Land
without Nightingales
Music
in the Making of German-America
Edited by Philip V. Bohlman
and Otto Holzapfel
Despite the laments of some nineteenth-century
German immigrants that America was a land bereft of poetry and
song, a "land without nightingales," the history of
German American music is a rich one.
This book explores the wide variety
of forms of musical expression among German-speaking immigrants
to America and their descendants from the eighteenth century
to the present. Topics range from Moravian music in colonial
America to musical life among twenty-first century Canadian Hutterites,
from polka music to German singing societies, from Lutheran hymns
to the songs of German-speaking Catholic and Jewish immigrants,
and from the songs of German-speaking Swiss settlers to the music
of immigrants from the Burgenland region of Austria.
Underlying
these diverse contributions is a common theme—the constant
interplay between the German and American sides of the hyphen
of "German-American" to be found in all these musical
styles. A companion CD includes musical selections that complement
and expand upon this theme.
The contributors—historians, musicologists, folklorists,
and scholars of German studies—include Philip V. Bohlman,
Alan R. Burdette, Kathleen Neils Conzen, Otto Holzapfel, James
P. Leary, Laurence Libin, Rudolf Pietsch, A. Gregg Roeber, Leo
Schelbert, and Helmut Wulz.
Philip V. Bohlman teaches ethnomusicology at the University
of Chicago, where he also serves on the Jewish Studies faculty. Otto Holzapfel of the German Folk-Song Archive (Deutsches
Volksliedarchiv), Freiburg, Germany, has also collaborated with
Philip Bohlman in producing The Folk Songs of the Ashkenaz, documenting music in the daily lives of the Jews of Central and
Eastern Europe.
Distributed
for the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.)
|
|
January 2002
310 pp. 6 x 9
30 b/w photos, 2 maps, 9 illus.
17 musical transcriptions
|
