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Jennifer Fisher provides a history of the “making it macho” strategy for men often employed in the dance world, which has been a response to the prejudices against ballet men throughout the 20th century and beyond. By looking at various rhetorical strategies in dance biography (Shawn, Nureyev, Bruhn), movies (Shall We Dance? The Turning Point), and television (So You Think You Can Dance), it foregrounds the frequency and futility of binary thinking in relation to masculinity as well as femininity when it comes to ballet performance. It references analysis of modern masculinity by Michael Kimmel and George Mosse, as well as dance analysis by Julia Foulkes and Ramsay Burt. It is suggested that, given the challenges for men in the feminized world of ballet, they trade the “macho” moniker for that of “maverick.”

This conclusion is a reflection on the life and accomplishments of Chinn. It begins by considering the definition of the word maverick, which fits Chinn well: in his time considered himself and was considered by others a nonconformist. In his roles as a military weapons expert, a colonel in the military, and director of the Kentucky Historical Society, Chinn was unafraid to give his own opinion and follow his own route. The chapter concludes by lauding Chinn and mavericks in general.

This chapter illustrates the conditions of the Great Depression in the region and the failure of local and state governments to deal with the worst consequences of the international economic crisis. Public aid remained almost non-existent, but when it did come, local and state politicians wielded relief policies as the latest in a long line of laws meant to tilt the power in labor relations further away from workers. This chapter examines the objective conditions of life during the 1930s. Continued deportation campaigns, higher unemployment rates, and lower wages exacerbated the problems already present in previous decades. Political solutions to these problems, even during the height of New Deal reformism, proved rare and fleeting as agribusiness interests and conservative politicians maintained control of much of the state despite countervailing pressures.

In the 1920s, American composers were true mavericks—that is, highly eccentric and individualistic—yet were successful because they self-organized in tightly knit societies. In this process, they demonstrated a pattern found throughout American history: a radical vision attained through communalism. Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Seeger are three such maverick composers who strongly adhered to a thoroughgoing and systematic dissonance, where one finds traces of Puritanism. Harry Partch is most directly and overtly associated with the myth of American individualism, one whose music is essentially communal. John Cage seemed to be indifferent to geography, a reflection of his own disassociation from community. Cage's anticommunalism is entirely consistent with his purpose of non-intention, and his position is curiously close to some aspects of minimalism. La Monte Young also disdained the idea of community. A special edge that marked American history, the edge of chaos between nature and civilization, was recognized by both Frederick Jackson Turner and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This book focuses on America's maverick composers, those who lived unusual lives or flaunted norms and wrote works that were considered incomprehensible and even unplayable. It examines the role of the maverick in American music and culture. It looks at a number of mavericks, most of whom are composers of art music, including William Billings, John Cage, Anthony Philip Heinrich, Frank Zappa, Charles Ives, Leo Ornstein, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, and Meredith Monk. The book shows that the maverick tradition lies at the center of the myth about rugged individualism. In tracing the history of the maverick tradition, the book considers the role of nature, both physically and metaphorically, in opposition to notions of science and progress. Moreover, it discusses the forces both in the musical community and in American culture that account for the rise of the maverick. It considers the fundamental question raised by the maverick tradition—communalism versus individualism—and looks at the important themes of Puritanism, nature, and democracy found in the work of both Billings and Heinrich.

This chapter discusses Five Songs by George Antheil. As one of the first composers to incorporate jazz elements in a classical context, he was fond of experimenting with odd instrumental combinations and electronic devices. This chapter provides examples of Antheil’s vocal work to demonstrate the composer’s originality. The piano writing is dramatic and often dense in texture. Moreover, the vocal tessitura descends as the cycle progresses, while the piano becomes more dominant. The first three songs are very short, but the last two have an almost orchestral richness. Texts are aphoristic and concise, and voice parts are correspondingly plain and unadorned, moving for the most part in a combination of declamatory speech patterns, long slow spans, often on a monotone, and close intervals, leaving the piano to illustrate the imagery and atmosphere of the words.

This chapter presents information on the theme and programs of the San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks festival. Michael Tilson Thomas, the orchestra's music director worked hard to invest the theme with coherence. The theme proposed was fraught with volatile issues concerning American identity and the place of the arts in an egalitarian society. The opening was breathtaking. The timpanist, bestriding the top of an implied pyramid on a riser at the orchestra's rear, whacked out his barbaric yawp at the beginning of Ruggles's Sun-Treader with marvelously simulated abandon. The program notes were eloquent about the problems Crawford Seeger had to endure in her day because of the American modern-music world's misogyny, and about the impact of Babbittry on her style. Her Andante, gentle by comparison with Sun-Treader, strongly resembles Samuel Barber's nearly contemporaneous Adagio for Strings.

The core motivation for Molinism is a desire to preserve a libertarian account of human freedom while at the same time defending a strong view of divine providence, but in recent times it was introduced by Alvin Plantinga in order to rebut certain versions of the problem of evil. Viewed from this perspective concerning the problem of evil, the key ingredient of the view is the existence of counterfactuals of freedom — counterfactuals concerning what any free individual would freely do in a given set of circumstances. What we are interested in here, and what is most relevant to the context of theological reflection on the nature of God's providence, is not the counterfactuals themselves but rather the choice situation in which the individual in question is deliberating about what to do. This chapter argues that we need a more fundamental investigation, focusing on conditionals of deliberation rather than on counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. It is a quite natural assumption to think of conditionals of deliberation in terms of counterfactuals, and hence it is quite natural to clarify a Molinist account of providence in terms of counterfactuals. Such an identification, however, is a mistake. The chapter concludes that attempts to avoid the need to engage in this more fundamental investigation by showing that there is no coherent Maverick position have failed. The best remedy is to abandon such resistance and pursue the more fundamental investigation to see what the prospects are for an account of creation that makes room for libertarian freedom while leaving the doctrine of providence intact.

This chapter focuses on the concept of “maverick,” a term as American as the Stars and Stripes that the notion of the “maverick composer” is likewise unique to the United States. An important handful of American composers in the postwar years demonstrated a comparable lack of interest not in music but in the traditional business of music-making. As much as they could, they avoided the universities that supported so many of the modernists. They avoided, too, the opera companies and symphony orchestras that through commissions and performances supported so many of the mainstreamers. Occasionally, they banded together in collectives whose members pursued similar goals and thus were mutually influential. However, most of the time, the maverick composers of the Fifties marched to the beats of very different drummers.

Rodney Marsh is a British footballer who found his sporting success in his home country and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. This chapter frames Marsh as a maverick, as a result of his drinking, womanizing, gambling, but also his blatant disregard for the rules of the game and society. Largely based on Marsh’s own words, from interviews and his autobiography, the chapter examines the ways Marsh was understood as a maverick in the sport of football.

This chapter reflects on Jewish communist, socialist, and maverick lawyers. Whereas many Jewish solicitors viewed their profession primarily from a business perspective—and were extremely successful in both business and professional terms—another group of solicitors from the same east European background were driven by more altruistic motives, impelled by a zealous pursuit of justice on behalf of their clients or devoted to active campaigning for specific legal reform. Some members of this latter group were communists; a larger number of the outstanding Jewish lawyers from the second generation of east European immigrants were associated with the Labour Party; still others were mavericks. Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, it has become apparent that the recruitment of Jewish lawyers into the Communist Party was a passing phase born out of the frustrations of the 1930s, and the misplaced idealism of the early 1950s. Towards the end of the century, Jewish radicalism continued in new forms.

American mavericks dramatically transformed the musical world in the twentieth century. The end of the Renaissance was heralded not by the serialists or the free atonalists that defined an avant-garde style after World War II, but by a group of experimentalists who rejected the premises upon which the very definition of art music was based. Yet what may be the turning point toward a new musical culture occurred on November 13, 1940, when Walt Disney premiered Fantasia, a film that became the subject of debate in the classical music establishment and whose implications were explored by the mavericks such as Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, and John Cage. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s the visual was exploited by most popular music acts in different ways. Concerts themselves always had and continue to have a strong visual element. In the 1990s, a new phenomenon emerged: the formation of classical ensembles based on visual appeal. The visual element is most prominent in opera.

The emergence of modernism in the American musical world represents a dramatic break with the past. Initial attempts to plant musical modernism on American soil proved futile, but change finally occurred in the 1920s, thanks to a group of headstrong, individualist, imaginative, creative maverick composers. It happened in 1922, when ultramodern musicians, helped by sympathizers in the other arts, began to launch what became a successful campaign to establish modernism in American music. These ultramoderns succeeded because they organized in a way no musicians had done before, thus dramatically transforming relationship between artist and the public. In New York, it was the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz who had helped make modernism part of the art world since the beginning of the twentieth century. The man who had his pulse on American music in 1920 was Paul Rosenfeld, the most important voice for the musical avant-garde from 1917 through the 1920.

This chapter focuses on the early period of Gordon Pask’s life, tracing the development of his research from his days as a Cambridge undergraduate to the period in the late 1950s when his work started to have an impact internationally. It describes three of his maverick machines: Musicolour, a sound-actuated interactive light show; SAKI, a keyboard-skill training machine; and an electrochemical device that grew an “ear.” It assesses the value of these machines, fifty years after they were built, in particular, the maverick ideas that they embody.

This chapter examines how Charles E. Ives has been affected by the transformations in American musicology over the last twenty-five years. It begins with a discussion of Maynard Solomon's accusation that Ives had engaged in a “systematic pattern of falsification” to safeguard his claims at the patent-house of musical modernism. It then considers how Solomon's criticisms served as the catalyst for an explosion of scholarly activity centered on Ives in the 1990s. In particular, it describes the approaches taken by musicologists to rebut Solomon, including those associated with “New Musicology.” It also explores the etiology of the myth that Ives was a patriarch of a lineage of composers known as the American Mavericks, along with the vicissitudes of Ives scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century.

This chapter provides a historical context for America's competitive religious marketplace and constructs an archetype for enterprising spiritual leaders dubbed as holy mavericks. Using the pioneering ministry of eighteenth-century revivalist George Whitefield as the starting point, it explores how evangelical innovators enjoy larger shares of the market than other religious suppliers by adapting to changing environments in a multiplicity of contexts. It argues that the diverse ways that holy mavericks construct evangelical archetypes borrow from their personal biographies and the contiguous cultural formations of our postindustrial sight-and-sound generation. Paula White, T. D. Jakes, Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and Brian McLaren did not suddenly appear out of nowhere; certain life experiences and structural changes equipped them with cultural tool kits to transform their spiritual gifts into saleable commodities. White and Jakes draw homiletics from a black church preaching aesthetic, whereas Warren employs an upbeat motivational speaking style. Osteen feeds Americans' taste for consumption, while McLaren taps into some Americans' commitment to dissent from the status quo.