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American composers not only explored new compositional byways during the 1920s but also sought ways to bring their work before the public. They were good at it, often finding others willing to invest time and money in devising opportunities for performance and publication. As a result, a string of new music organizations appeared in New York City, including the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association of Composers, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts. These followed parallel ventures in the visual arts. During the first two decades of the century, Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery 291 exhibited new European and American art, while selected dealers such as Stephan Bourgeois began featuring modernist painting. This chapter looks at the legacy of composers Marion Bauer, Frederick Jacobi, Emerson Whithorne, and Louis Gruenberg in the field of modernist music in New York.

This chapter discusses Roy Hart, the Roy Hart Theater, and the roots of extended vocalism; widening of vocal range and inclusion of non-traditional vocal sounds and techniques; the American monologists; Meredith Monk, her techniques, vocal esthetic, and music-theater works; other well-known performers; and Quog Music Theater and the American Music Theater Festival.

This chapter looks at a period in Aaron Copeland's life that would be his busiest and most productive. It highlights several events and accomplishments that Copeland went through during these years such as his invitation to the First Festival of Pan American Chamber Music by its sponsor, Elizabeth Sprague Coolridge. He composed a piece for CBS radio (Music for Radio). He lectured at the New School for Social Research and also played a role in the founding and formation of the American Composers Alliance. He promoted the cause of music education in his New School lectures, titled “What to Listen for in Music” and he obtained the opportunity to compose a score for the documentary film, The City, for the New York World's Fair. The chapter explores his love affair and relationship with Leonard Bernstein, as well as the compositions he would produce during World War II.

This chapter considers Blitzstein’s few years of co-habitation with Bill Hewitt; his continued leftist activities, including his involvement with the American-Soviet Music Society and his support for Henry Wallace; the growing censuring of him and his activities by anti-communists, including his inclusion in Red Channels; and his heightened championing of the amalgamation of popular and serious traditions as found in American, including Broadway musicals, and in the Soviet Union, including Prokofiev. This chapter also surveys his work from the immediate postwar years, including an unproduced show about Soviet-American friendship, Goloopchik; his incidental scores for Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest and G. B. Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion; and his ballet for Lincoln Kirstein and the New York City Ballet, The Guests, choreographed by Jerome Robbins.

All-black units served in the historically segregated armed forces of the United States as late as the Korean War. No fewer than 3,000 black soldiers, freed from slavery, had fought in the army of the American Revolution. Others figured in the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans of 1814, and as many as 200,000 served in the Union army and navy during the Civil War. During the Great War, there were four black regiments in the regular army. The role of black service musicians in maintaining high levels of morale was soon a matter of record among the Allies and Central Powers alike, and their musical contributions were destined to reverberate long after the Armistice. This chapter focuses on the so-called “hellfighters” of the 369th regiment, including John Philip Sousa and James Reese Europe; the continuous production of “coon songs,” some written by black musicians themselves; bandmasters and the birth of an American conservatory in Fontainebleau, France; and the idea of a readily identifiable “American Music.”.

This chapter narrates events of great influence and importance in Aaron Copeland's life during the Great Depression. It notes the event of the First Festival of Contemporary American Music held on April 30 and May 1, 1932 at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. At this event, the newly formed Young Composer's Group performed, composed of students of Nadia Boulanger and people Copeland knew. The chapter notes Copeland's role in the festival, and how his song selection was enthusiastically received. His performance at the piano is also considered a landmark in the history of the reception of Ives's music. Furthermore, the chapter showcases the letters that Copeland wrote to newspapers clarifying his supposed comment on newspaper critics being a “menace.” It marks the significance of Copeland's visit to Mexico City, whereby he adopted a style rooted in folk tradition that brought about the creation of his greatest works as Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring.

This chapter discusses the history of African American Music. Many of the roots of black American music lie in Africa more than four hundred years ago at the start of the slave trade. It is essential to realize that the importance given to music and dance in Africa was reflected among black people in America in the songs they sang, in their dancing, and at their folk gatherings. As such, every aspect of jazz, blues, and gospel music is African to some degree. Work songs and the related prison songs are precursors of the blues. One can assume that primitive forms of pre-blues appeared around 1885, mostly in the Deep South and predominantly in the state of Mississippi. However, it was several more years before the famous AAB twelve-bar structure appeared, and when it did, one of its leading practitioners was Charley Patton.

This chapter considers the debate over the definition of “American” music, a complex issue entangling art with patriotism. While American painters and writers had achieved international recognition and consequent acceptance at home, American composers remained largely unappreciated. A few musicians, including Henry Cowell, argued that compositional Americanism was completely unnecessary and virtually impossible at a high level of quality. They agreed that folk or vernacular music was useful only if composers could substantially elevate it as they absorbed it into “art” music. The sudden growth of jazz in the early 1920s suggested another route to “American music.” Henry was troubled by narrow definitions of “American,” so he challenged European and American ignorance of American musical diversity. He often attacked jazz as a criterion for American authenticity. In his introduction to the book American Composers on American Music, Henry tackled the controversy.

Throughout its history in the United States, black music has been through the repetition and revision of texts, through the interplay of black language and black music in a long chain of Signifyin(g) tropes, such that African American peasants became and continue to be poets in a land that initially denied them the right to be called artists of any stripe. It is clear from the nature of their texts and their tunes that the makers of this music—the repeaters and revisers of the musical derivatives of the ring—have privileged and honored the spirit of Esu as, for example, that spirit is personified in the redoubtable Harriet Tubman, who bid many thousands to come ride her train.

Joplin’s first publication after Freddie’s death was Bethena, a sad, poignant waltz. It was issued by T. Bahnsen, a piano manufacturer that published two other Joplin pieces in 1905. With Leola, published by Stark’s subsidiary American Music Syndicate, Joplin for the first time warned against playing ragtime fast. By the end of 1905, he had started on another opera. Stark moved to New York that year, opening an office a few blocks from Tin Pan Alley; his son William continued operation of the St. Louis office. Joplin lived in Chicago for part of 1906, trying to cultivate contacts with other major publishers While in Chicago, he collaborated on Heliotrope Bouquet with the extremely talented but musically illiterate, Louis Chauvin; the piece was published by Stark the following year. In 1907, before leaving for New York, Joplin also collaborated on a song with the socialist publisher F. F. Berry.

This chapter focuses on Henry Cowell's first summer in California's San Quentin Prison, where he was sentenced to one to fifteen years in 1936 due to a morals charge involving a young man. Henry's pre-prison fear of being forbidden to write was unfounded, but the daily limit of a single two-page letter prevented him from staying in touch with his friends and maintaining his professional activities. In San Quentin, he had been temporarily assigned to a morning sweeping detail until a full-time job was organized. In his letters to his father Harry, Henry refrained from describing the real conditions of the prison. At the time, San Quentin seemed like a powder keg ready to explode, jammed with 6,000 men in a space designed for half as many. The prison was also filled with contraband—drugs, alcohol, weapons, poison, knockout drops, cigars, candy—all ingeniously smuggled in. After about a month, Henry discovered that prisoners had ordered the books New Musical Resources and American Composers on American Music more than a dozen times under a lending agreement with the state library at Sacramento.