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New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification.

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New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification. By Amy C. Beal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. [xvi, 340 p. ISBN 0-520-24755-8. $49.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

In music, no less than in other fields--historical, political and cultural--the relationship between the United States of America and West Germany is one that clearly defines the post-1945 world. The close association of the Federal Republic and the United States has been considered in recent years in volumes such as Detlef Junker's two edited volumes The United States and Germany in the Era of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), Thomas A. Schwartz's America's Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), Ralph Willett's The Americanization of Germany (New York: Routledge, 1989), and John Willoughby's Remaking the Conquering Heroes (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Yet despite the importance of this connection, until relatively recently, little work had been undertaken that considered in detail the broader cultural, artistic, and musical contexts of this relationship. Amy C. Beal's new volume will doubtless play a prominent part in this developing area, begun with Frances Stonor Saunders's Who Paid the Piper? (London: Granta Books, 1999) and continued in David Monod's Settling Scores: German Music, Denazification and the Americans, 1945-1953 (Chapel Hill: University of North...

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