American Harmony: Inspired Choral Miniatures from New England, Appalachia, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, and the Midwest Edited by Nym Cooke. Boston: David R. Godine, 2017.

Abstract

example, he shows how Slava! A Political Overture takes its themes almost entirely from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In the final chapter, Mari Yoshihara investigates Bernstein’s complex opera, A Quiet Place, and its approach to gender, sexuality, and family. The Houston Grand Opera, La Scala, and the Kennedy Center teamed up to produce this provocative work. After poor reviews, Bernstein made numerous changes to it. Yoshihara notes that, despite some obvious biographical similarities to the composer’s life, the piece is important for its psychological character development and its “political and moral message” about the importance of AIDS treatments when the disease was not yet well known (290). Barry Seldes sums up the volume’s essence by noting that Bernstein was “. . . a political man in the highest and best sense of that term, convinced of the need to exercise good democratic citizenship in a public sphere rife with contention and vulnerable to mean-spirited and demagogic power” (81). This book does a wonderful job situating both Bernstein and many of his works in the nation’s capital. A few chapters, especially the last three, are more technical than others, and therefore will likely appeal more to scholars. Moreover, some of these have a rather tenuous connection to the book’s setting beyond the fact that the pieces they discuss had premiered there. Although all the chapters were interesting and well-written, chapter 2’s focus on Bernstein’s associations with various presidents was especially engaging and chock-full of information. Both the academic community and general readers will hail Leonard Bernstein and Washington DC for its solid scholarship, clear writing, and focus on a subject who remains revered by the American populace more than thirty years after his death.