Naxos has long regaled
listeners with its American Classics
collection, a series of recordings that
cover American music from its earliest
days to the present. There are 235 volumes
in the series as of the writing of this
review in June 2007. With discs from
Stephen Foster to today’s young composers,
no other label offers such a wide-ranging
collection of American classical music.
Naxos has now released
a book that can be seen as a companion
to this series. This provides an overview
of the genre from its origins to the
present. Together with the two accompanying
CDs that contain excerpts from certain
works, and access to a special web site
where book owners can listen to many
more excerpts, this package provides
an excellent way for listeners to discover
more music from the United States.
While many American
composers have attained international
status, few are well known outside the
world of contemporary music. Charles
Ives, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein
and the minimalists Philip Glass and
Steve Reich are familiar to most classical
music listeners. Those more interested
in this area will know John Cage, Morton
Feldman, Walter Piston, Ned Rorem and
others. But with this book in hand,
you may be tempted to seek out works
by lesser-known composers, such as -
to mention just a few interesting composers
I have discovered through the Naxos
series - Edward MacDowell, Elie Siegmeister
and David Diamond.
The book covers American
classical music from its early days
- discussing Stephen Foster, whose music
I would hesitate to call "classical"
- through the new millennium. As in
all books of this kind, composer bios
are more than succinct. An exception
is made for Charles Ives and Leonard
Bernstein, each of whom gets his own
short chapter. As expected, the book
proceeds more or less chronologically,
and covers a vast range of other composers.
What it lacks in depth it makes up in
breadth, giving one of the best overviews
available of American music.
The author attempts
to integrate aspects of American history
in order to place composers in their
contexts. Curiously, some of his historic
comments are such understatements that
they make one wonder whether the author
really thought about what he was writing.
For example, when discussing the Civil
War, he says, "in which thousands
of victims were slaughtered on each
side". Reducing the war’s 600,000
dead to this vague statement seems insensitive
at best.
The accompanying CDs
are very useful, but there are some
annoyances with them. While the book
comes with two generous CDs, totalling
nearly 160 minutes, additional music
is available from the Naxos web site.
You have to enter a password and other
information that you find in the book.
However, the samples provided on the
web require Windows Media Player, and
are encoded at a desultory 20 kbps;
needless to say, these are useful only
to get an idea of the music, not to
appreciate the recordings themselves.
Also, the recordings on the CDs are
not available from the website, so you
have to juggle from one to the other
to hear all the music. On the other
hand, you do get to listen to a fair
number of complete works on the web
site - the book's CDs only contain short
bits of works with the notable exception
of the full American in Paris on
the first CD. This is, I suppose, to
be expected for this type of overview.
It's obvious that all
the samples are from Naxos recordings,
which makes the book a kind of advertisement
for their CDs, but Naxos's American
Classics collection is an extraordinary
project, offering many recordings of
great American works and lesser-known
composers.
Finally, Naxos did
not find the best way to include CDs
with books. The CDs are in plastic sleeves
glued to the inside front and back covers.
To remove the CDs - which stick to the
sleeves - you must insert a bit of card
between the CD and the sleeve, or tear
out the plastic sleeves, which would
damage the covers. There are many better
ways to add CDs to books than this.
Despite these reservations,
this is an excellent book for anyone
interested in American classical music,
and even more so for collectors of the
Naxos American Classics series. Well
written, well printed, with copious
illustrations, there is plenty of meat
in these 200-plus pages. One might want
a bit more depth, but what is here is
certainly worth reading.
Kirk McElhearn
A note from Naxos
With each Life &
Music biography comes access to a dedicated
website for that composer, containing
hours of extra music to listen to. The
works featured on the CDs may be enjoyed
in full on the website (so in the case
of Mahler, there are seven symphonies
and four major vocal works!) plus many
pieces by contemporaries of the composer.
There is also a substantial timeline
showing the composer’s life beside
concurrent events in arts, literature
and history.
These websites, together with the book
and CDs, make for an unrivalled multimedia
approach the biographical format and
a uniquely rounded portrait of each
composer.
