Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s by Oja, Carol J.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780195058499.

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920s have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Ojas book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.