Sketches from the Twin Cities: A Song Sung Red, White, and Blue

Geoffrey Dean, Sketches, Gustav Mahler, South Dakota Symphony Orchestra

War, Jazz, and The Star Spangled Banner

By Geoffrey Dean

Books with an implied musical “soundtrack” have always interested me, as some of my earlier posts on this blog will attest. So when I came across a new tome by E. Douglas Bomberger titled Making Music American: 1917 and the Transformation of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), I knew I had a music-filled read in store. 1917 was the year that jazz made its sensational first appearance in New York City and on records, with the Original Dixieland “Jass” Band’s “Livery Stable Blues.” It was also the year that the US entered World War I, making the presence of music by Wagner, Beethoven, and other German composers on concert programs increasingly controversial and the appearance of jazz on the national scene a timely diversion. The Star Spangled Banner, not yet the official our national anthem, became in 1917 a source of heated debate: should it be played, and if so, where, how, and by whom?

Growing Up in America

Jazz

By Rolf Dumke

[Links to previously published installments appear at the bottom.]

In contrast to my usually detailed memories of childhood experiences, I have few memories of my life in St. Paul’s Lutheran School in the 5th and 6th grades, which were taught by a strict, small and mousy man who drilled his pupils in arithmetic.

Sunday Review: How We Got to Now (TV) & 700 Sundays (theatre on HBO)

Strange fruit

By Morris Dean

I don't think I would ever have paired Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now & Billy Crystal's 700 Sundays for a joint review, but for each work's striking invocation of a 1939 song by Billie Holiday, each describing it as perhaps America's first protest song – or racial protest song at any rate. Pairing the two works seemed imperative. Then I realized that the works also have in common that they are theatrical one-man shows, and both are explicitly stories about getting to now.