Music in America: Exploring Cultural Expression Through Music - Perfect for Music Lovers, Cultural Studies & Classroom Learning

This book focuses on the multiple ethnic musics that have contributed to the identification of American music from the time of the originating migrations that founded the North American states. It stands as a challenge to histories that identify American music as having its origins in the hegemonic cultures of English, then German, Protestant American societies to which later immigrants contributed. According to the historian Ron Takaki, African, Catholic, and Jewish migrations simultaneously occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--sometimes they occurred on the same ships, sometimes on other ships. Adelaida Reyes draws attention to the musical interactions that began in colonial settlements. The book is a fine introduction to a complex and splendid aspect of American life and culture, in which Americans can justifiably take pride.