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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 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.

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.

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.