Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (review)

Abstract

In her much anticipated study of modern music between World War I and the Great Depression, Carol J. Oja captures the diverse energies and breathless excitement of contemporary composition in New York City. She surveys an impressive range of composers and works, both familiar and obscure, in what reads as a series of related essays on the subject of American musical modernism during the twenties. Declining to offer a concrete definition of modernism —a movement with "no dominating center or clear line of authority" (p. 4), Oja nonetheless finds a line of argument to develop in focusing on modernism's international and collaborative nature. She dispels two pervasive "truths" about the period: first, that American composers single-mindedly pursued a national identity in their music; and second, that these same composers were isolated prophets of modernism, "lone innovators storming the musical fortress that refused them entrance" (p. 6). Instead, she discusses such figures as Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Paul Rosenfeld, and George Gershwin in relation to their social, political, and cultural contexts, considering in the process such contemporaneous issues as theosophy, neoclassicism, nationalism, and pluralism. The result is a richly nuanced history that illuminates particular compositions as well as the general relationship between modern music and modern life.