Music of the Gilded Age

John Ogasapian was a Professor of Music History at University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and author of Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era (Greenwood, 2004).N. Lee Orr is Coordinator of Music History and Literature at Georgia State University.

Both respected musicologists, Ogasapian and Orr took up a daunting challenge because they had to run the gamut from art music (and its various supporting institutions) to various types of popular theater and popular music (and their venues) and at the same time show how this huge and diverse body of music both reflected and influenced society. Organized by genre, this compendium draws on a vast amount of information, taken from approximately 175 writings on American music. The authors stress basic social themes of the period: industrialization, acquisition of wealth, population growth, immigration, territorial expansion, communication, race, and religion. No single piece of music is discussed in any detail and even major composers are not treated in depth. The reader will come away from this book with an appreciation of both the quantity and diversity of music that kept pace with the growth of a nation from relative insularity to a world power. Recommended. Lower-/upper-division undergraduates; general readers.