McNally's Row of Flats: Irish American Songs of Old New York by Harrigan and Braham. By Mick Moloney. McNally's Row of Flats. Are you There Moriarity. The Regular Army-O. Patrick's Day Parade. Danny by my Side. Get Up Jack John Sit Down. Dad's Dinner Pail. Never Take the Horseshoe From the Door. I Never Drink Behind the Bar. The Babies on Our Block. The Mulligan Guard. Old Boss Barry. Such an Education Has My Mary Ann. Maggie Murphy's Home. Compass 4426, 2006.

This article surveys the reception of concert performances in Manhattan of music by John Cage, from his arrival in 1942 until his gala retrospective held in Town Hall in 1958, in particular comparing responses from composer-critics such as Virgil Thomson, stabled at the New York Herald Tribune, with that of music journalists based at the New York Times and other local dailies. Close reading of reviews and of an array of archival sources suggests that Cage's personal and professional relationships with composer-critics ensured that the reception of his music was uniquely well informed, and that his prepared piano works and early experiments with chance were treated with a remarkable degree of affirmation. Much of Cage's critical identity can be attributed to the aegis of Thomson, who, if he denied acting as “hired plugger” for Cage, nonetheless sympathetically construed him as Americanist, Francophile, post-Schoenbergian, and ultramodernist. Thomson's resignation from the Tribune in 1954 coincided with a pronounced deterioration in Manhattan critics' appreciation of Cage. I argue that the reasons for this lie as much with the demise of the composer-critic—and a reversal of Cage's own attitude to criticism—as with conservative disaffection with new forms of experimentalism.

Backstage at the Grand Ole Opry is one of my favorite places in Nashville. After checking in at the security desk, guests are free to wander the maze of hallways that connect the historic dressing rooms. Onstage, guests crowd into seats between the musicians and the red country-barn backdrop, watching the bustle of the show as the curtain rises and falls between segments. Announcers read famous slogans in advertising copy; legendary singers in sequins and rhinestones chat with up-and-coming performers in the wings; the Carol Lee Singers and house band keep the music humming along. Headliners take the stage and crack jokes with the audience, who, in turn, applaud their approval at the beginning of favorite songs. Square dancers kick up their heels while fans gather at the footlights to snap scrapbook pictures. The live broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry on WSM, on the air continuously since 1925, represent a collision of country's past and present in a beloved, nostalgic, and slightly chaotic performance tradition.

In reviewing and packing my musicological library in preparation for a move, I came across documentation for a variety of studies and projects from the late 1970s and early 1980s that were based upon an electronic future for musical scholarship. Twenty years ago, such pioneering musicologists as Ian Bent, Barry S. Brook, Jan LaRue, and William Malm were assembling large searchable databases of writings, music, and instruments, even as theorists like Mario Baroni, Allen Forte, and Arthur Wenk were exploring computer technology to analyze and devise “grammars” of melodic construction and to identify and compare pitch-class sets. In those pre-Oakland (barely pre-Contemplating Music) days of the American Musicological Society, the gathering of such sources was considered an honorable practice—indeed, we owe the eminently useful RILM to the perspicacious Brook. While these collections of data ostensibly were to enable comprehensiveness in study and serve the purposes of comparative analysis, they ultimately did not lead to interpretation, not at least of the critical type that Joseph Kerman and later Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary were advocating.