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Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs & Consumer Culture in Victorian America. .(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs & Consumer Culture in Victorian America. By Dennis G. Waring. (Music/Culture.) Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002. [xix, 356 p. ISBN 0-819-56507-5. $70 (hbk.); ISBN 0-819-56508-3. $29.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, maps, compact disc.

In his book, Manufacturing the Muse, Dennis Waring has effectively held a magnifying glass to Victorian society, offering significant insights into the role of the reed organ in the consumer culture of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America. Certainly his study encompasses the Estey Organ Company in particular; but the scope of the work is much more far-reaching than would be permitted if he confined himself to a single product of a specific company. Instead, Waring has focused on the development of American material culture, on both social and economic implications of industrialization, on the position of this particular musical instrument in society through years of great change, and--not quite incidentally, but almost as a case study--on the Estey Organ Company, unique in its longevity and ability to change with the prevailing fickle tastes of American culture.

As an ethnomusicologist Waring is well prepared for such a task, for perhaps no discipline is...

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