{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03053763440860215, 'fraction_numerical': 0.007741935483870968, 'mean_word_length': 5.2359249329758715, '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}}
Beethoven in America. By Michael Broyles. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011.

I always imagined Beethoven as a messy-haired, frowning savant, shaking his fist towards the heavens between fits of inspired creativity. My impression was not prompted by a specific encounter with a Beethoven symphony or sonata—indeed, with my band background, I am fairly confident I never played a work by Beethoven until my undergraduate studies. Rather, my image of Beethoven was based upon portrayals of the composer and his music in film, popular music, and other cultural production. In Beethoven in America, Michael Broyles explores such conceptualizations of Beethoven in the United States, from his American premiere in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1805—a performance of a “grand overture by Beethoven,” most likely referring to the first movement of his first symphony—to the Beethoven Skeleton Automatic Watch by Steinhausen, advertised in the Skymall catalog with the phrase “We found Beethoven’s immortal beloved! And now it belongs on your wrist”1 (334–45). A fully comprehensive study on such a large topic is impossible, so Broyles divides his approach between a chronological history of the performance and reception of Beethoven’s works in the nineteenth century and a more thematic exploration of Beethoven’s place in U.S. culture in the twentieth century. In doing so, he illuminates how Beethoven has been molded to fit a number of different narratives, ranging from Transcendentalism to the Black Power movement to the star-crossed lover depicted in the film Immortal Beloved (1994). Broyles divides his text into four parts, composed of three chapters each, which are, for the most part, chronological. In the first part, “Arrival and Sacralization,” he traces the earliest known performances of Beethoven’s works on U.S. soil. He also examines how nineteenth-century critics came to understand Beethoven as a musical hero set on a pedestal both figuratively, as in the writings of Margaret Fuller and John Sullivan Dwight, and literally, as in the old Boston Music Hall’s large statue of the composer looming over the stage. Broyles also argues that nineteenth-century critics’ declaration of Beethoven’s musical language as being exceedingly masculine “broke gender barriers” in American music performance by