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Author(s): DEXTER EDGE
Review by: DEXTER EDGE
Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Fall 2006), pp. 739-
747
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
Society
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 Reviews 739

analysis of pre-tonal (if not specifically medieval) music need not be distorted
by an author’s own knowledge of what would come later, or read only
through the prism of later priorities.
In chapter 4, “Evidence, Interpretation, Power and Persuasion,” Leech-
Wilkinson departs from his chronological model to consider larger questions
concerning the study of medieval music. As with chapter 1, this chapter
should be read (and discussed!) by every graduate student in musicology. The
past twenty years have seen enormous changes in musicology brought about
by challenges to our idea of a musical canon. The author demonstrates to
non-medievalists the centrality of medieval music to the formation and contin-
ual reconceptualization of musicological scholarship, while he suggests to me-
dievalists ways in which we can rejoin the central conversation. He reconsiders
the various strands of his chronological surveys, and the observations he draws
are valid for the whole field of musicology.
It always comes down to evidence and its interpretation. The interpretation
of medieval music, and specifically discussion of its performance, its sounding
presence, ground to a halt for a while after Richard Taruskin pointed out in a
series of articles that our ideas about authenticity were, well, inauthentic.13
Taruskin has convinced us that it is impossible to know what anything
sounded like in the past. Leech-Wilkinson agrees, but tells us that, even so, it
remains worthwhile to ask questions about the performance of medieval
music, “not because we are establishing ‘what happened’ but because the
readings we produce help us to make sense—our sense—of what survives”
(p. 259).
ELIZABETH RANDELL UPTON

Manuscripts from Mannheim, ca. 1730–1778: A Study in the Methodology of

Musical Source Research, by Eugene K. Wolf, in collaboration with Jean K.
Wolf and Paul Corneilson. Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mann-
heimer Hofkapelle 9. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. 408 pp.

The study of musical sources is currently far from fashionable, particularly in

North America, where the subject, now seldom taught, is perhaps considered
a relic of a bygone positivistic age. But even in the alleged heyday of musico-
logical positivism, between the end of the Second World War and the publi-
cation of Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press) in 1985, few scholars applied rigorous methods and stan-
dards to the study of musical manuscripts, and only a handful applied them to

13. Most of the relevant articles are collected in Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on
Music and Performance (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

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740 Journal of the American Musicological Society

musical manuscripts of the eighteenth century. Eugene K. Wolf, who died on

12 December 2002, was one of those who did. His passing and that of his
mentor Jan LaRue in 2004, following close on the deaths of Wolfgang Plath
in 1995 and Alan Tyson in 2000, mark the end of an era in the study of
eighteenth-century musical sources.
In a series of classic articles published in the 1950s and 60s, LaRue articu-
lated a broad vision of the ways in which the history of eighteenth-century in-
strumental music might be elucidated through the study of musical style.1 The
key to this approach, LaRue realized, was to attain a thorough understanding
of the common currency of a style in order to be able to recognize what was
innovative and individual within it. In order to do this, one had first to define
and establish as carefully and comprehensively as possible the repertoire of
works that constituted the style. To establish a repertoire required in turn that
the sources of that repertoire be located and dated as accurately as possible,
and their attributions evaluated. Wolf was one of the more prominent of
LaRue’s many students at New York University who carried forward this vi-
sion in their own scholarly work and teaching. Throughout his career, begin-
ning with his doctoral dissertation on the symphonies of Johann Stamitz, Wolf
was principally engaged with the symphonies produced by composers at the
Mannheim court in the eighteenth century.2 His work on that repertoire was
built upon a comprehensive and meticulous examination of the (mostly
manuscript) sources of that music, coupled with careful reasoning about the
implications of those sources. He was also an important innovator in the
methodology of musical source studies, particularly in his work on staff ruling.
The book under review represents the definitive statement of Wolf ’s work
on musical manuscripts associated with Mannheim, in all genres, instrumental,
operatic, and sacred. Yet his book also has a wider pedagogical aim, as he ex-
plains in his preface: “The broader purpose of this book, as emphasized by its
subtitle, is to furnish an example of, and detailed introduction to, a basic
methodology for the study of music manuscripts from approximately the sev-
enteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries” (p. 12). The fundamental
problem of the Mannheim repertoire can be simply stated: few musical
sources from eighteenth-century Mannheim survive, and hardly any of those
that do are in Mannheim today. The musical holdings of the Mannheim court
were divided when Elector Carl Theodor moved his court to Munich in 1778.
Much of the music that remained in Mannheim was lost when the court opera
house was destroyed during the Austrian siege in 1795 (Mannheim was occu-

1. Several of LaRue’s fundamental articles on musical source studies and style are reprinted in
“A Birthday Salute to Jan LaRue,” special issue, Journal of Musicology 18, no. 2 (Spring 2001).
2. Eugene K. Wolf, “The Symphonies of Johann Stamitz: Authenticity, Chronology, and
Style” (PhD diss., New York University, 1972). This dissertation was the basis for Wolf ’s The
Symphonies of Johann Stamitz: A Study in the Formation of the Classic Style with a Thematic Cata-
logue of the Symphonies and Orchestral Trios (Utrecht: Bohn, Scheltema & Holkema; The Hague
and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981).

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 Reviews 741

pied by the French at the time). Most of the rest was lost in the devastation of
the Second World War. For that reason, nearly all of the surviving musical
manuscripts from eighteenth-century Mannheim are today preserved else-
where in widely scattered collections.
One of Wolf’s major contributions to the history of eighteenth-century
music was the reconstruction, with the assistance of his wife Jean K. Wolf and
later Paul Corneilson, of the surviving corpus of musical manuscripts pro-
duced in Mannheim or closely associated with the city under the Electors Carl
Philipp and Carl Theodor. Much of Wolf ’s book revises and supersedes earlier
published articles by him and his collaborators, most notably ones published
in this Journal in 1974 and 1994.3 During the intervening years, Wolf was
able to augment considerably the catalogue of manuscripts that he had pub-
lished in 1974; some notable additions include the recently discovered auto-
graph score of Ignaz Holzbauer’s opera Günther von Schwarzburg, numerous
sources for the works of Abbé Georg Joseph Vogler, and a large group of vocal
works and overtures in the Pretlack collection in the Staatsbibliothek zu
Berlin.4
Wolf ’s first chapter summarizes the history of music at the electoral court in
Mannheim from 1720 until the removal of the court to Munich in 1778, and
traces the history of the music collection of the Mannheim court. Chapter 2,
“Codicological Evidence: Methods for the Study of Eighteenth-Century
Music Manuscripts,” offers a thorough and relatively up-to-date introduction
to methods for the analysis of eighteenth-century musical manuscripts; this
chapter could easily be used as a basic text for a course on the subject.5 Wolf
takes great care in choosing appropriate technical terms and using them con-
sistently. For example, he prefers the term “compound rastrum” for devices

3. Eugene K. Wolf and Jean K. Wolf, “A Newly Identified Complex of Manuscripts from
Mannheim,” this Journal 27 (1974): 379–437; and Paul Corneilson and Eugene K. Wolf,
“Newly Identified Manuscripts of Operas and Related Works from Mannheim,” this Journal 47
(1994): 244–74 (oddly, Wolf consistently gives the date of this article as 1992). A revised version
of the latter forms the basis of chapter 8 in the book under review. In addition, portions of
chapter 1 are based on Wolf ’s chapter on Mannheim in Neal Zaslaw, ed., The Classical Era: From
the 1740s to the End of the 18th Century (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989); the coverage
of musical staff ruling in chapter 2 summarizes the more detailed treatment given in Jean K. Wolf
and Eugene K. Wolf, “Rastrology and Its Use in Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Studies,” in
Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in Honor of Jan LaRue, ed. Eugene K. Wolf and
Edward H. Roesner, 237–91 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1990).
4. For Wolf ’s summary of the principal revisions and augmentations to his earlier work, see
pp. 36–37. A few manuscripts in the 1974 catalogue have been removed from the book; see
p. 37n37.
5. Disclosure: in 1999 and 2000, as I was engaged in writing my own detailed introduction
to the analysis of musical manuscripts, Wolf and I were in occasional contact via e-mail and in per-
son. At one point we traded early drafts of the relevant chapters of our work on manuscript analy-
sis. Our chapters cover roughly the same ground, but differ considerably in scope, methodology,
and the range of examples adduced. See my “Mozart’s Viennese Copyists” (PhD diss., University
of Southern California, 2001), esp. chap. 3.

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742 Journal of the American Musicological Society

capable of ruling two or more staves at a time. This term has the advantage of
generality, in that it can be used to refer to a broad range of devices for ruling
music paper, and it is more precise than such commonly used but misleading
terms as “machine ruled.” Occasionally Wolf ’s terminology is less apt; for
example, his use of the term “papyrological” to refer to the study of paper
(p. 55) is perhaps not the best choice, given that the term has currency among
scholars who study papyrus. The more mundane “paper studies” is preferable.
Wolf points out that most of the music paper used in Mannheim came
from Swiss mills, with smaller amounts coming from German mills; northern
Italian paper of the kind commonly found in the autographs of Mozart and
other composers active in Vienna, as well as in most Viennese copies of this
period, does not appear in manuscripts from Mannheim. The book thus func-
tions as, among other things, a valuable source of information about types of
paper that have hitherto received little attention from music historians, infor-
mation that may well be useful to scholars working on regions other than
Mannheim.
Wolf ’s most important contribution to the analysis of musical manuscripts
has been his elucidation of the many types of compound rastra used for ruling
staff lines in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and his
demonstration of the scholarly benefits of a close comparison of such rastra.6
Wolf advocates a system of detailed measurements as the best method for
comparing and distinguishing rastra, and this method has clearly worked well
for him in the repertoire with which he is principally concerned. I have sug-
gested elsewhere that methods of direct visual comparison may be both sim-
pler and potentially more reliable than measurement for establishing the
identity of rastra.7 Even so, measurement continues to play a role in the classi-
fication of rastra and in the communication of information about them. In any
case, Wolf ’s explication of his method remains essential reading for anyone in-

6. See principally Wolf and Wolf, “Rastrology and Its Use in Eighteenth-Century Manuscript
Studies,” summarized in pp. 65–88 of the book under review.
7. For a critique of Wolf ’s method and a discussion of visual methods for the comparison of
staff ruling, see my “Mozart’s Viennese Copyists,” 363–70. Wolf ’s survey of the work of other
scholars on staff ruling fails to mention the important work of Paul J. Everett on early eighteenth-
century Italian manuscripts; Everett also advocates the use of visual methods for the comparison
of staff ruling, although his method differs from mine. See Paul J. Everett, “The Application and
Usefulness of ‘Rastrology,’ with Particular Reference to Early Eighteenth-Century Italian
Manuscripts,” in Musica e filologia, contributi in occasione del festival “Musica e filologia” Verona,
30 settembre–18 ottobre 1982, ed. Marco Di Pasquale and Richard Pierce, 135–58 (Verona:
Edizioni della Società Letteraria, 1983); and idem, The Manchester Concerto Partbooks (New York:
Garland, 1989). Wolf (p. 81n68) incorrectly claims that I suggested to him that musical staff rul-
ing might be measured using a good-quality caliper. I never made such a claim. I personally have
advocated the use of visual methods for comparing staff ruling since the early 1990s. Recent ex-
periments suggest that direct comparison of digital images has tremendous potential as a simple
but highly accurate method for comparing staff ruling.

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 Reviews 743

terested in the (still mainly untapped) potential of rastrology for the dating of
musical manuscripts.
Wolf closes his survey of the techniques of manuscript analysis with a brief
discussion (pp. 88–94) of techniques for the description and comparison of
musical handwriting. This section is perhaps less satisfactory as a general intro-
duction to the topic than the other sections in chapter 2, but his method is
generally adequate for the relatively restricted range of hands that appear in
the corpus of manuscripts with which he is concerned.8
Chapters 3–9 provide a comprehensive discussion of all known surviving
musical manuscripts that originated at Mannheim from around 1730 until
1778, or that were closely associated with the city during that period (for ex-
ample, opera manuscripts copied elsewhere, but used in Mannheim). These
seven chapters follow the organization of the six tables in his appendix A
(pp. 223–92), which list the entire known corpus of Mannheim manuscripts
(table VI in appendix A combines the manuscripts discussed in chapters 8 and
9). As Wolf explains at the end of his introduction (p. 45): “[This] organiza-
tion is . . . based on a combination of two factors: (1) the strength of evidence
for Mannheim provenance . . . and (2) a desire for simplicity and clarity of or-
ganization.” Chapter 3 and appendix A/I deal with what Wolf calls the “core”
manuscripts—that is, twenty-four manuscripts that carry original annotations
explicitly linking them with Mannheim: seven manuscripts now in the collec-
tion of the Jesuitenkirche in Mannheim; six autographs of the composer Carlo
Grua; three ballets copied by Sigismund Falgera; and eight autographs of
works that Mozart composed in Mannheim. Although Wolf himself does not
explicitly make the point, his inclusion of Mozart’s autographs accentuates the
difference between what he calls a “corpus” of manuscripts and what might be
called the Mannheim “repertoire,” the body of works written by composers
resident in Mannheim. One might for various reasons not want to claim that
Mozart’s works belong to the Mannheim musical repertoire (he was, after all,
only a visitor in Mannheim, not a member of its musical establishment); but
the analysis of the manuscripts that Mozart produced in Mannheim undoubt-
edly helps us better understand the corpus of manuscripts produced there.
Chapter 4 and appendix A/II are devoted to the autographs and other
manuscripts of works by Ignaz Holzbauer. Chapter 5 and appendix A/III
deal comprehensively with manuscripts of orchestral music by Christian
Cannabich. Miscellaneous autographs of Carlo Grua, Franz Xaver Richter,
and Mozart that do not carry explicit annotations of provenance are discussed
in chapter 6, and manuscripts of music by Vogler are dealt with in chapter 7.
Chapter 8 covers manuscripts of operas and related works; here the strictures
on the provenance of manuscripts are loosened to include items produced
elsewhere that can be demonstrated to have been used in Mannheim or to

8. For a more comprehensive discussion of methods for the description and comparison of
musical handwriting, see my “Mozart’s Viennese Copyists,” 192–323.

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744 Journal of the American Musicological Society

have been in a collection there in the eighteenth century. Chapter 9 is a mis-

cellany, dealing with all other manuscripts that can be associated with
Mannheim for one reason or another.
This organization by strength of provenance has the advantage of making
clear the relative certainty with which various manuscripts can be linked to
Mannheim, but it is potentially confusing for the reader in other ways. For ex-
ample, the discussion of the sources of Grua’s works is split among chapters 3,
6, and 9, and that of Holzbauer’s among chapters 4, 8, and 9. Wolf ’s commit-
ment to a comprehensive discussion of sources is admirable and invaluable;
but it must be admitted that the discussion does not always make for gripping
reading. Only a Cannabich specialist or a reviewer is likely to wade through
every word of chapter 5, on the many sets of parts for the very many sym-
phonies and other orchestral works by that composer. Yet this chapter estab-
lishes a persuasive chronology of those sources that would certainly provide a
crucial basis for any assessment of Cannabich’s own development as a com-
poser and of his role in the history of music at Mannheim. In fact, most of
Wolf’s discussions of individual sources are models of clear reasoning about
the implications that may be drawn from the technical analysis of manuscript
sources. To take just one small example from among many: his analysis
(pp. 123–24) of the autograph of Holzbauer’s oratorio Betulia liberata shows
beyond a reasonable doubt that this manuscript dates not from the time of the
earliest known performance of the work in 1760, but rather from the early
1770s, and thus represents “a newly prepared score of the revised version of
this oratorio that was performed at Mannheim in 1774” (p. 124).
Nearly 160 pages of the book (almost 40 percent of the total) are devoted
to four major appendices: appendix A, “a comprehensive catalogue raisonné of
all the manuscripts considered here to have originated at the Mannheim
court” (p. 223); appendix B, a comprehensive account of the watermarks in
the papers used for these manuscripts; appendix C, a series of tables listing all
of the compound rastra found in them; and appendix D, descriptions of their
“copyists” (a term that Wolf uses for all musical handwritings, including those
of composers). Appendix A will surely serve as the fundamental reference on
sources of the Mannheim musical repertoire for the foreseeable future.
Although this appendix as a whole can be considered highly reliable, some of
the less central listings may need to be treated with caution. For example, the
first two items in table VI (“Other Manuscripts from Mannheim,” p. 262) are
sets of parts in the monastery of Klosterneuburg in Austria (A-KN) for
Holzbauer Masses in B flat and E flat. Upon closer scrutiny, Wolf ’s case for
assigning these manuscripts to Mannheim seems less than fully persuasive:
apart from the fact that the masses are by Holzbauer, the only other bit of
direct evidence linking them to Mannheim seems to be that the copyist
“Mannheim 1” is found in the vocal parts for the Mass in E flat. Another
copyist associated with these parts (Wolf ’s “KN/Mh. 1”) appears only in
these two masses, as does the rastrum with which the parts are ruled (Wolf ’s

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 Reviews 745

“12:6” in appendix C), and there is no evident reason to associate either the
copyist or the rastrum with Mannheim. The watermark of the parts for the
Mass in B flat (“?J. J. Heusler 1”) is merely similar to one in a partially auto-
graph set of parts for a Holzbauer symphony in Regensburg, and the water-
mark of the parts for the Mass in E flat (“Blum 4a”) is found only in these
parts, thus providing no clear evidence of provenance.9 Although we can by
no means rule out the possibility that the manuscripts in Klosterneuburg
come from Mannheim, the presence of a single Mannheim copyist in one of
the two sets of parts seems insufficient to make the case. In source studies, the
devil is very much in the details.
Entry 102 in table A/VI (p. 273) lists a set of parts for a soprano aria by
Holzbauer, “Sentirsi dire dal caro bene,” a setting of a text from Metastasio’s
Semiramide riconosciuta, where it belongs to the character Mirteo. As Wolf
points out, Holzbauer is not known to have set Semiramide, and no setting of
it is known to have been performed in Mannheim. Although the manuscript
seems to stem from Mannheim, one wonders whether the aria itself might
date from before Holzbauer’s time in that city. As it happens, Gluck’s setting
of that text was the first opera performed in the Burgtheater in Vienna in
1748, at a time when Holzbauer was director of the theater’s orchestra and his
wife Rosalie at least occasionally took soprano roles in productions there.
Perhaps there is a connection.
Appendix B provides descriptions of all of the watermarks found in the
sources listed in appendix A. Images are provided for the most important of
these watermarks, although only of a single mold in each case; the images are
based on Wolf ’s own (quite good) tracings, and are reproduced in the book at
a uniform reduction (75 percent of full size); a centimeter ruler is included in
each image. Appendix C provides a comprehensive list of all compound rastra
discussed in the book, including rastra with two, four, five, six, seven, ten, and
twelve staves. Wolf makes the surprising claim (p. 320) that “ten-stave paper
lined with two passes of a five-stave rastrum (2 x 5) is very common in Italian
and Viennese music manuscripts. . . .” I cannot recall ever finding a persuasive
example of this type of ruling in any of the several hundred Viennese manu-
scripts that I have examined dating from the period 1740 to 1800. Viennese
manuscripts from that period are almost universally ruled with full-page rastra.
Appendix D describes fifty-eight different “copyists” (including the hands
of such composers as Cannabich, Holzbauer, and Mozart), ten known by
name, and forty-eight anonymous ones (although Wolf makes plausible sug-
gestions for the identities of several of these). Nearly all of the hands are illus-
trated by reproductions of Wolf ’s own tracings of their most important

9. Of the two other watermarks that Wolf groups together with “Blum 4a” in appendix B,
“Blum 4b” has a “somewhat different shield” (p. 300) and occurs only in one source, and Wolf
admits that he is uncertain whether his “Blum 4,” likewise from a single source, is equivalent to
Blum 4a or 4b.

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746 Journal of the American Musicological Society

characteristics (clefs, time signatures, and the like); facsimiles from manuscripts
are included for the most important hands. In a few cases, the match between
his tracings and the symbols in the facsimiles is inexact; for example, the C-
clefs (and to a lesser extent, the bass clefs) in Wolf ’s tracings of the hand of
Franz Xaver Richter (p. 338) are not good matches with those in the accom-
panying facsimile from a Richter autograph (p. 339).
But these criticisms are largely quibbles over detail in what remains an ex-
traordinarily useful reference and a monument to Wolf ’s meticulous work on
Mannheim sources over the course of more than three decades. The book was
set from camera-ready copy prepared by Wolf himself; that this is not obvious
is a compliment to Wolf ’s skill. The book is remarkably free of typographical
errors. Among the few that I have found: the texts of notes 9 and 10 on p. 26
are reversed relative to their proper positions; “my” on the fourth line from
the bottom of p. 38 should be “may”; and the transcription in the caption
to figure 4.1 on p. 122 should read “17: 8b: 1763,” not “18: 8b: 1763.” On
p. 129 Wolf refers to the flourishes often found in eighteenth-century signa-
tures as “mano propria” signs; these flourishes are usually derived (sometimes
in a highly stylized way) from the abbreviations “m.p.,” “m.pia,” or some-
thing similar. The correct Latin is “manu propria” (by [my] own hand), where
“manu” is the ablative of the fourth-declension feminine noun “manus.”10
In describing the “scholarly stance” of his book, Wolf writes (p. 13):
Some—many—musicologists will no doubt consider this book an example of
rampant positivism. . . . But my hope would be that those scholars whose inter-
ests run to more critical and interpretive approaches would at least recognize
the utility for many kinds of studies of having solid control of areas of source re-
search such as authenticity, chronology, and provenance as a foundation or
background for their work. . . . One might even hope, probably quixotically,
that those with other scholarly interests and agendas might grant that interpre-
tation, creativity, and imagination can occasionally characterize even such os-
tensibly sterile pursuits as the dating of a manuscript or the establishment of a
stemma. In any event, I do not myself regard the kind of highly empirical re-
search depicted in this book as inherently more important than, or somehow
superior to, the manifold other approaches that are now accepted parts of the
pluralistic discipline we call musicology. Indeed, I shall be perfectly happy never
again to trace another watermark or measure another set of staves!

This seems to me unnecessarily defensive. Source studies are fundamental in

any historical discipline, and everything we as musicologists do, regardless of
our approach or agenda, is to some degree historical, whether we are writing
about music of the fourteenth century or music we heard last night. In a non-
trivial sense, even the secondary sources we cite are historical. History without

10. The sentence referring to “mano propria” is taken over directly from Wolf and Wolf, “A
Newly Identified Complex of Manuscripts from Mannheim,” 388.

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 Reviews 747

sources is fantasy. It is not the need for source studies that changes, but rather
the questions that we want the sources to answer.
Gene, as he was universally known to those who knew him, attended the
AMS meeting in Houston in 2002, six weeks before he died. He looked more
frail than when I had last seen him in Lisbon a couple of years earlier, and it
seemed clear to me at the time that he had come to Houston to say goodbye
to his friends in the field. At that meeting, he gave me a great gift: as I deliv-
ered my paper, “The Genesis of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro,” Gene sat just a
few rows from the front, directly in my line of sight. As I paused in my reading
at one point to look up at the audience, I saw that he was beaming at me with
an enormous smile, as if I were his own child.
And in a scholarly sense, I am. Gene is deeply missed, and it is our tremen-
dous loss that he will never trace another watermark or measure another set
of staves.
DEXTER EDGE

Pioneers of Jazz: The Story of the Creole Band, by Lawrence Gushee. Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xii, 384 pp.

In this unusual and excellent book, Lawrence Gushee traces the activities of
an important band during the late 1910s, as it makes its way across North
America on vaudeville circuits. For most of the thousands of people who
heard it, the Creole Band was the first to communicate the exciting sounds of
early jazz from New Orleans. This “African American” (the scare quotes will
be explained below) band was good enough to make its way in shows that
were otherwise exclusively white. They accomplished this by playing music
that was described by one reviewer as “the squeak of a clarinet and the thrum-
ming of a bass viol, all grouped together in some sort of African time”
(p. 195). The story is thus of great importance, and Gushee’s telling of it
holds tremendous value.
The range of documentary evidence Gushee brings to bear on the topic is
truly astonishing. Virtually no kind of documentary evidence escapes his
notice: newspapers, census reports, family scrapbooks, contracts, photographs,
police reports, wills, birth certificates, draft registrations, baptismal records,
death certificates, marriage certificates, surnames, addresses, magazine articles,
a novel, speeches made for jazz fans, and interviews—many, many interviews,
of all types and degrees of reliability. In a series of earlier articles that are well
known among jazz scholars, Gushee demonstrated how to work with this
range of diverse evidence. In Pioneers of Jazz he goes much further. The book
reflects the work of a lifetime.
Early jazz in general has been neglected by musicology, and its manifesta-
tion through vaudeville even more so. As musicians started to leave New

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