- Leaving Everything Most Loved (Jacqueline Winspear)
- America's Musical Life: A History (Richard Crawford)
Books Read:
- Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris)
- Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (Charles Hiroshi Garrett)
This was a pretty good week. I preordered Leaving Everything Most Loved a couple of months ago, so I didn't really buy it this week. Back in December, I wrote about Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series - mysteries solved by a female detective during the 1920s-1930s. The early books dealt with the aftermath of WWI; the most recent ones cover the changes leading up to WWII. I'm completely hooked, so I preordered the latest one, but I'm not going to let myself read it until I can see the light at the end of the tunnel...I have far too many papers to write, and I know I'll be unable to exercise any sort of self-control with this book. The blurb on the book jacket says that Leaving Everything Most Loved "marks a pivotal moment in this remarkable series," so I'm intrigued.
The book I actually did spend money on this week was Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life. Richard Crawford is part of the tradition of musicologists who have written histories of American music that include popular and folk music, but the reason I first heard his name was back in my band literature class - this book is the only chronology of American music to include two full chapters on band history. At the band conference I was at last week, more than one band director mentioned Richard Crawford to me when they heard I was a musicology student, and I had a great talk with my old band director from Baylor about his experiences in Dr. Crawford's classes at the University of Michigan - he was there when Crawford was writing this book - so I decided that I really needed to own it. I plan to read it this summer - it will tie into my thesis research quite nicely!
David Sedaris's Me Talk Pretty One Day is another book I have frequently heard mentioned over the past few years, but have never read. I checked it out from the library and loved it - the book is a memoir told in short essays, and they are all hilarious, although I especially enjoyed the second half of the book as it takes place in Paris, one of my favorite settings. I read about half of the book on my conference trip last week; it's the perfect book to pick up when you have twenty minutes or so to fill.
Struggling to Define a Nation was the second book I read for my Music in the US II class. Garrett examines some of the less-talked-about genres that were popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, and all of them relate in some way to cultural conflict. This is an unconventional way of looking at the history of American music, and I appreciated the way it opened my mind not only to the variety of music that makes up our history, but to the idea that the diversity we celebrate in our music is sometimes difficult to discuss due to the contestation out of which much of the music grew.
Struggling to Define a Nation was the second book I read for my Music in the US II class. Garrett examines some of the less-talked-about genres that were popular at the beginning of the twentieth century, and all of them relate in some way to cultural conflict. This is an unconventional way of looking at the history of American music, and I appreciated the way it opened my mind not only to the variety of music that makes up our history, but to the idea that the diversity we celebrate in our music is sometimes difficult to discuss due to the contestation out of which much of the music grew.
I'm getting pretty deeply buried in three research papers, so I foresee less reading in the month of April - almost all of my free time is being devoted to researching and writing!
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