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This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.
This text reassesses the legacy of one of America's best-loved composers at a pivotal moment - as his life and work shift from the realm of personal memory to that of history. The collection of 17 essays explores the stages of cultural change on which Aaron Copeland's long life unfolded.
How collaboration can address the challenges facing music scholarship in the Twenty-First Century
A super-star of 20th-century music, Leonard Bernstein is famous for his multi-faceted artistic brilliance. Best-known on Broadway for "West Side Story," a tale of immigrant struggles and urban gang warfare, Bernstein thrived within the theater's collaborative artistic environments, and he forged a life-long commitment to advancing social justice. In 'Bernstein meets Broadway: collaborative art in a time of war', award-winning author Carol J. Oja explores a youthful Bernstein-a twenty-something composer who was emerging in New York City during World War II. Devising an innovative framework, Oja constructs a wide-ranging cultural history that illuminates how Bernstein and his friends violated ...
Colin McPhee was a performer, writer, and pioneer among Western composers in turning to Asia for inspiration. A close friend of Aaron Copland, Carlos Chavez, Henry Cowell, and Virgil Thomson, he played a vital role in new music activities in New York in the 1920s, but his most important accomplishments came from his devotion to the music of Bali. Carol Oja's Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds traces his life, his influences on fellow musicians, and the profound experience of a composer striving to comprehend an entirely new musical language. After hearing rare recordings of the Balinese gamelan--a percussion orchestra with delicately layered textures and clangorous sounds--McPhee traveled ...
Combining cultural analysis with historical and personal accounts of a century of musical life at the American Academy in Rome, this volume provides a history of the AAR's Rome Prize in Composition.
Out of Bounds examines Kay Kaufman Shelemay's impact as a pioneer of musical diaspora studies on a generation of scholars. The wide-ranging essays treat such diverse topics as cantorial life in America, gender and fertility among Ethiopians in Israel, transnational performance itineraries of griots and Korean drummers, and video games.
"The Victorian cup on my shelf--a present from my mother--reads 'Love the Giver.' Is it because the very word patronage implies the authority of the father that we have treated American women patrons and activists so unlovingly in the writing of our own history? This pioneering collection of superb scholarship redresses that imbalance. At the same time it brilliantly documents the interrelationship between various aspects of gender and the creation of our own culture."--Judith Tick, author of Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music "Together with the fine-grained and energetic research, I like the spirit of this book, which is ambitious, bold, and generous minded. Cultiv...
A narrative history of the music of African-Americans with emphasis on the folk music genres.
Composer, conductor, activist, and icon of twentieth-century America, Leonard Bernstein (1918-90) had a rich association with Washington, DC. Although he never lived there, the U.S. capital was the site of some of the most important moments in his life and work, as he engaged with the nation's struggles and triumphs. By examining Bernstein through the lens of DC, this book offers new insights into his life and music from the 1940s through the 1980s, including his role in building DC's artistic landscape, his political-diplomatic aims, his works that received premieres and other early performances in DC, and his relationships with the nation's liberal and conservative political elites. The co...