{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.030894308943089432, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0065040650406504065, 'mean_word_length': 5.459317585301838, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape. By Denise Von Glahn. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003; paperback edition, 2009.

Many listeners have probably been intrigued by ways in which composers evoke place. After all, any number of musical works explicitly attempt to do so, such as Pines of Rome, Nights in the Gardens of Spain, El salón México, and other chestnuts. To be sure, such music is sometimes rather disparagingly labeled “travel music” or “picture-postcard music.” Tainted by the travel industry, with its attendant connotations of commodification, these works presumably lack the transcendence of “absolute” music, said to shun extramusical references. Also interwoven into many musicological reflections on place is nationalism—Richard Taruskin has referred to it as “tourist nationalism”—and its attendant polemics over central and peripheral countries.1 Another common trope is exoticism, as found in operas such as François-Adrien Boieldieu’s Le calife de Bagdad (1800), reflecting Orientalist fantasies. Place music may also be associated with memory—philosopher Edward S. Casey has even identified the phenomenon of “place memory.”2 Long a topic of interest in ethnomusicology, memory has recently begun to engage historical musicologists;3 indeed, given the growing proximity of the two disciplines, it is perhaps not surprising that place has been explored from both perspectives, as in Martin Stokes’s Ethnicity, Identity, and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, which treats subjects as diverse as Chopin and national anthems, Australian aboriginal traditions, and the “Liverpool” sound in relation to place.4 In one way or another, these perspectives call forth a few fundamental questions. Can we dismiss extramusical references (geographical or otherwise situating) that more often than not constitute the very essence of these place-conscious works? Are at least some of these works implicitly nationalistic? What do place pieces prompt us to remember, thus influencing our understanding of music and memory? How should we confront the question of representation, one that has dogged composers and critics at various points in the history of music and that has found its way into the theoretical framework of much recent musicology? All these matters present themselves, directly or indirectly, to the reader of Denise Von Glahn’s The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape.