"A Tidal Wave of Encouragement"—American Composers' Concerts in the Gilded Age. By E. Douglas Bomberger. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97446-4 (cloth). Pp. xvii, 235. $69.95.

The final decades of the nineteenth century were arguably the most exciting in the history of classical music in the United States. For orchestras and opera companies—in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Cincinnati—this was a time of thrilling early fruition. For composers, it was a time of high (yet unfulfilled) promise. And yet the period has been little explored. Douglas Bomberger's detailed case study of the American composers' movement of the 1880s and 1890s takes its place on a short shelf of indispensable works of research exploring America's �edgling but formidable musical high culture of the late Gilded Age.