Oja, Carol J. - Making Music Modern

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.

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CONTENTS

An Introduction: The Modern Music Shop
Enter the Moderns
1 Leo Ornstein: Wild Man of the 1910s
2 Creating a God: The Reception of Edgar Varese
3 The Arrival of European Modernism
The Machine in the Concert Hall
4 Engineers of Art
5 Ballet Mecanique and International Modernist Networks
Spirituality and American Dissonance
6 Dane Rudhyar's Vision of Dissonance
7 The Ecstasy of Carl Ruggles
8 Henry Cowell's Throbbing Masses of Sounds
9 Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual Dissonance
Myths and Institutions
10 A Forgotten Vanguard: The Legacy of Marion Bauer, Louis Gruenberg, Frederick Jacobi, and Emerson Whitmore
11 Organizing the Moderns
12 Women Patrons and Activists
New World Neoclassicism
13 Neoclassicism: Orthodox Europeanism or Empowering Internationalism?
14 The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland
15 Virgil Thomson's Cocktail of Culture
16 A Quartet of New World Neoclassicists
European Modernists and American Critics
17 Europeans in Performance and on Tour
18 Visionary Critics
Widening Horizons
19 Modernism and The Jazz Age
20 Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists
Epilogue
Selected Discography