All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA's Federal Music Project and American Society

Abstract

All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA's Federal Music Project and American Society. By Kenneth J. Bindas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. [xiv, 164 p. ISBN 0-87049-909-2. $24.00.] Kenneth J. Bindas's concise monograph is a long-overdue treatment of an important topic in American music history. The Federal Music Project (FMP) was one of four innovative depression-era programs in the Works Progress Administration's (WPA) Federal Am Projects. The Art, Theater, and Writing projects have all received book-length examinations memorializing them as representative New Deal experiments. These three projects financed remarkable murals, plays, and guidebooks that enriched Americans' acquaintance with their cultural resources, but conservatives also attacked the projects for employing political radicals who criticized capitalism and social injustice. The current culture wars over public arts funding ensure that these projects remain relevant today. As Bindas shows, the FMP was generally free of the ideological conflict that engulfed the other arts projects. The Project's director, the emigre conductor Nikolai Sokoloff, promoted European classics at the expense of American composers, avant-garde works, and swing and other popular music. Sokoloff was also constrained by the American Federation of Musicians, a bourgeois-minded affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, which did its best to avoid radical unionism and to ensure steady musical employment. The union also discriminated against nonwhites and women, a prejudice that diminished potential radicalism in the FMP (which nevertheless did fund many African-American and Hispanic ensembles and some all-female groups). Sokoloff and his staff settled on a basic recipe of the classics and the more uplifting, innocuous new American works for FMP concerts, a taste epitomized by their most grandiose project, the patriotic 1938 opera Gettysburg that premiered at the Hollywood Bowl. For all of the FMP's caution regarding content, its activities were impressive in scope: more than 224,00 (concerts given before 148 million listeners, featuring at least 6,700 works by American composers. The book conveys the importance of the FMP as a part of the New Deal and 1930s American culture. Musicians faced a tremendous employment crisis due to the depression and the rise of recording and radio. At its peak, the Project employed over fifteen thousand professional musicians for an average of eight to ten months. …