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This chapter chronicles Prokofiev's relocation to Moscow in the spring of 1936, his reaction to the denunciation of Shostakovich in Pravda; the composition of the ballet Romeo and Juliet and the Cantata for the Twentieth Anniversary of October; the censorship of those two works, and Prokofiev's service as a cultural representative for the Soviet regime during his last two trips abroad. The chapter addresses his collaborations with the director Sergey Radlov (who conceived a happy ending for Romeo and Juliet) and Nataliya Sats (who commissioned Peter and the Wolf for the Moscow Children's Theater), his fraught relationship with the Chairman of the Committee on Arts Affairs Platon Kerzhentsev, and his speeches at the Union of Soviet Composers. The description of his last trip to the United States corrects inaccuracies in the historical record concerning his interest in Hollywood film composition. Prokofiev was monitored throughout the trip by Soviet officials working for the VOKS organization and the Embassies in London and Washington.

In his second inaugural address of 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declared the end of post-colonial isolation and the beginning of international leadership. Once World War I was over, transatlantic relations in music reflected such sentiments as much as they did in politics. France, the United States's wartime ally, became its peacetime friend. Forces of internationalization resounded throughout the new music scene. In 1920, the Prix de Rome was first awarded, launching a fellowship program for creative artists at the American Academy in Rome that continues to the present. The Conservatoire Américain at Fontainebleau opened the following year in France, initiating an ambitious, long-reaching Franco-American interchange. There and then the young Nadia Boulanger welcomed Aaron Copland as a pupil, the first of many gifted American musicians who entered her studio during the next half of the century.

This chapter aims to widen the concept of musical creativity from its singular form, which would allow it to accept certain manifestations of multiple musical creativities. It introduces the concept of musical creativity and its connection to the ideal of individual heroism, or to the individual genius of the Great Composers. It studies the conceptualization of creativity in collective and individual improvisational performance, which was believed to be crucial to the training of instrumentalists. The chapter also considers some modern conceptions of music creativity and studies the technological, social, and temporal dimensions of music.

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 considers Schuman's various attempts to use his position and influence to extend his ideas of music education, musical diplomacy, and American contemporary music. It looks at the establishment of the BMI Student Composer Awards and Schuman's pressure upon the managers of the Metropolitan Opera Association and the New York Philharmonic to perform American music. Also striking is Schuman's role in brokering a number of mergers: 1) the National Institute of Arts and Letters with the American Academy of Arts and Letters; 2) the High School of Music and Art and the High School of Performing Arts; and 3) the International Society of Contemporary Music (U.S. Section) and the League of Composers. The chapter ends by looking at Schuman's Credendum, commissioned by the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.

This chapter discusses the formation of the Composers' Union. The Composers' Union formed gradually, from the advent of creative unions in 1932 to the foundation of the all-USSR Organizational Committee of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1939 and to the expanded reach of the all-USSR Composers' Union beyond the cultural capitals just before the Second World War. Though it was always subject to outside ideological monitoring, the Composers' Union became a bureaucratic institution juridically distinct from both government oversight committees and the Communist Party. Thus, the bureaucracy that most closely touched the lives of composers and musicologists was formed primarily according to the demands of Composers' Union leaders, all of whom were, by the beginning of the war, professional composers and musicologists.

This chapter examines the Composers' Union during the Great Patriotic War. The war was an important moment in the development of the Soviet music profession. During a chaotic and traumatic evacuation, the Composers' Union expanded contacts and implicit commitments between the central body and local chapters, clarified the institutional relationship between its professional and resource distribution functions, and drew a solid boundary on membership by permanently excluding performers. At the same time, an influx of new members, mainly songwriters, changed the face of Composers' Union membership. Most importantly, the leadership of the Composers' Union helped to stimulate and support composers' and musicologists' response to the call to professional arms. The Composers' Union as a whole and its members individually produced just the sort of music that the war effort required. For this service, the members of the Composers' Union gained lasting juridical access to a comparatively privileged strata of Soviet society.

The core of this chapter is documentation of the proceedings of the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviet Composers in 1991, drawn from the eyewitness account and tape-recorded transcripts made by the author, the only Western musicologist who was accredited to attend. It provides a vivid snapshot of a critical moment in Soviet musical and cultural history, a time of political upheaval, regional and ethnic strife, and economic collapse. The Congress began hopefully, but quickly disintegrated into a debacle of monumental proportions. From the vantage point of twenty years later, the Eighth—and what proved to be the final—Congress of the USSR Union of Composers stands out as a turning point in a radical and unprecedented cultural transformation.

This chapter examines the teachings of Hubert Parry, as well as those of Charles Villiers Stanford. Parry's life of Richard Wagner, published in the early eighties in his Studies of Great Composers, is masterly, putting him in his high place long before the time when Bernard Shaw and his satellites imagined that they had discovered him. His early radicalism subsided in later years to a broad-minded conservatism. Stanford in many ways was the opposite of Parry. Parry is sometimes musically inarticulate and clumsy. Stanford was occasionally too clever: his very facility sometimes betrayed him. He could, at will, adopt the technique of any composer he chose—as in The Middle Watch, where he beats Frederick Delius at his own game. However, in such works as the Stabat Mater the Requiem, and some of his songs, one finds Stanford thinking his own beautiful thoughts in his own beautiful way.

This chapter focuses on the Jazz Composers Guild and the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra, which directly affected Bley's career. The Jazz Composers Guild was a member-run musicians' cooperative. Composers involved in the guild acknowledged their music as a branch of noncommercial, avant-garde art music in desperate need of subsidy and aimed to find support through foundation grants. Later in 1964, the Jazz Composers Guild produced a series of events featuring music by Bley and by some of the leading avant-garde jazz composers of the time, all of whom were founding members of the guild. Bley then created the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra because having a band was a requirement of being in the guild.

The chapter covers Blitzstein’s marriage to Eva Goldbeck; his involvement with the Dartington School; his and Eva’s deportation from Brussels for alleged communist activities; his return to New York and involvement with Charles Seeger and the Marxist Composers’ Collective; his growing interest in the German socialist composer Hanns Eisler; and the illness and death of Eva from anorexia.

This chapter introduces the Los Angeles Federal Music Project (FMP), which partially solved the unemployment problem of musicians in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, first describing the pre-FMP music programs in Los Angeles, which were strongly influenced by the musicians' union. It then studies the national leadership of the Federal Music and Theatre projects, in order to further understand their local implementation and the issues that these projects raised. Next, the chapter looks at the administration and organization of the FMP and the WPA Music Projects, describing the FMP's 1936 production of La Traviata, and finally introduces the “Society of Native American Composers.”

The only avant-garde musical composition explicitly to reference Provo's activism in its title came from a musician associated with the worlds of jazz and improvisation: Willem Breuker's Litany for the 14th of June 1966 is today regarded as a breakthrough moment for Dutch improvised music. Shortly thereafter, Breuker joined the Misha Mengelberg Quartet, spurring a change of direction for the group that was to lead to the creation in 1967 of the Instant Composers Pool. The Pool's musicians were reluctant to admit a direct connection between their musical practice and the era's pursuit of “freedom.” This chapter argues that their early performances, in fact, closely resembled the kind of “individualist anarchism” in which Provo was most interested, and in which the egoism of the creative individual was uppermost.

This conclusion returns to the composerly attitude addressed repeatedly in this book, namely that most professional Japanese composers live their creative lives with an attitude of flexibility, as even the most distinguished of composers (with a few exceptions) are willing to write for both amateurs (adult and young) and professionals, music complex or simple, music comfortably funded in some tradition or resulting from the modern desire to “find their own voice.” In so doing, most Japanese composers maintain a relational role in their society. The explanation for this lies in the emergence of “the composer” in the particular conditions of Japanese musical modernity that led to the perception of and expectation for composers that they will be individuals who will make tangible contributions to their culture— in response to national political agendas or the developing infrastructures of modernization and in response to the needs of the people through the events of the twentieth century. Through participation in the increasingly shared cultural space, composers, performer-composers and performers of both Western and traditional practices are bridging differences internally and, with increasing confidence, contributing significantly to global cosmopolitan culture in the sphere of “concert music.”

This chapter examines the period after Aaron Copeland's return from Paris, where he first concentrated on writing a work for organ and orchestra to be performed by Nadia Boulanger on her visit to the U.S. It was due to Nadia's connections that she was able to arrange a commission and two performances of Copeland's piece, which introduced Copeland to the American public. His introduction to Serge Koussevitzky also proved valuable, as Koussevitzky later eagerly promoted Copeland's next big work, Music for the Theatre (1925) in a concert sponsored by the League of Composers. During this period, Copeland also became involved with the league's journal, Modern Music, where he was a critic striving to provide tactful, honest, and helpful opinions. This chapter also looks at the forming of two of Copeland's most important musical relationships: with Israel Citkowitz and Carlos Chávez.

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.

In this chapter, Maya Plisetskaya talks about her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, and his music. Shchedrin composed music for such works as The Little Humpbacked Horse, Anna Karenina, The Seagull, and Lady with the Dog. He was always in the shadow of the spotlight of Maya's success, but never suffered from it. Maya admits that it is complicated when two artists live side by side, but they supported each other. She attended the premiere of Shchedrin's The Old-Time Music of Russian Circuses in Chicago, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Loren Maazel. She was also at the premiere of the Fourth Piano Concerto at the Kennedy Center with Nikolai Petrov and Slava Rostropovich. Shchedrin became chairman of the Union of Composers of Russia, founded by Dmitri Shostakovich who was also its first chairman, and was a member of the Moscow Tribune as well as the Interregional Group of Deputies.