Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

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An Introduction: The Modern Music Shop
Enter the Moderns
1 Leo Ornstein: Wild Man of the 1910s
2 Creating a God: The Reception of Edgar Varese
3 The Arrival of European Modernism
The Machine in the Concert Hall
4 Engineers of Art
5 Ballet Mecanique and International Modernist Networks
Spirituality and American Dissonance
6 Dane Rudhyar's Vision of Dissonance
7 The Ecstasy of Carl Ruggles
8 Henry Cowell's Throbbing Masses of Sounds
9 Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual Dissonance
Myths and Institutions
10 A Forgotten Vanguard: The Legacy of Marion Bauer, Louis Gruenberg, Frederick Jacobi, and Emerson Whitmore
11 Organizing the Moderns
12 Women Patrons and Activists
New World Neoclassicism
13 Neoclassicism: Orthodox Europeanism or Empowering Internationalism?
14 The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland
15 Virgil Thomson's Cocktail of Culture
16 A Quartet of New World Neoclassicists
European Modernists and American Critics
17 Europeans in Performance and on Tour
18 Visionary Critics
Widening Horizons
19 Modernism and The Jazz Age
20 Crossing Over with George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and the Modernists
Epilogue
Selected Discography

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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 century. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, Edgar Varèse, Henry Cowell, Leo Ornstein, Marion Bauer, George Antheil-these were the leaders of a talented new generation of American composers whose efforts made New York City the center of new music in the country. They founded composer societies--such as the International Composers' Guild, the League of Composers, the Pan American Association, and the Copland-Sessions Concerts--to promote the performance of their music, and they nimbly negotiated cultural boundaries, aiming for recognition in Western Europe as much as at home. They showed exceptional skill at marketing their work. Drawing on extensive archival material--including interviews, correspondence, popular periodicals, and little-known music manuscripts--Oja provides a new perspective on the period and a compelling collective portrait of the figures, puncturing many longstanding myths. American composers active in New York during the 1920s are explored in relation to the "Machine Age" and American Dada; the impact of spirituality on American dissonance; the crucial, behind-the-scenes role of women as patrons and promoters of modernist music; cross-currents between jazz and concert music; the critical reception of modernist music (especially in the writings of Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld); and the international impulse behind neoclassicism. The book also examines the persistent biases of the time, particularly anti-Semitisim, gender stereotyping, and longstanding racial attitudes.

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Wise, witty and compulsively readable...non-dogmatically postmodern. Eschewing a linear narrative, [Oja] writes short chapters that are narrowly and precisely focused rather than comprehensive. The result might be likened to the comic strip, that most post-modern of narrative forms, and the form fits the content

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