During the Civil War, countless musical works were written about the conflict and marketed to amateur musicians, especially women. Among them were pieces composed in response to recent conflicts, often published within days or weeks of the relevant event. Popular genres included keyboard battle pieces, which depicted some of the most pivotal battles of the war in musical rhetoric, bringing them alive in the minds and imaginations of drawing room performers and audiences.

This essay is the first detailed study of American keyboard battle pieces from the Civil War. It investigates how they mirror many aspects of Civil War life, including the civilian demand for vivid war news, especially eyewitness accounts from the front, the advent of telegraphic reporting, and the fallibility of the media in reporting on the war. The pieces also reflect cultural trends of the mid-nineteenth century not related to war, particularly the popularity of theatrical melodrama on the stage and the prominence of virtuosity in piano repertoire. In investigating the performance of battle pieces as a site where women imagined and experienced the perils of war, this article contributes to scholarship that deepens our understanding of how women at home participated in mass culture.

Throughout his career, John Williams has set the musical tone for the American presidency, most elaborately with his scores for Oliver Stone's controversial films JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). While invested in capturing the character of these commanders in chief through musical codes, Williams's soundtracks are equally engaged in the act of the evocation and telling of “history.” Specifically, they construct a tragic myth of 1960s America in which the promise represented by JFK is destroyed from without, and Nixon from within, both by the malevolent forces of the military-industrial complex. In considering the thematic and dramatic means by which Williams paints his orchestral portraits, I reveal the extent to which music supports Stone's paranoiac narratives, especially in cases where the director's collage-like visual aesthetic puts pressure on the otherwise nostalgic traits of Williams's default tonal style.

I offer a music-analytical approach to JFK and Nixon informed by interviews, studies of political mythology and paranoia, and musicological appraisals of Williams's music. Stone's 1960s-as-lapsarian-metanarrative positions Kennedy as a romanticized absence, an image of the fabular fallen King, and Williams renders him as a public recollection rather than a human being with interiority. Nixon, by contrast, is a tragic antihero, consumed by dark forces of history and an abundance of ambivalent thematic material. Particular attention is paid to the dismantling of Kennedy's noble leitmotif during JFK’s prologue and motorcade sequence and to the near-fascistic musical accompaniment of Nixon's speeches. Having demonstrated the active role these scores play, I conclude that Williams's music constitutes an authoring of history in a strong, albeit postmodern, sense, consistent with but independent from Stone's screenplay.

Cue: Lalo Schifrin's “Theme from Mission: Impossible.” If the return of Tom Cruise, explosions, and fast-paced chases to the screen this summer is any indication, Americans (and the global audience for Hollywood action film) love an impossible mission. Certainly, U.S. music scholars do. Reading the eight reviews of the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter, AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles Garrett (with a large and distinguished editorial team and nearly fifteen hundred contributors), as well as dipping frequently into its entries, we were deeply impressed both by the quality and ambition of the eight-volume, 5.4 million-word encyclopedia and by the “gargantuan” task (as Leta Miller puts it) with which the reviewers had been charged.

“How does one review a monument?” Richard Crawford wondered when he sat down to review the first AmeriGrove in 1987; it puts “the conventional notion of a review to the test.” Some thirty years later, with the new AmeriGrove twice the size of the first edition and with the U.S. soundscape becoming more global and hybrid by the day, the challenge has increased for the potential reviewer. Indeed, how do you review a collective enterprise with up to 1500 authors and 9300 entries (some old, some new) along a timeline of some 350 years? For a professional insider like Richard Crawford the test was tough enough, but to assess its virtues and faults from a European perch, it is positively daunting, particularly when post-national, global crosscurrents continue to inspire a constantly evolving U.S. musical scene.

The publication of a dictionary in one's discipline is always a welcome event, allowing its users to quickly find essential information on a variety of topics, people, and institutions. The second edition of the Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter AmeriGrove II), an eight-volume set comprising some 5300-plus pages, offers a comprehensive view of all musics American; it is a delight to peruse. At more than double the length of its predecessor, which was published in 1986, AmeriGrove II covers an even wider array of topics. It “refers to musical life and cultures within the region now covered by the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories. [It] likewise features coverage of the music-making practices of native cultures whose occupation of these regions predates European contact” (1:vii).

Here are two important lessons about information control: first, there is always “too much to know.” This phrase comes from historian Ann Blair, who argues in her book of the same title that in the early modern period the attempt to gather and systematize knowledge was already regarded as a hubristic task. Second, information control is inherently ideological. Think of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's magisterial Encyclopédie (1751–77), which in thirty-two volumes attempted to map the world of knowledge and, in doing so, determined what counted as “knowable” and what was ruled out. Equally ambitious and ideological was Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (advertised 1800, completed 1828), a monumental undertaking aimed at codifying a national language for the new United States. Both of these lessons apply to the pre-1800 articles in AmeriGrove II, and, indeed, to the eight-volume dictionary as a whole. Confronted with the problem of “too much to know,” AmeriGrove II inherits the optimism of its Enlightenment ancestor and endeavors to expand systematically the knowable world of U.S. music history, yet it leaves much uncovered. Moreover, like Webster's dictionary, the focus of AmeriGrove II is confidently national. Whether it echoes Webster's nationalistic stance is a more complicated question, particularly for the articles on pre-1800 topics.

Musicological research on nineteenth-century music blossomed during the 1970s. The surge was solidified with the founding of the journal 19th-Century Music in 1977, roughly a year after the establishment of the Sonneck Society and a decade before the appearance of AmeriGrove I. During this decade, the journal published seven articles on nineteenth-century American subjects (all on the United States, not other American regions or countries). By contrast, the official journal of the Sonneck Society, American Music, published nearly twice that number between 1983 and 1986 alone. Although this simple metric has sociological explanations exceeding the scope of this review, it suggests that work on nineteenth-century music in the Americas stood at some remove from general musicological discourse in the Sonneck Society's early days.

In May 2014, then book review editor John Koegel asked if I wanted to be part of the team of eight scholars with varied interests and specialties to review the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter AmeriGrove II), edited by Charles H. Garrett (what a Herculean task!) and published by Oxford University Press in 2013. Specifically, John wondered if I would be “willing to review the coverage of American traditional music.” As one who has used and appreciated the first edition of this monumentally ambitious work, I was curious to see the updated edition, so the next day I naively wrote back, “This sounds interesting, and I'll take on the assignment.”

The eight-volume second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music is an extraordinary achievement, embodying the contributions of nearly 1500 scholars, many of whom regularly read and publish in the present journal. It was therefore with some trepidation, and a great deal of humility, that I accepted John Koegel's invitation to review the encyclopedia's coverage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century “art music.” The more I delved into this gargantuan task, the more impressed I became with the encyclopedia's scope, the high quality of writing, and the sensitivity to difficult conceptual issues in the field. (And as a side benefit, I learned about a host of people I'd not previously known.)

On the evening of March 8, 2014, I became the most envied person in the Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Marriott Heritage Ballroom (perhaps the whole of Lancaster County). For my own part, I snoozed. But there on the nightstand, my cell phone danced with texts of more energetic colleagues: “Sherrie, you won the Grove! Where the @#! are you?” It seemed I had hit the jackpot in the SAM 2.0 raffle. In (quite literally) the blink of an eye, I had gone from a run-of-the-mill scholar of American music with pretty much the same books on the shelf as others with my particular set of research interests, to one of the few people on the planet to own the entire eight-volume AmeriGrove II. In that same life-changing moment—as I learned the next morning—I had also become the person least able to politely decline John Koegel's invitation to contribute to this multipart review.

The coverage of post-1950 popular music and jazz in the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter referred to as the AmeriGrove II) is truly impressive in its range and scope. AmeriGrove II gives substantial space to a variety of styles ranging from rhythm and blues and rock to country and hip hop, a nod not only to the tremendous impact they have had on the making and consumption of U.S. music in recent decades, but also to the explosion in popular music scholarship witnessed in organizations like the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the popular music study groups of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Society for Ethnomusicology. Throughout its many entries, AmeriGrove II showcases just how much the study of recent American popular music has grown since AmeriGrove I appeared nearly thirty years ago.

Permission to use notation for the theme from “Star Trek” was received after the article by Getman in the August 2015 issue of Journal of the Society for American Music was published. The captions for Examples 1, 2, and 4 should carry the following credit:

Theme from “Star Trek(R),” words by Gene Roddenberry, music by Alexander Courage. © 1966, 1970 Bruin Music Company. Copyright renewed. This arrangement © 2015 Bruin Music Company. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.