Introduction:
Disciplining American Music
By Mary Wallace Davidson
The papers on which the following articles
are based were initially invited for presentation at the conference of
the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation
Centres (IAML) at Berkeley, California, on August 5, 2002, as one of two
sessions entitled "Disciplining American Music: Issues Affecting
Scholars, Teachers, and Librarians." When I was asked by the program
committee to plan plenary sessions on American music, I turned rst to
Richard Crawford for advice and help. Indeed, he was sorely tempted to
participate himself, as he had been a principal speaker at the previous
IAML meeting in the United States, in Washington, D.C., in May 1983. He
expressed his gratitude to that event as the catalyst for the new direction
in his thinking about the history of American music, culminating in his
magnicent work, America's Musical Life: A History, published in
2001. His paper in 1983 had begun to develop his seminal ideas about "composers'
music" and "performers' music" as organizing principles
for American music studies.
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