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Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music.

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Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. By Michael Broyles. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. [387 p. ISBN 0-300-10045-0. $40.00.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Michael Broyles's history of mavericks in American music attempts to document a paradox: a tradition of tradition-defying musicians in America. To do this, Broyles calls upon his considerable narrative skills and his experience with social histories of music; he has previously written Music of the Highest Class: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), and edited the journals of Lowell Mason's year in Europe (A Yankee Musician in Europe: The 1837 Journals of Lowell Mason [Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1990]).

A brief introductory chapter sets out Broyles's focus and plan for the book: "this book is not about mavericks themselves; it is about the maverick tradition. It is about American society's long-standing fascination with the figure of the maverick, what that means about the place of music in American culture and what that tells us about American society" (p. 2, emphasis in original). After this introduction, Broyles sets out with a series of chapters that profile various American composers who, for one reason or another, have stood outside the musical mainstream of their times. Part 1 of the book, "Pioneers," contains chapters on William Billings and Anthony Philip Heinrich, both composers who often get short-changed in music histories, even histories of American music. The source materials used in these chapters are extremely valuable resources, and it is also useful to have brief, thoroughly-researched biographical portraits of these important early American musicians. Both of these chapters have a strong focus on the relationship of the composers to their communities, and the tensions that arose as a result of their insistence on following their own personal vision.

Part 2 of the book, "New Concepts and Forces in...

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