Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I ed. by William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee (review)

Reviewed by: Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I ed. by William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee Stewart Duncan Over Here, Over There: Transatlantic Conversations on the Music of World War I. Edited by William Brooks, Christina Bashford, and Gayle Magee. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. [viii, 257 p. ISBN 9780252042706 (hardcover), $110; ISBN 9780252084546 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780252051562 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Over Here, Over There shows how individuals and communities alike turned to music as a tool for reaction, recovery, and even professional gain during the First World War. The book focuses specifically on the "Atlantic partners" in the war: the United States, France, Great Britain, and Canada. This transnational frame not only reflects the volume's origins—born of two international conferences and raised by a team of British, Canadian, and American editors—but also defines its contribution to the somewhat crowded field of studies on music and the Great War. The editors argue that the volume's focus adds perspective by reflecting "the way the alliance itself was negotiated, developed, and affirmed by musical individuals and communities in transatlantic countries during the Great War" (p. 2). The book's diverse chapters suggest that this alliance was as much experienced and processed through music as it was strengthened by it. Though some sections contribute more fully to this mission than others, Over Here, Over There succeeds in expanding and enlivening our understanding of musical activity during the First World War. Studies of the war tend to lean heavily on what historian John Mullen calls the "morale-based approach," tracing how music lifted spirits at home and on the battlefield (John Mullen, "Beyond the Question of Morale," in Popular Song in the First World War: An [End Page 628] International Perspective, ed. John Mullen [New York: Routledge, 2019], 1). Over Here, Over There goes further by highlighting a more diverse picture of musical activity in wartime. The book's structure reflects this ambition: two parts, each with five chapters, focus on individual and collective musical topics, respectively. These two halves are punctuated by an opening "prelude," an "interlude," and a closing "postlude" that situate the material of these chapters in the timeline of the war. The chapters in part 1, "Individuals," detail musical actions, such as compositions and performances, that helped their creators process grief, contribute to public discourse, or boost their careers. Though the approaches and aims of each chapter vary, they all discuss ways that specific musicians—here Frank Bridge, Charles Ives, Claude Debussy, John Philip Sousa, and Irving Berlin—used music to engage with the conflict's effect on their immediate environment. This focus is a major part of the book's success. Detailing what these familiar names experienced in a specific time and place allows us to see their work in a new light. Gayle Magee, for instance, situates Ives's wartime vocal compositions within his daily professional life in New York City, including his experience of the impromptu public response to the news of the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915. Ives himself makes this association clear in his own writing, but Magee encourages us to see works like "From Hanover Square North" in relation to the more mundane aspects of Ives's "New York 'everyman'" existence, including his part in the insurance industry's attempts to profit from the war (p. 39). The subjects of these chapters are at once disappointingly homogenous (familiar White men of European descent) and intriguingly varied, as each composer occupied a different space in the decade's musical landscape. Christina Bashford connects the choices Frank Bridge made in writing his Lament for string orchestra (1915) to his relationship to victims of the Lusitania and the gendered resonance of the string orchestra genre for English audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Magee's chapter on Ives, if somewhat burdened by its close reading of wartime insurance policies, shows how a composer split between two professional identities used music to engage with the war's human element, even as his industry profited from the violence. Barbara Kelley explores how Debussy's No...

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