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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Exotica [Paperback] Review

Exoticaby David Toop
David Toop is arguably the most intelligent music critic writing today, his range of interests prospecting across an avant garde canvas coloured by the 20th century's foremost writers,thinkers and musicians.
Although Toop's subject is predominantlythat of fabricated soundscapes in a real world, a music which has come tobe categorised as exotica, his roots are literary and extend to novelisticcosmographers like Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and William Burroughs.Toop is erudite, but refreshingly unacademic in the way his texts areinterspersed with autobiography, anecdote, interviews and fiction. Bringingimaginative criticism to bear on a range of subjects from the beginnings ofethnic music to Josephine Baker and Yma Sumac, Les Baxter and Martin Denny,Toop succeeds in aligning the concept of the exotic with world music. In acentury in which we have grown to be increasingly interiorised, televisionoften providing our point of contact with the external world, so music hascome to assume the role of transporting geography into our rooms. In thisrespect Les Baxter's floridly contrived soundscapes prove central to Toop'sthesis, for Baxter was throughout the 1950's to offer his listeners packagetours in sound. According to Toop Baxter's music provided 'runningexcursions for sedentary tourists who wanted to stroll around some taboourges before lunch, view a pagan ceremony through gaps in the bamboo, gowild in the sun or conjure a demon, all without leaving home stereocomforts in the whitebread suburbs.' Baxter's albums carried titles such asCaribbean moonlight, Jewels of the Sea, Ritual of the Savage and Ports ofPleasure, and by hinting at sexual licentiousness in exotic landscapes, themusic was to prove irresistible to a 1950's record buying public.
Toop is particularly good on inventive vocalists like Josephine Baker andYma Sumac. When Baker arrived in Paris in 1925 as a dancer with La RevueNégre, she caused a sensation by exposing her breasts when she danced.Aspiring to chanson, she injected the medium with her atavistic Africanroots, so as to create an exotic vocal genre.
Yma Sumac noted forher collaboration with Les Baxter on Voice of the Xtabay, was anextraordinarily volatile singer of South American ancestry noted for hermulti-octave range and freakishly histrionic tone. Sumac shared with Baxterand Denny the ability to transpose a spuriously sourced primitivism to thecontrived medium of the Western recording studio.
David Toop is amarvellous guide to the curious, the bizarre, the culted and the durable in20th century music. His book includes interviews with the eclectic likes ofBurt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, Maroumi Hosno and NusratFateh Ali Khan, the renowned Pakistani popular singer.
More thanjust a vibrantly maverick musician and musicologist David Toop writes withthe exciting inventiveness of a fine prose stylist. This is a book to beingested slowly and with careful attention paid to the originality of theauthor's metaphors. Exotica is a rich text in the best sense ofcontemporary writing.
JEREMY REED

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Product Description:
"Exotica" takes a look at the music and people behind some of the world's most witty, experimental and adventurous sound recordings. Since the invention of the microphone, people have experimented with sound, putting everything from thunderstorms and dolphin sounds, medical operations, native jungle drums and junkyard trash down on vinyl. Notions of the exotic have inspired popular music and musicians in all fields from classical, through "easy listening" to rap - from Stravinsky to the Boo-Yah T.R.I.B.E David Toop takes the reader through the 20th century's fascination with exotica, its icons and practitioners, taking in the work of Les Baxter, the meaning of Carmen Miranda, leopard skin leotards and pink fluffy cubicles, elevator music and more. Included are interviews with Burt Bacharach, Ornette Coleman, Bill Laswell, YMO's Haroumi Hosono, and Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

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