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Georges Liébert, Nietzsche and Music , trans. David Pellauer and Graham Parkes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004). 304 pp. $38

One of the greatest values of Greene’s book is that it serves as an excellent starting place to explore ethnic song in America. Even so, we are often surprised by what is missing. Greene does touch on a number of important figures in both American music and theatre, and there are brief sections on Ole Bull, Hjalmar Peterson, Sholem Aleichem, Boris Thomashefsky, Morris Rosenfeld, Aaron Lebedeff and Pablo J. González. But music historians will miss many of the most famous immigrant musicians. We are left wondering what became of Patrick Gilmore, Theodore Thomas, Joe Hill or any of the Jewish composers active in Tin Pan Alley. The neglect of these musicians is especially notable because many of their activities tie in so perfectly to Greene’s thesis. Despite these shortcomings, A Singing Ambivalence is a valuable contribution. Music historians will find it useful, not so much for its discussion of lyrics as for its remarkably clear description of immigrant life in America. As the familiar theme of immigrant unhappiness and disappointment is repeated in each chapter, the reader begins to wonder if Greene is not proving the obvious: that people who have suddenly been displaced feel uncertainty in their new surroundings. But his excellent conclusion, which traces the historiography of immigrant studies, reminds us that this conclusion has not been obvious at all. This feature is a testament to Green’s scholarship. The book’s bibliography of lesser-known (and often localized) studies of ethnic song in America is also valuable. So too are the interesting discussions of sources and performance traditions. Especially notable is Greene’s description of the Chinese poetic inscriptions discovered in the 1960s on the walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. In the end, this brief book shows us that song lyrics can serve as powerful indicators of group experiences, and that the American experience was not always easy or pleasant. As the Hungarian saying warns travellers: ‘To emigrate is sad / To return is no joy, either’ (p. 186, n. 56).