Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back by Mark Slobin

Abstract

164 The Michigan Historical Review present a larger narrative of art, architecture, and design underlying the story of building and rebuilding of Detroit. Using photographs of the sculptures and through careful research of underlying history, Morrison produces a catalog encompassing the immense history and high design value. Across various sculptors and their styles, Morrison underlines these sculptures as a “metaphor for the city” (p. 3), “a symbol of nationalism” (p. 73), “a representation of history and ideals” (p. 149), and “a marvel” (p. 241). In the process, however, Morrison fails to introduce or conclude regarding the possible storyline of integration of art, architecture, culture, and city building. He finds the perfect tool in his photographic skill—a passion and love—but does not allow it to provide a bigger picture. The book will be helpful for art and architecture students, researchers, and practitioners, especially those interested in the history of art and architecture in the region as well as to general citizens and city leaders interested in rich artistic traditions in Detroit. Through illustrative documentation of architectural sculptures from eight decades in Detroit’s history, the book offers a critical insight into the architectural scene in Detroit. It also argues for a much-needed case for documentation, preservation, and historic conservation in the city and the region to identify, protect, and celebrate its rich heritage in art and architecture. Anirban Adhya Lawrence Technological University Mark Slobin. Motor City Music: A Detroiter Looks Back. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 233. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth: $29.95. In Motor City Music, ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin aims to combine concentrated studies of the cultural impact of different immigrant and migrant groups in early- to mid-twentieth century Detroit with his own memories of growing up in a rapidly decentralizing ethnic neighborhood. By focusing on the intermingling of what he terms musical “traffic” in a nod to the city’s automotive culture, Slobin uses these stories, combined with archival research and interviews with prominent local musicians, to argue that neighborhood boundaries were porous enough to allow classical, popular, and ethnic music to converge in ways distinct to Detroit’s urban structures. The result is an unusual and uneven, Book Reviews 165 sometimes frustrating but often fascinating, glimpse of the city’s musical history beyond the customary focus on Paradise Valley jazz and Motown. Slobin begins with an examination of his early years, growing up in Detroit’s Jewish neighborhood, in a family with close ties to Eastern Europe. There are moments when his personal recollections feel like slapdash footnotes to more traditional research sources—noting that his school concert band shared a program with a noted orchestral teacher, or that his parents were friends with several esteemed local musicians, for instance, do little to bring the narratives to life. But in the introduction, he elegantly shows how listening to old Yiddish folk tunes, Soviet political anthems, American pop ditties, and classical concertos could form a musical soundscape that encouraged outreach and experimentation. He carries this argument through an intriguing, if somewhat disjointed, chapter on how the musical styles of different immigrant and migrant groups shaped the city’s culture during the Depression and World War II, and into a more fully realized section on how Jewish Detroiters re-shaped the mainstream music scene to reflect their own backgrounds and struggles. While Slobin does an admirable job detailing the heretofore unexamined effect that Jewish residents had on the city’s culture, most of the other specific ethnic and regional profiles are too cursory to function as in-depth examinations of the music forms themselves. And yet they still provide an intriguing look at how new residents kept their traditions alive while simultaneously helping to create new, multi-layered “American” identities. Slobin’s efforts to explain the intersections among music and race relations, however, are not quite as effective. In a chapter devoted to the city’s high school music programs in the 1930s and ’40s, for instance, he nicely describes how students of diverse backgrounds were trained in classical music stylings, even as African-American graduates were denied access to the same positions that awaited their peers. The programs ended, he explains, when...