Art Music Activism

Aesthetics and Politics in 1930s New York City

Maria Cristina Fava (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

240 Seiten

2024
University of Illinois Press (Verlag)
978-0-252-04571-4 (ISBN)

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Surrounded by the widespread misery of the Depression, left-leaning classical music composers sought a musical language that both engaged the masses and gave voice to their concerns. Maria Cristina Fava explores the rich creative milieu shaped by artists dedicated to using music and theater to advance the promotion, circulation, and acceptance of leftist ideas in 1930s New York City. Despite tensions between aesthetic and pragmatic goals, the people and groups produced works at the center of the decade’s sociopolitical and cultural life. Fava looks at the Composers’ Collective of New York and its work on proletarian music and workers’ songs before turning to the blend of experimentation and vernacular idioms that shaped the political use of music within the American Worker’s Theater Movement. Fava then reveals how composers and theater practitioners from these two groups achieved prominence within endeavors promoted by the Works Project Administration.

Fava’s history teases out fascinating details from performances and offstage activity attached to works by composers such as Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, and Harold Rome. Endeavors encouraged avant-garde experimentation while nurturing innovations friendly to modernist approaches and an interest in non-western music. Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock offered a memorable example that found popular success, but while the piece achieved its goals, it became so wrapped up in myths surrounding workers’ theater that critics overlooked Blitzstein’s musical ingenuity.

Provocative and original, Art Music Activism considers how innovative classical composers of the 1930s balanced creative aims with experimentation, accessible content, and a sociopolitical message to create socially meaningful works.

Maria Cristina Fava is an associate professor of musicology at Western Michigan University.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Bourgeois Modernism for the Proletariat: The Composers’ Collective

Chapter 2. The Workers’ Theater Movement and the Politicization of the Musical Revue

Chapter 3. Keeping Politics at Bay: Composers’ Forum Laboratory

Chapter 4. The Living Newspaper Unit and Innovative Musical Approaches

Chapter 5. A Leftist Myth: Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock

Epilogue

Notes

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	07.03.2024
Reihe/Serie	Music in American Life
Zusatzinfo	4 black & white photographs, 17 music examples
Verlagsort	Baltimore
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	481 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Klassik / Oper / Musical
	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Theater / Ballett
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
ISBN-10	0-252-04571-8 / 0252045718
ISBN-13	978-0-252-04571-4 / 9780252045714
Zustand	Neuware