Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

by Carol J. Oja

Book Overview

New York City witnessed a dazzling burst of creativity in the 1920s. In this pathbreaking study, Carol J. Oja explores this artistic renaissance from the perspective of composers of classical and modern music, who along with writers, painters, and jazz musicians, were at the heart of early modernism in America. She also illustrates how the aesthetic attitudes and institutional structures from the 1920s left a deep imprint on the arts over the 20th...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195058496
• ISBN13: 9780195058499
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 512 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

What a time it was and what a fine book to bring it alive for us once again

What an exciting and most interesting book! Carol Oja takes us back to a transitional period in the cultural history of New York City (and America); the 1920s. It isn't that book doesn't talk about anything outside of those years, but that the stuff before leads into that decade and the stuff after discusses how it flowed from those times. Probably the best place to start reading this book is the fascinating Appendix that lists the programs of Modern Music Societies in New York from 1920-31. It gives you a flavor for the decade and the material the book is going to cover. There was a time when Europe treated all of the United States about like New York and Los Angeles treat even big mid-western cities now. A place to come and make piles of money from the rubes (I am from Ann Arbor, MI - we get lots of great visits from orchestras and artists, but it is almost always the artists coming here to give us something rather than coming here to seek something). In our age of instant communications and global simultaneous experience of cultural events, it is hard to remember or understand that it used to take months and years for cultural events in one part of the world to work there way to other cultural centers. Awhile back I spoke with an elderly friend who was one of the founders of the Interlochen arts camp in northern Michigan and had been involved in the School of Music in the days of Earl V. Moore. He told me that in the 1920s here in Ann Arbor, the new music was Dvorak and Tchaikowsky. They did not get the stuff of Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky until later. Now things had changed by the 1960s. Another friend got a hold of the score and parts for Stravinsky's "Requiem Canticles" and gave the second performance of the work here in Ann Arbor immediately after the premier. This book does a great job of showing us how the sense of growth and wonder of the burgeoning city whetted people's appetite for new ideas and wonders in drama, art, and music. Edgard Varèse brought his unique genius to the city and founded an orchestra to play new music. He caused a sensation and created a demand for more of the new. This openness allowed local talent to flourish and the likes of Ornstein, Ruggles, Anthiel, and others prepared the way for the next generation of Copeland, Sessions, and others. The author supplies us with great descriptions, generous portions of music samples, and well chosen pictures For me, the most powerful idea that stays with me is how alive and searching everything was. People did not wait to be subsidized, or for institutions to come to them and give them grants asking them for their art. They just went and made it and created their own means for performance and presentation. Of course, most of it was not art built to last. But so what? This weird demand we make that only art that is eternal is worth making or that only absolutely unique art deserves praise is utter nonsense. I wish we encouraged more of this kind of

When American Music Came Into Its Own

Carol Oja's 'Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s' is an important book for those of us who want to know more about the historical development of 'modern' music in the US. Her main thesis is that it was during the latter part of the 1910s and the whole of the 1920s, and particularly in New York, that American composers developed a modernity that was wholly theirs, not something borrowed from Europe. Of course, there were predecessors--giants like Charles Ives--but they were still largely being ignored. It wasn't until a nucleus of composers, patrons, and fledgling arts organizations began coalescing in New York that the American voice finally emerged and was being heard. Beginning with visionaries like Leo Ornstein in the 1910s, this group soon included such rugged individualists as Dane Rudhyar, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, George Antheil, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland. And individual voices they were, but they recognized, or at least some of them did, that they needed to band together in a sort of artistic and political brotherhood to get their works performed and published. Such efforts as 'Musical Quarterly,' the League of Composers, 'Musical Review,' 'Modern Music,' the Copland-Sessions Concerts and many more came into being. Music journalists (and promoters) like Carl van Vechten and Paul Rosenfield called wider attention to this new music.This was a heady time. Of course, not all of the excitement was in New York. But many musicians from outside New York were attracted there. For instance, Ruth Crawford, later Ruth Crawford Seeger and one of the most original voices of all, came from Chicago late in the 1920s. Artistic ferment, not only in music but in all the arts, made New York THE place to be. The book mentions and discusses the works of many composers that are not very well remembered today--but whose music may be due some sort of revival of interest--like Marion Bauer, Louis Gruenberg, William Grant Still, Emerson Whithorne, Frederick Jacobi. And of course composers now very well-known are discussed: Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Carlos Chávez, Walter Piston. There is a chapter on the widening influence of jazz on American concert music and a description of the famous Aeolian Hall concert in 1924 that introduced Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue,' (and Zez Confrey's 'Kitten on the Keys,' as well!). A good deal of engaging prose is written about the wealthy and fiercely devoted women who were important, even crucial, patrons of modern music: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Blanche Walton, Alma Morgenthau Wertheim. There are many illustrations--concert programs, pictures of musicians and the like. Particularly interesting are reproductions of literally dozens of pages from musical scores, as from Varèse's 'Octandre,' Antheil's 'Ballet mécanique,' Ruggles's 'Vox clamans in deserto,' Cowell's 'The Voice of Lir,' Copland's 'Piano Variations,' Crawford's 'String Quartet' and many others. A valuable and fascinating 4