (such as German Romanticism) are amplified among Americanists because of the long shadow that European music casts over the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, Hugh Macdonald's Music in 1853: Biography of a Year , which documents the interactions of Brahms, Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, and Joachim.1 While Macdonald's book is a fascinating study of men who figure in nearly every history of nineteenth-century music, these men hardly represent music heard in the United States in …

Journal

Journal of the American Musicological Society – University of California Press

Published: Aug 1, 2019

References