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Since Pound could not participate in these national projects, he devised a cultural nationalist project of his own. Chapter Five shows Pound acting the cultural administrator, albeit on a very local, self-driven project, the revival of the music of Antonio Vivaldi. Pound saw this work as both enriching the culture of his adopted home Rapallo and offering a musical model for the mining of Italy’s rich cultural heritage in service of modern nationalist culture. Where his earlier work with cultural artifacts had remained in the realm of the aesthetic, here he adopts an explicitly political objective. His collaborative work with Olga Rudge and Gerhart Münch (and sometimes with Italian composer Alfredo Casella) toward bringing the largely forgotten music of Vivaldi to modern listeners was usually framed in a distinctly fascist cultural rhetoric. This chapter uses new archival evidence—including scores, clippings, letters, and pamphlets—to demonstrate both Pound’s use of fascist rhetoric in this endeavor and his involvement in the actual music of the revival (something previous scholars have denied).

The composers Hindemith and Casella did not turn to themes from antiquity, but their compositions of the twenties--notably Hindemith’s Cardillac and Casella’s La giara and his Scarlattiana--display conspicuously the use of classical musical forms, such as passacaglia, fugue, gavotte, and many others, all orchestrated for smaller instrumentation typical of the Baroque rather than the huge orchestras of Wagner and Mahler. Their writings also reveal a conscious desire to emulate their fellow classicists of the ’20s in the return to order and harmony.

Concurrent with his later theoretical studies, Gershwin further investigated the classical repertoire. He especially admired Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Wagner, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and Stravinsky. Gershwin not only went to concerts but studied the great classics at home, including the Bach keyboard toccatas, and also took an interest in current developments and in meeting other composers both at home and abroad, including England. He made additional discoveries in his later years, and in 1929 acquired the score to Alfredo Casella's Serenata for five instruments. Meanwhile, Gershwin knew more about his own country's composers than he generally made known. His greatest affinity and loyalty were always to Broadway's composers, including those, such as Vernon Duke and Oscar Levant, who were, like himself, active in more serious realms as well.

Having transcribed and analyzed the fascinating compositional sketches for Sonata and Serenade at the Stravinsky archive, I observed how Stravinsky’s compositional process for these two works is shown through his reliance on the classical piano repertoire. For example, a very prominent quotation from a Mozart Sonata is found in the sketches for Stravinsky’s Sonata in different places within the sketches. Yet, in Stravinsky’s final rendition of the Sonata, his quotation from the Mozart excerpt is rather insignificant. In the sketches for the Serenade, Stravinsky repeats a different quotation in several places. As with the Mozart fragment in the Sonata, this example does not seem to be significant in the published edition. In both cases, Stravinsky seems to be using these sources as “musical conduits.”