Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s / Edition 1

by Carol J. Oja

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195162578
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	512
Product dimensions:	9.02(w) x 5.66(h) x 1.30(d)
Lexile:	1420L (what's this?)

About the Author

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

An Introduction: The Modern Music ShopEnter the Moderns1. Leo Ornstein: "Wild Man" of the 1910s2. Creating a God: The Reception of Edgar Varèse3. The Arrival of European ModernismThe Machine in the Concert Hall4. Engineers of Art5. Ballet Mécanique and International Modernist NetworksSpirituality and American Dissonance6. Dane Rudhyar's Vision of Dissonance7. The Ecstasy of Carl Ruggles8. Henry Cowell's "Throbbing Masses of Sounds"9. Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual DissonanceMyths and Institutions10. A Forgotten Vanguard: The Legacy of Marion Bauer, Louis Gruenberg, Frederick Jacobi, and Emerson Whitmore11. Organizing the Moderns12. Women Patrons and ActivistsNew World Neoclassicism13. Neoclassicism: "Orthodox Europeanism" or Empowering Internationalism? 14. The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland15. Virgil Thomson's "Cocktail of Culture"16. A Quartet of New World NeoclassicistsEuropean Modernists and American Critics17. Europeans in Performance and on Tour18. Visionary CriticsWidening Horizons19. Modernism and "The Jazz Age"20. Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the ModernistsEpilogueSelected Discography

What People are Saying About This

Richard Crawford

Making Music Modern is a distinguished work of musical scholarship: a beautifully wrought blend of data and interpretation by an author with sovereign command of her subject. The topic is important as well as complex: not only how American composers grappled with modern currents but how European modernism extended its reach to a part of the globe that was in the process of changing from outpost to cultural capital. I unreservedly commend it.
—(Richard Crawford, University of Michigan)

Joel Sachs

Carol Oja's Making Music Modern is an extraordinary contribution to the history of American music. Her sweeping panorama of New York's music in ferment is, by virtue of the nature of the city, also a brilliant view of the liberation of American composers from bondage to the European tradition. Professor Oja's generous serving of the political and social setting of American modernism and its creators reveals music as a living body within a universe of artistic credos, human relationships, racial prejudices, and economic needs. The book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the concert music of our time and the cultural life of New York.
—(Joel Sachs, The Julliard School)

Vivian Perlis

Making Music Modern is an absorbing book that gives a refreshing view of an exciting and pivotal time in the history of American music. Carol Oja has achieved a wonderfully readable book, backed by an impressive amount of research. It is filled with rich detail and vivid portraits of the colorful figures that made modernism the catchword of 20th-century music. Carol Oja brings this fascinating period to life in an original format that gives the reader an insightful and engrossing experience.
—(Vivian Perlis, Yale University)

Editorial Reviews

With this superb exploration of the classical music scene in New York City during the 1920s and early 1930s, Oja (music and American studies, Coll. of William and Mary) adds to her list of well-received music titles, including the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award-winning Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds. She profiles a variety of composers, both well known (Aaron Copland) and little remembered (Dane Rudhyar), analyzing a composition and placing the musician within the context of the overall artistic and social milieu. Her ability to show how styles such as neoclassicism and the use of technology or dissonance combined to form a new genre of "American" music is a distinguishing feature. Women patrons, the influence of jazz, and music criticism are discussed, and there is a useful appendix of programs of modern music societies. One hopes that Oja will now focus on another decade or locale to complement this work. Exhaustively researched and written in an intelligent, engaging style, this book is highly recommended for academic collections and for public collections with a sophisticated clientele.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

"Carol Oja's Making Music Modern is a rare achievement, at once on essential musicological study and major contribution to our general fund of knowledge on America in the twentieth century...Too much cultural history is written from a..."big man" perspective. This book fills in our map of the neighbourhood, giving us the lesser known musicians, patrons, critics, magazines, and new music societies, not to mention selected painters, philosophers, mystics and cranks...Her brief discussions of the artistic/intellectual climate surrounding her composers is superb, and will keep the non-specialist glued to the page."—Current Musicology

"Pioneering....This is important history, and [Oja] cover[s] all of it, conservatives and radicals alike, with fascinating sidelights on critics, female patrons of contemporary music and of course on individual composers....[Oja reveals] that modern music in the 20's was diverse and multicultural, with jazz and Latin overtones, women composers and one strong African-American, William Grant Still. And [she shows] that American modernism could be provocatively different from the European kind."—The New York Times Book Review

"[A] superb exploration of the classical music scene in New York City during the 1920s and early 1930s....Profiles a variety of composers, both well known (Aaron Copland) and little remembered (Dane Rudhyar)....[Oja's] ability to show how styles such as neoclassicism and the use of technology or dissonance combined to form a new genre of ‘American' music is a distinguishing feature....Exhaustively researched and written in an intelligent, engaging style, this book is highly recommended."—Library Journal

"Marvelous....[Oja] wisely recognizes both the internationalism of the music scene during the 1920s [and] the huge importance of the developing new music infrastructure that emerged during the 1920s....Oja avoids the cultural exclusivity so prevalent among musicologists in her virtuosic contextualization of the emerging new music in the broader world of arts and ideas....A remarkable study."—Institute for Studies in American Music

"Carol Oja's Making Music Modern is an extraordinary contribution to the history of American music. Her sweeping panorama of New York's music in ferment is, by virtue of the nature of the city, also a brilliant view of the liberation of American composers from bondage to the European tradition. Professor Oja's generous serving of the political and social setting of American modernism and its creators reveals music as a living body within a universe of artistic credos, human relationships, racial prejudices, and economic needs. The book is a must for anyone who wants to understand the concert music of our time and the cultural life of New York."—Joel Sachs, The Julliard School

"Making Music Modern is an absorbing book that gives a refreshing view of an exciting and pivotal time in the history of American music. Carol Oja has achieved a wonderfully readable book, backed by an impressive amount of research. It is filled with rich detail and vivid portraits of the colorful figures that made modernism the catchword of 20th-century music. Carol Oja brings this fascinating period to life in an original format that gives the reader an insightful and engrossing experience."—Vivian Perlis, Yale University

"Making Music Modern is a distinguished work of musical scholarship: a beautifully wrought blend of data and interpretation by an author with sovereign command of her subject. The topic is important as well as complex: not only how American composers grappled with modern currents but how European modernism extended its reach to a part of the globe that was in the process of changing from outpost to cultural capital. I unreservedly commend it."—Richard Crawford, University of Michigan

"Wise, witty and compulsively readable...non-dogmatically postmodern. Eschewing a linear narrative, [Oja] writes short chapters that are narrowly and precisely focused rather than comprehensive. The result might be likened to the comic strip, that most post-modern of narrative forms, and the form fits the content."—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher