Struble, John Warthen.  THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN CLASSICAL MUSIC:
MACDOWELL THROUGH MINIMALISM.  444p.  NY: Facts on File, 1995.

The arrangement and proportional emphases of a historical survey like this
inevitably reveals much about an author's perspectives and preferences.
In comparison with another recent book, Lyle Gann's _American Music in
the Twentieth Century_ (Schirmer, 1997), which focuses very heavily on
experimental innovators, Struble attempts to give a more even-handed
consideration to three main currents, the Americanist, the academic and
the experimental.  His sympathies lean toward the first and third of these,
but he succeeds in dealing fairly, if not equally, with all the composers
he discusses.  His approach is mainly a composer by composer treatment,
though he does of course place them in a stylistic framework.  His
explanations of stylistic developments is clear, intelligible and concise.
He does not use musical examples (unlike Gann) and there is more
biographical than stylistic content, on balance.  Not counting the
introductory and concluding sections, he groups composers by period or
by style--he surely struggled with this--in a dozen chapters.  Ives,
Gershwin and Cage get a separate chapter each, which tells you something.

This survey of American musical history might have been subtitled simply
with the dates 1620-1993, because Struble opens with a chapter called
"Forerunners" outlining seven distinct, and old, regional styles that had
some influence on later developments.  MacDowell shares a chapter on the
"Second new England School" (the first being Billings and others) with
Paine, Chadwick, Beach and Parker.  Early 20th Century composers such
as Farwell, Carpenter, Deems Taylor, John J.  Becker (to whom Ives left
a bequest), Ornstein (whom I don't know but now think I should), and
several even more obscure, are discussed along with Griffes, whom Struble
considers the best of the lot.  Copland, Thomson and Harris enjoy two
chapters--before and after 1933--with briefer treatments of Antheil,
Blitzstein, Riegger, Toch, Thompson and William Grant Still.  Sandwiched
into the 1933 entr'acte, so to speak, is an extended account, neutral in
tone, of the "Rise of Musical Academia." which considers composers as
diverse as Hanson, Bloch, Sessions, Piston, Schuman, Babbitt, Perle and
Luening.  Warthen reveals Babbitt's lifelong interest in popular music,
for those who think of him only in very different terms.

Next, the period from the Forties to the Sixties is again given a mixed-
bag approach, introducing Barber, Menotti, Carter, Bernstein and, more
briefly Ross Lee Finney, Crumb, Foss, Creston, Gould, Diamond, Hovhanness,
Persichetti, Kirchner, Schuller, the "strikingly original" film composer
Bernard Herrman, and a name completely unfamiliar to me, John LaMontaine,
said to have written a very lyrical piano concerto.  (No mention of Harold
Shapero.)

The Sixties avant-garde chapter has chronology trouble again, because
it begins with Ruggles, Cowell and Varese, who were much earlier figures,
followed by Partch, Nancarrow, Dane Rudhyar and Lou Harrison.  In
connection with Cage and the aleatoric "revolution," Struble writes about
Feldman, Earle Brown and Pauline Oliveros, whose music he clearly likes.
Here he introduces the sugggestion that it may be perfectly all right for
a composer to write only for a local audience; the instruments of Partch,
for instance, are unique objects.

When he gets to post-modernism and minimalism, Struble reveals his lack
of regret for the passing of serialism.  He does not attack it, but he
does seem to celebrate the liberation from it of those he considers next.
No one he discusses, except John Adams, is under the age of sixty, which
is perhaps disappointing, though this is a history, after all.  Rochberg,
Del Tredici, Corigliano, Druckman, Stephen Albert, and Bolcom (the best
of these, in Struble's view) are his choices for discussion.  The
minimalism chapter discusses all the usual suspects along with their
differences.

Finally, in conclusion, Struble lays out alternative futures for classical
music in America, along with a discussion of factors such as the enormous
proliferation of composers, self-censorship by composers faced with
funding and grant guidelines, "the double-edged sword" of recording
and broadcasting developments, and audience concerns.

Aside from an occasional quibble or even an brow-raising remark or two
by Struble, which I see no need to draw attention to, and aside from the
inevitable reservations about emphasis on this composer rather than that,
this is a book that looks back on historical musical developments with
the kind of perspective I find it comfortable to share.  Recommended.

Jim Tobin