Book Reviews 391 Most chapters end with their own bibliography. The appendices at the end of the book contain the ILL code for the United States, as well as an explanatory supplement. Perhaps most useful is the list of figures provided near the begin- ning. Throughout the book, figures are used to depict images of various samples of library policies and forms used for ILL and document delivery, which allow readers to easily visualize what is being described. The writing style and language of this book are focused toward librar- ians and information professionals who are already familiar with library-related terms and phrases. This book presents a simplified look at how to set up and maintain a small-scale ILL operation and would be of most interest to librarians and information professionals. It takes a realistic approach to what smaller librar- ies are able to offer in terms of ILL and document delivery services and offers ad- vice to librarians developing these types of operations within their libraries.—Judy P. Bolstad, University of California, Berkeley. Barry Cooper. Child Composers & Their Works: A Historical Survey. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009. 216p. alk. paper, $65 (ISBN 9780810869110). LC2009-000236. When does a composer become a com- poser? Barry Cooper sets out to re- habilitate and reassess the musical compositions of Western young people. He is quite right that Western music history has tended both to prejudice “adult” works (however defined) and to favor that “mature” music that spe- cifically advances musical style. It has more or less ignored the “juvenilia” of major composers, even when such compositions contain formal coherence or musical innovation, features that are clearly valued later in the composer ’s life. Child Composers & Their Works at its best attempts to shine scholarly light on neglected corners in this repertory. It sometimes does so, however, at the ex- pense of objectivity and sound method. The heart of the book’s value as a li- brary reference work is the “Annotated Checklist of Notable Child Composers.” For more than 100 individuals, who wrote more than 2000 “childhood” pieces of music, Cooper has assembled snapshots of compositional lives before the age of sixteen (admitting this is an arbitrary boundary). Each person is listed in chron- ological order by date of birth, and each receives a brief prose description of his or her early compositional life, including a discussion of specific musical features where possible, an extremely helpful discography of extant musical recordings, and a brief bibliography. The availability of documentation unfortunately governs the depth of Cooper’s entries and leads to an inevitable unevenness of treatment. He cites, for instance, evidence for several years’ worth of lost Händel church music, documentation that probably is known only because it concerns Händel. For Mozart, Felix Mendelssohn, and Richard Strauss, enough of their “childhood” music (and musicological commentary on it) survives that several pages of text can present Cooper’s thoughtful take on the development of these composers as chil- dren. For Rossini, there is a critical evalu- ation of his early musical style and, for Schubert, extensive discussion of a single early work. In the case of composers such as Bonville (99), or even Paganini (105), on the other hand, the documentation for more than a sentence or two either does not exist or has not yet been uncovered. The Checklist allows Cooper to ad- vance several fascinating observations on “child composers” as a group (chapter 5). It is quite common for a child composer to have a musical parent, for instance, but also to live without parental pressure to compose. Many child composers have early training at the keyboard, which helps to foster their early musical experi- mentation. Several “prodigies” surpris- ingly become more conservative in style later in life, which further contributes to their marginalization in common music histories. Erich Korngold, “one of the 392 College & Research Libraries July 2010 most outstanding of all child composers” (192), serves as Cooper’s star example of a prodigy who veers later into conserva- tism. Despite the scarcity of documenta- tion across the spectrum of child compos- ers, Cooper’s observations in this chapter are among his most interesting. Despite the book’s reference value and insightful observations, however, its limi- tations tend to overwhelm it. Again, the basic source material for many compos- ers’ childhood composition is generally lacking. This can be the case for many reasons, including documentation gaps for earlier composers, later compos- ers’ suppression of their own youthful music, or a simple lack of publications for childhood works. Furthermore, Coo- per’s checklist is “compiled mainly from standard dictionaries, biographies, and thematic catalogs” (8). Thus there is an unavoidable but powerful bias toward children who eventually became adult composers, or at least adults with a strong connection to the music industry, such as conductor Fürtwängler or musicologist Fétis. This unavoidable bias is especially problematic considering Cooper’s desire to address “not the childhood works of major composers, but the major works of all child composers” (4); his goal as stated may be nearly impossible. Conse- quently, many of Cooper’s conclusions in the central chapter on “common charac- teristics” of child composers are difficult to substantiate: what does it mean, for instance, that, among this particular sample of musically important people who composed as children, so many of them became composers as adults? In addition, it is problematic to evaluate the young composers for the quality of their work by “adult” criteria such as whether or not they composed a “major work” by the time they were sixteen (65–66). Cooper situates his work quite ap- propriately within the context of femi- nist and other musicological methods: prejudices about gender, race, and sexual orientation have similarly sidelined other groups of composers within the Western musical canon. Certainly (as Cooper sup- ports with innumerable quotations) the musical works of child composers have too often been viewed as “juvenilia” and thus have been marginalized in the course of both music history and the history of a composer ’s own develop- ment. Frequently, a young person’s music follows the models the child knows—in which case it might be dismissed as derivative—or it deviates from the standards of the day—in which case it might be labeled incompetent. Cooper addresses the fundamental question of youthful musical creativity in many of these cases and argues passionately that the book’s corpus of childhood composi- tions are not only technically competent but, in many cases, show nascent musical minds giving early utterance to creative ideas that will later bear greater fruit. For instance, a young Beethoven explores the dramatic release of a C minor to C major shift, which will later feature in the Fifth Symphony, and an adolescent Chopin considers the radical shift of ending a virtuosic dance number in a different key. Despite its strengths, Child Composers & Their Works is difficult to assess. It may be the case that Cooper is heralding the opening of a completely new field in musicology. He suggests the possibility of a “childist” revision of music history (73), in which case Child Composers & Their Works will be a foundational volume, soon superceded and supplemented on the reference shelf (Cooper often alludes to future research that could supplement and fortify his catalog). Or it could be a highly interesting, but ultimately mar- ginal, recapitulation of musical works, many of which are still not ready for prime time.—Timothy J. Dickey, OCLC Research, Dublin, Ohio. Martin Austin Nesvig. Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. 366p. alk. paper, $60 (ISBN 9780300140408). LC2008-054919.