Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties

Abstract

Historians of the 1950s have long examined popular music—early rock ‘n’ roll, jazz, folk, the songs of Hollywood and Broadway musicals—to offer insights into the culture and politics of the period. In Music in the Age of Anxiety James Wierzbicki adds to these (except, curiously not, to folk) an examination of many other styles of music from the era to trace how they reflected and were shaped by contemporary social, cultural, and political issues. Examining the music of the decade “less as a phenomenon unto itself than as a manifestation of the conditions under which it emerged or receded, thrived or withered,” Wierzbicki argues that “all of this music … was somehow affected by the anxious spirit of the times” (pp. 4–5). The anxieties of the 1950s that Wierzbicki believes affected the decade's music will be familiar to postwar historians—racial turmoil, suburban conformity, sexual repression, the red scare and the Cold War—and he offers little about these topics that historians will not already know. Rather, as a musicologist, he brings together so many styles of music—pop, rock, jazz, Hollywood, Broadway, opera, mainstream and modernist composers, and avant-garde and experimental “mavericks”—and examines the music, musicians, and music industry of the decade through the lenses of these anxieties.