Remembering Modern Music

Abstract

Minna Lederman Daniel. 99. Longtime Modern Music Editor, the obituary headline in the New York Times proclaimed after her death on 29 October. Yet Modern Music only existed for some two decades (it began as a review journal for the League of Composers in 1924, became independent two years later, and lasted in that form until 1946), meaning that Modern Music took up only a little more than a fifth of Daniel's very long life. Yet longtime sounds right anyway. Daniel's contribution to the literature of American music is that big. Daniel simply produced, at a steady bimonthly rate, some of the century's best writing about music. She developed a stable of writing composers who wrote with wit and clarity, who were invariably interesting and, in a surprising number of cases, wonderful stylists. Surely no such gathering of superb composer-writers has existed before, nor is it likely to again in the foreseeable future. History is now, thanks to Daniel, well served with the illuminating and irresistible reports from the front line of the battles of twentieth-century music during its most crucial years. Maybe she was lucky that there were such fine writers among composers at that time. But she also cultivated the likes of Virgil Thomson, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Paul Bowles, Lou Harrison, and all the rest. The story of Modern Music has been chronicled in a small book, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music 1924-47) she made for the Institute for Studies in American Music, Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, in 1983 (I.S.A.M. Monograph no. 18). And perhaps the best tribute to Daniel is to tease the reader with the enticing leads of some of the articles reprinted in the volume.