Like Charles Hamm’s Music in the New World (1983), this excellent history serves as an inclusive tutor for the layperson. Scherer (music critic for The Wall Street Joumal and a lecturer on classical-music appreciation on PBS and at venues in New York City) takes a broad view of classical music. He devotes the first 40 pages to an inclusive history of American music through the Civil War. Thereafter, he discusses not only classical music but also genres bordering on classical music—ragtime, musicals, operettas, and jazz-, popular-, and folk-influenced symphonic music. The author has an equally inclusive aesthetic about the many types of US music. His attitude is one of curiosity rather than advocacy of the importance of one composer or style over another. The accompanying CD includes 18 examples, and a link to NAXOS Music Library (CH, Jul’O6, 43-6434) gives access to 164 more examples. Another helpful feature is the use of sidebars containing synoptic sentences from the text. Though the book includes no musical illustrations, copious handsome photographs (most of composers) embellish the text. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates; general readers.

Like Tom Lehrer’s song in which the names of all the elements “of which the news has come to Hahhv’d” are sung to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Modern Major General,” this survey for ordinary listeners is a tour de force. Lord knows how many composers and at least one piece by each Scherer cites, but he begins the story of art music in North America in Mexico before retreating to the English in Virginia and Massachusetts and the music they brought. He dusts off quite a contingent of nineteenth-century composers besides Foster, Gottschalk, and MacDowell, and his coverage of the twentieth century is downright heroic. His attitude is so open and sympathetic that he rouses curiosity about virtually every composer he discusses, even the toughest serialists and experimentalists. Fortunately, a CD of 18 excerpts comes with the book, a Web site at which more can be heard is listed, and tracks on both are flagged in the page margins. Despite a few gaffes on nonmusical matters, a book no American music lover should miss.

This overview-originally published in the United Kingdom by Naxos Books and previously in the United States in 2005 as The Story of American Classical Music (with a much shorter text)-covers the entire range of American classical music from Colonial times to the present, including several 21st-century works. Scherer, music critic for the Wall Street Journal, takes a broad view of classical music, discussing Scott Joplin, operetta, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Amy Beach, and Charles Ives. The focus, though, is clearly on a discussion of canonical classical music for the "educated layman" rather than the "trained musician." This does not aim to be definitive in an academic sense, and unlike Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America, it does not discuss the social importance of classical music; however, it has its own niche as a well-written chronological popular history of classical music in America based on composers and eras. The accompanying audio CD and available online tracks-18 on the CD and over 150 online, many of them complete works-help enormously. Highly recommended.