Sigma Alpha Iota

sai-national.org • Winter 2026 29 DOLLY PARTON: JOURNEY OF A SEEKER edited by Paul Kingsbury Country Music Foundation Press, 2025 As recently reported in PAN PIPES (Fall 2025), the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has opened the exhibition Dolly Parton: Journey of a Seeker, which will run through 2026. This book is a companion catalog to that exhibition. SAI Honorary Member Dolly Parton's career has been going on for many decades; the catalog covers the highlights of Parton's life, as well as showcases the documents, costumes, musical instruments, and more that have been significant to her. The production values of the book are superb, and it features large color photographs and easily legible text. In addition to its many images, its chapters provide the story of the beginning of Parton's musical career, and background on some of her most famous songs and lavish costumes. The writing emphasizes how Parton's determination and sense of self provided the foundation for all her career decisions and success. Her philanthropic efforts such as her Imagination Library—in which she provides free books to children throughout the United States and beyond—are also noted. It would have been ideal if the book had been a little more extensive (it has 80 pages that can be perused quickly), but what is there is wonderful and serves its purpose well— giving readers and fans a small taste of and motivation to visit the exhibition in Nashville. It sounds like something not to be missed! Kathi Bower Peterson is a graduate of Indiana University, where she majored in music history and oboe, and was a member of the Iota Epsilon chapter. She also has an MM (in musicology) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MLIS from San Jose State University. She has been the librarian at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library in La Jolla, California since 1997 and currently serves as the treasurer of the San Diego Alumnae Chapter. She recently finished serving three terms as Coordinator of Scholarships for SAI Philanthropies, Inc. Bk Reviews ART MUSIC ACTIVISM: AESTHETICS AND POLITICS IN 1930S NEW YORK CITY by Maria Cristina Fava University of Illinois Press, 2024 Art Music Activism uses the New York City of the 1930s to explore some of the most important issues in the arts of that era. Faced then with the economic hardships of the Depression, artists such as composers worked to find an approach to creating music that expressed the dominant concerns of society in a way that could be understand by all sectors of the population, yet would still allow them to maintain a high aesthetic standard while practicing innovation. As Fava shows the reader, despite the many organizations created for this purpose, as well as government support through such programs as the Works Progress Administration (WPA), this was not an easy task, one that led to mixed results. After an introduction in which she provides cultural context as well as an overview of the book, Fava devotes her first chapter to the question of how best to reach the "proletariat" using music. Because a large number of cultural agents were left- leaning, seeing Communism as a solution for the political and economic problems of what they considered to be a non-egalitarian society, they prioritized further education of the working class, or proletariat, about the benefits this new system afforded. To this end, the Composers' Collective of New York was formed in 1932 and later determined that the best musical genres to accomplish this were mass songs to be sung at events such as demonstrations and parades, choral songs for amateur as well as professional groups, and solo songs that considered common themes in people's lives. Borrowing inspiration from Russia and Germany, these composers attempted to combine elements of folk music and art music. Ultimately these efforts failed to gain traction with the masses and were not aesthetically satisfying to the composers. Subsequent chapters explore cultural organizations such as the Workers' Theater Movement and the path it took to politicizing musical revues, including how it and the Composers' Collective worked within the WPA. In addition, Fava describes how groups such as the Federal Music Project and the Living Newspaper Unit initiated a trend toward a more avant- garde style of composition as well as further experimentation in music overall. Fava's final chapter is devoted to composer Marc Blitzstein's musical, The Cradle Will Rock. In her opinion, this work "successfully [combined] experimentation, vernacular idioms, and a socio-political message," making it "one of the strongest manifestations of labor theater." She explains how the first performance of the musical, which, due to logistical issues and the sudden policy changes of the WPA, had to be performed without costumes, scenery, or an orchestra (although Blitzstein meant for it to be performed in the traditional fashion). This unexpectedly led to its success and emulation by other productions, inspiring philosophical arguments about the purpose and methods of theater. Fava has done meticulous research, and her book is unquestionably well-written. It is perfect for readers who are willing to seriously engage with political and cultural theories and issues, and it provides an intriguing look at an important decade in our country's musical life.

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