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Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists

Carol J. Oja

in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

On February 12, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin (1898-1937), premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Soon a group of other composers joined him in a brief but intense movement ... More

On February 12, 1924, Rhapsody in Blue, composed by George Gershwin (1898-1937), premiered at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Soon a group of other composers joined him in a brief but intense movement to produce “highbrow jazz”, including John Alden Carpenter, Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, and William Grant Still. The first three made their careers in concert music, and the last straddled both popular music and concert music. At the same time, parallel forays were being made by European modernists seeking a means of mediating between the rarefied aesthetic terrain of high modernism and the more accessible plains of jazz. Gershwin may have taken his biggest artistic leap of the mid-1920s with another work, the Concerto in F, which represented a more ambitious attempt to bridge independent musical categories. One of the trendsetters in the crossover movement was the jazz-band conductor Paul Whiteman (1890-1967).Less

Welcoming the Ultramodern

Catherine Parsons Smith

in Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular

This chapter discusses the arrival of ultramodern music in Los Angeles. It first describes music making in Los Angeles during the 1920s, excluding the working-class musicians who were employed in ... More

This chapter discusses the arrival of ultramodern music in Los Angeles. It first describes music making in Los Angeles during the 1920s, excluding the working-class musicians who were employed in restaurants, bars, and the silent movie palaces. The chapter then introduces Olga Steeb, a successful teacher and artist who remained open to the “new” in music, and also identifies several patrons of the concert music scene, before discussing the ultramodern performances conducted in Los Angeles.Less

Transitions: Function and Difference in Myth and Ritual

Samuel A. Floyd

in The Power of Black Music: Interpreting its History from Africa to the United States

This chapter presents certain transitional musical events that took place in African American music during the 1940s—events that would have influential effects and would change the course of black ... More

This chapter presents certain transitional musical events that took place in African American music during the 1940s—events that would have influential effects and would change the course of black music in the following decades. It is devoted to a clarification of these events, with focus on the role of myth and ritual. These events took place as follows: in jazz, the rise of bebop, with its creators returning to and embracing elements of African American myth and ritual, changed the course of the genre; in popular music, the rise of rhythm and blues laid the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll and soul music also caused an incursion of black music into white society; and in concert-hall music, certain black composers embraced myth, paid homage to ritual, and produced works of high quality and import, signaling the rise of black composers of the first rank in American society.Less

Europeans in Performance and on Tour

Carol J. Oja

in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

While American neoclassicists obscured their stylistic connection to Western Europe, these same composers and their American contemporaries worked to foster transatlantic performance opportunities. ... More

While American neoclassicists obscured their stylistic connection to Western Europe, these same composers and their American contemporaries worked to foster transatlantic performance opportunities. The founding of New York City's modern music societies in the early 1920s generated a booming trade in European modernism, and other strategic points of Euro-American contact occurred, including especially the New York premieres of Pierrot lunaire and Le Sacre du printemps, the establishment of the International Society for Contemporary Music, and the United States tours of European composers. Through these tours and premieres, New York City not only caught up with Western Europe in presenting continental modernism but also became a desirable locale in its own right. Even though visiting European luminaries seemed to pay little attention to American composers of concert music, they helped alter the overall climate for modernism. As every year passed, New York seemed less provincial, and its young composers benefited from the difference.Less

Founding the Hollywood Bowl

Catherine Parsons Smith

in Making Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular

This chapter discusses the founding of the Hollywood Bowl, which has been considered as the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and shows that its success represents the end of a ... More

This chapter discusses the founding of the Hollywood Bowl, which has been considered as the summer home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and shows that its success represents the end of a number of efforts in Los Angeles to form its own regional version of American high culture. It states that there were some organizational conflicts which led to the establishment of the Bowl, and notes that these reveal a lot about the interests which have developed around the making of concert music in the city. The chapter studies the early years of the Hollywood Bowl, its period of inactivity, and its eventual revival in the 1920s.Less

Introduction: The Modern Music Shop

Carol J. Oja

in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

To young creative artists of the 1920s, New York City seemed to hold unprecedented charm and unlimited potential. As a talented new generation of American writers, musicians, and painters reached ... More

To young creative artists of the 1920s, New York City seemed to hold unprecedented charm and unlimited potential. As a talented new generation of American writers, musicians, and painters reached maturity—ranging from Langston Hughes and Ernest Hemingway to Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, Arthur Dove, and Georgia O'Keeffe—it included composers who wrote music for the concert hall, most notably George Antheil, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, William Grant Still, and Virgil Thomson. Over the course of the decade, American composers of concert music explored an imaginative range of styles and ideologies, all under the banner of modernism. Leaders emerged among them: first the French-American Edgard Varèse; and by the second half of the decade, Copland and Cowell. This book looks at the extraordinary network of composers and ideologies that gave rise to modernist music—or new music—in New York City, from World War I until the early years of the Depression.Less

A Peek Through Ragged Tent Flaps and Heaven's Door: Concerts That Rupture and Bond

Keila Diehl

in Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

This chapter focuses on public music concerts in Dharamsala. It explains that by juxtaposing Hindi, English, Nepali and Tibetan songs, these concerts profoundly revealing cultural performances in ... More

This chapter focuses on public music concerts in Dharamsala. It explains that by juxtaposing Hindi, English, Nepali and Tibetan songs, these concerts profoundly revealing cultural performances in which many of the social dynamics and communitywide challenges raised throughout this book are enacted. It also discusses how rock concerts provided a level of comfort with cultural ambiguity and a passion for foreign cultures that is worrisome to some in the Tibetan refugee community.Less

The Afro-american Symphony and Its Scherzo

Catherine Parsons Smith

in William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions

This chapter discusses in detail the Afro-American Symphony, focusing on its third movement, the Scherzo. The score of the Scherzo is now included in the latest edition of a widely used anthology, ... More

This chapter discusses in detail the Afro-American Symphony, focusing on its third movement, the Scherzo. The score of the Scherzo is now included in the latest edition of a widely used anthology, while the Afro-American Symphony is considered to be Still's most popular work. It describes the Afro-American Symphony as the single most influential expression of Still's aesthetic of racial fusion, where he brought together the symphony and the blues and changed both in the process. This chapter notes the racial barrier that existed in popular music and concert music, and compares the Afro-American Symphony to other popular symphonies during the time.Less

Powers of Blackness: Jazz and the Blues in Modern Concert Music

Lawrence Kramer

in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History

The aim of this chapter is to examine the encounter between some of the music of black America—ragtime, blues, and jazz—and white modernist concert music in both the United States and France. It ... More

The aim of this chapter is to examine the encounter between some of the music of black America—ragtime, blues, and jazz—and white modernist concert music in both the United States and France. It intends to show that it is not going too far to describe the results as a continuation of blackface by different means. The original blackface minstrels, were crude, obscene, and egregiously racist, a carnivalesque debasement of the black male as other. The encounter of musical modernism with jazz and blues might be said to have produced a site at which dominant white cultures were unusually hospitable to African-American cultural energies, well in advance of parallel encounters in popular music. The social and cultural motives for giving concert music an Africanist dimension obviously differed by nation. There evolved a body of techniques by which the texture of a concert piece could embed the sounds of black music but at the same time imbue them with an aura of distance. The black sounds function as framed references to the idiom of the other. Musical Africanisms are generally supposed to occupy an ex-centric position, to stand outside the essence of the artwork even as their presence defines the character of the artwork. With the advent of what might be called jazz-age modernism, mainstream musical Africanism can be said to have combined the semiotics of Ives's First Sonata and the structural usage of his “Elegy.” Musical Africanisms arise in the place that pleasure as excess is felt to have vacated.Less

“Dean of Afro-american Composers” or “harlem Renaissance Man”: The New Negro and the Musical Poetics of William Grant Still

Catherine Parsons Smith

in William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions

This chapter describes the relationship between Still's work and the Harlem Renaissance. It studies three style periods of Still's concert music, namely “Ultra-Modern”, “racial”, and “universal.” ... More

This chapter describes the relationship between Still's work and the Harlem Renaissance. It studies three style periods of Still's concert music, namely “Ultra-Modern”, “racial”, and “universal.” This chapter uses the connection between the Harlem Renaissance and modernism to explain Still's position in American music.Less

Notes for an Interview

Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Kevin C. Karnes (ed.)

in Korngold and His World

This chapter contains a transcript of a conversation between Erich Korngold and an unidentified person. It opens with suspension points and is studded with them throughout, alternating with fragments ... More

This chapter contains a transcript of a conversation between Erich Korngold and an unidentified person. It opens with suspension points and is studded with them throughout, alternating with fragments of text that range in length from complete sentences to just four or five German words. Nowhere is the interviewer named or is the slightest hint at a location provided. Indeed, it is not even clear if the interview ever took place at all, or if the document records instead an imagined exchange between Korngold and an ideal interlocutor, perhaps in a kind of typed rehearsal for a conversation he anticipated upon his return to Austria. (Even his parenthetical notes indicating where recorded examples are to be played relay indecision, sometimes followed by one or even two question marks.) For all of its ambiguity, however, this document is invaluable, for it records what are probably Korngold's most extensive surviving statements on the concert and operatic music composed by his contemporaries, and of the sounds of avant-garde modernism, with which his own music was widely contrasted.Less

East of the Wall, South of the Sea

Richard Ivan Jobs

in Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe

This chapter explores the centrality of music and rock ‘n’ roll to these travels and how the geopolitical limits of the Cold War circumscribed them but also, importantly, how youth culture and youth ... More

This chapter explores the centrality of music and rock ‘n’ roll to these travels and how the geopolitical limits of the Cold War circumscribed them but also, importantly, how youth culture and youth travel expanded this social space into the eastern and southern peripheries of Europe, including Spain and around the Mediterranean. The New Age Travellers, young nomads of the 1970s and 1980s, who adopted a lifestyle of illegal trespass out of their peregrinations between music festivals and concerts, spread out from Britain to continental Europe, adopting a near stateless existence. Notably, it was the music and travel culture of the young that in many ways was most successful at traversing the Cold War division of Europe with considerable attention focused on Berlin as a kind of unruly frontier space of cultural transfer. The conclusion of the Cold War itself was punctuated by a 1990 performance of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” in the wasteland of Potsdamer Platz with 350,000 young people from all over Europe in attendance. Yet even as the circuits of travel expanded and the exclusions of class, gender, and nationality diminished, those of race and ethnicity persisted in the political context of decolonization and immigration.Less

Modernism and the “Jazz Age”

Carol J. Oja

in Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

Jazz was the single most discussed musical genre of the United States during the 1920s, coming to represent the decade as a whole. The “Jazz Age” evoked rapid mechanization and the giddy good life of ... More

Jazz was the single most discussed musical genre of the United States during the 1920s, coming to represent the decade as a whole. The “Jazz Age” evoked rapid mechanization and the giddy good life of America's more high-rolling citizens, as much as it did a particular genre of music. For American modernist composers, increased pluralism expanded the repertory of available sound sources, and their “eclectic breeding” became a vital component in shaping modernism in the New World. Jazz was the non-European music with the greatest impact on composers of modernist music. Aside from contributing materials to new music, it provided a much-desired musical link to cultures thought to be “primitive”, whether those of the African continent or the American South. It also appeared to be one of the most effective ways in which American composers might gain long-desired acceptance in Western Europe. The vogue for jazz among American concert composers reached its peak between 1924 and 1926, yet it had ongoing implications profoundly affecting the musical language of Americans for decades to come.Less

Summary and Assessment

Henry Martin

in Charlie Parker, Composer

Chapter 10 pulls together information from the analytical chapters and provides a summary via a series of tables. These tables include the Parker contrafacts based on “Honeysuckle Rose” and rhythm ... More

Chapter 10 pulls together information from the analytical chapters and provides a summary via a series of tables. These tables include the Parker contrafacts based on “Honeysuckle Rose” and rhythm changes; Parker’s works enumerated by category, key, contrafact, and primary line; Parker’s attitude toward revisions and adaptations; what tunes Parker liked to call on the bandstand; and what works might be excluded from a list of Parker compositions, if a more traditional understanding of composition is assumed. The chapter concludes with discussions of Parker’s tendencies toward quotation and self-quotation, his interest in twentieth-century concert music (an ambition he was unable to fulfill), and his overall compositional legacy.Less

The Classical Music Mainstream

James Wierzbicki

in Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties

This chapter looks at how the American Symphony Orchestra League reported that thirty million people in the U.S. are actively interested in concert music. This does not mean jazz, popular ditties, ... More

This chapter looks at how the American Symphony Orchestra League reported that thirty million people in the U.S. are actively interested in concert music. This does not mean jazz, popular ditties, hillbilly dance-bands, hymn singing, or wedding marches, but classical music. Writer Virgil Thomson noted in his column that whereas during the previous year ticket buyers had spent $40 million on baseball, patrons of classical music had spent $45 million. This passion for what Thomson called “serious music” had been stirred even as World War II was in progress, and by the end of the Fifties it was still going strong. Never before has there been such an interest in music in America. The changed atmosphere had been apparent even just a few years after the war's end. For composers, this made the future seem very promising.Less

Introduction: Confronting the Silent Giant

James M. Doering

in The Great Orchestrator: Arthur Judson and American Arts Management

This introductory chapter talks about the legacy of Arthur Judson, a monumental figure in American concert music, whose career has largely evaded scholarly inquiry. His name appears in numerous ... More

This introductory chapter talks about the legacy of Arthur Judson, a monumental figure in American concert music, whose career has largely evaded scholarly inquiry. His name appears in numerous conductor biographies, and most historical accounts of the American symphony orchestra include some description of his contributions. But his long career and legacy have remained relatively unexamined. In part, this silence reflects the nature of his profession. Music management is a nebulous field that encompasses virtually every detail necessary to present music to the public. Deciphering the mundane from the musically significant can prove a formidable challenge, a problem compounded by the fact that music management is a subset of both the legal and the business worlds, which operate under necessary shrouds of secrecy.Less

Evolutions: Compositional Maturity in the 1950s

Philip Lambert

in Alec Wilder

This chapter examines Wilder's compositional maturity in the 1950s. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, Wilder pursued a long-held goal with growing confidence and perseverance. Having made his ... More

This chapter examines Wilder's compositional maturity in the 1950s. From the late 1940s through the 1950s, Wilder pursued a long-held goal with growing confidence and perseverance. Having made his name as a songwriter-arranger, he now aspired to become more of a “composer.” He never abandoned the popular song but he found himself drawn more and more to the sounds and artistic sensibilities of the theater, opera house, and concert hall. Wilder's turn toward concert music was inspired, in his mind, by his association and friendship with his Eastman confrère John Barrows. Barrows took on a role for Wilder's concert music that Mitch Miller had once played for Wilder's experience in the popular realm: promoting him, helping him find opportunities, and offering boundless encouragement. Over the decades of their friendship, Wilder would write not only because of Barrows but also for him, as a soloist and in chamber groups.Less

A Brief Chronology

Catherine Parsons Smith

in William Grant Still: A Study in Contradictions

This chapter presents a concise outline of Still's life. It starts in the year 1895, when Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi. The outline only includes significant events in Still's life, such ... More

This chapter presents a concise outline of Still's life. It starts in the year 1895, when Still was born in Woodville, Mississippi. The outline only includes significant events in Still's life, such as the first performance of his concert music in 1925 and his induction into the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).Less

Loyalties: The Prolific 1960s

Philip Lambert

in Alec Wilder

This chapter studies Wilder's music in the 1960s. Continuing to follow trends he had begun at the end of the preceding decade, he wrote volumes of concert music for groups of all sizes in the 1960s, ... More

This chapter studies Wilder's music in the 1960s. Continuing to follow trends he had begun at the end of the preceding decade, he wrote volumes of concert music for groups of all sizes in the 1960s, for wind ensembles and chamber orchestras and small groups and soloists with piano. He also wrote piano music, dramatic music of diverse kinds, and a handful of new songs, following traditional popular or art-song models. Also extending earlier trends, Wilder's loyalties to his artistic and ideological roots found musical expression through the efforts of loyal friends. As his travels and residencies and friendships multiplied, so did his catalog of original compositions perfectly suited for a faculty ensemble or senior recital or informal gathering in a college practice room or dormitory basement.Less