Despite the laments of some nineteenth-century German immigrants that America was a land bereft of poetry and song, a "land without nightingales," the history of German American music is a rich one. This book explores the wide variety of forms of musical expression among German-speaking immigrants to America and their descendants from the eighteenth century to the present. Topics range from Moravian music in colonial America to musical life among twenty-first century Canadian Hutterites, from polka music to German singing societies, from Lutheran hymns to the songs of German-speaking Catholic and Jewish immigrants, and from the songs of German-speaking Swiss settlers to the music of immigrants from the Burgenland region of Austria.
Underlying these diverse contributions is a common theme--the constant interplay between the German and American sides of the hyphen of "German-American" to be found in all these musical styles. A companion CD includes musical selections that complement and expand upon this theme. The contributors--historians, musicologists, folklorists, and scholars of German studies--include Philip V. Bohlman, Alan R. Burdette, Kathleen Neils Conzen, Otto Holzapfel, James P. Leary, Laurence Libin, Rudolf Pietsch, A. Gregg Roeber, Leo Schelbert, and Helmut Wulz.