Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood

by Kramer,Lawrence

• ISBN13: 9780815331544
• ISBN10: 0815331541
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-04-20
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Walt Whitman's poetry, especially his Civil War poetry, attracted settings by a wide variety of modern composers in both English- and German-speaking countries. The essays in this volume trace the transformation of Whitman's nineteenth-century texts into vehicles for confronting twentieth-century problems-aesthetic, social, and political. The contributors pay careful attention to music and poetry alike in examining how the Whitman settings become exemplary means of dealing with both the tragic and utopian faces of modernism. The book is accompanied by a CD recording by Joan Heller and Thomas Stumpf of complete Whitman cycles composed by Kurt Weill, George Crumb, and Lawrence Kramer, and the first recording of four Whitman songs composed in the 1920s by Marc Blitzstein.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Series Editor's Foreword	ix
Daniel Albright
Introduction	xvii
Lawrence Kramer
``Red War Is My Song'': Whitman, Higginson and Civil War Music	1	(24)
John M. Picker
``No Armpits, Please, We're British'': Whitman and English Music, 1884-1936	25	(18)
Byron Adams
Eros, Expressionism, and Exile: Whitman in German Music	43	(22)
Werner Grunzweig
Walter Grunzweig
Reclaiming Walt: Marc Blitzstein's Whitman Settings	65	(24)
David Metzer
A Visionary Backward Glance: The Divided Experience in Paul Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd: A Requiem ``For Those We Love''	89	(20)
Philip Coleman-Hull
``I'm an American!'' Whitman, Weill, and Cultural Identity	109	(24)
Kim H. Kowalke
Three American Requiems: Contemplating ``When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd''	133	(18)
Kathy Rugoff
Like Falling Leaves: The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps Settings	151	(16)
Lawrence Kramer
Contributors	167	(2)
Notes to the Compact Disc	169	(4)
Index of Names	173	(4)
Index of Titles	177