Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s [Hardcover] Review

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 40-page appendix lists all the pieces played on most of the new music series in New York during the period under discussion.
Oja has obviously done her research meticulously and the book is written in a lively, engaging style. It is not aimed at the scholarly audience, although surely musicologists can find plenty to marvel at here, but would be, I suspect, fascinating for the curious general reader.
Recommended.
Review by Scott Morrison.

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