Making Music Modern New York in the 1920s

by Oja, Carol J.

• ISBN13: 9780195162578
• ISBN10: 0195162579
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-02-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Marion Bauer, George Antheil-these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

Author Biography

Carol Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is co-editor of Aaron Copland and his World, as well as author of Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds, which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, and American Music Recordings: A Discography of U.S. Composers.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Modern Music Shop	3	(8)
Enter the Moderns
Leo Ornstein: ``Wild Man'' of the 1910s	11	(14)
Creating a God: The Reception of Edgard Varese	25	(20)
The Arrival of European Modernism	45	(14)
The Machine in the Concert Hall
Engineers of Art	59	(12)
Ballet Mecanique and International Modernist Networks	71	(26)
Spirituality and American Dissonance
Dane Rudhyar's Vision of Dissonance	97	(14)
The Ecstasy of Carl Ruggles	111	(16)
Henry Cowell's ``Throbbing Masses of Sounds''	127	(17)
Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual Dissonance	144	(11)
Myths and Institutions
A Forgotten Vanguard: The Legacy of Marion Bauer, Frederick Jacobi, Emerson Whithorne, and Louis Gruenberg	155	(22)
Organizing the Moderns	177	(24)
Women Patrons and Activists	201	(30)
New World Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism: ``Orthodox Europeanism'' or Empowering Internationalism?	231	(6)
The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland	237	(15)
Virgil Thomson's ``Cocktail of Culture''	252	(12)
A Quartet of New World Neoclassicists	264	(21)
European Modernists and American Critics
Europeans in Performance and on Tour	285	(12)
Visionary Critics	297	(16)
Widening Horizons
Modernism and the ``Jazz Age''	313	(5)
Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists	318	(43)
Epilogue	361	(4)
Selected Discography	365	(2)
Appendix: Programs of Modern--Music Societies in New York, 1920--1931	367	(40)
Notes	407	(52)
Selected Bibliography	459	(10)
Index	469