Modern Music

by David Nicholls

As Carol J. Oja notes in her marvelous and densely packed book, Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (Oxford University Press, 2000; $39.95), “Artists and intellectuals chronically avoid being aligned with ‘isms’” (p. 231). Thus in 1928, Roy Harris advised Aaron Copland to “avoid neo-classicism like the pest that it is” (p. 234), while the manifesto of Edgard Varèse’s International Composers’ Guild (founded in 1921) “denie[d] the existence of schools; [and] recognize[d] only the individual” (p. 183). Such sentiments on the part of creative artists are entirely reasonable, as it is their uniqueness (rather than their commonness) that they wish to be remembered for. Yet these desires are in direct opposition to the very natural tendency of the human mind to try and make sense of the disparate through categorization and compartmentalization. Musicologists, of course, have in general been no less prone to such activities than, say, mycologists, except that their taxonomies are period, place, and “ism” rather than the common characteristics of particular fungal genera.

One of the many laudable achievements of Making Music Modern is that, contrary to this tendency, it follows to a very considerable degree the ICG manifesto in denying the existence of schools, and recognizing only the individual. True, Oja of logical necessity groups her chapters by topical themes: “Spirituality and American Dissonance” brings together studies of Dane Rudhyar, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Ruth Crawford, while “New World Neoclassicism” does the same for Copland, Virgil Thomson, and a representative quartet of Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Harris, and Carlos Chávez. But she wisely recognizes both the internationalism of the music scene in New York during the 1920s—for instance in the section dealing with “European Modernists and American Critics” and the chapter titled “The Transatlantic Gaze of Aaron Copland”—and the huge importance of the developing new music infrastructure that emerged during the 1920s. This latter is discussed in the three chapters grouped as “Myths and Institutions,” and the opening “Introduction: The Modern Music Shop,” which—inter alia—conjures up the forgotten image of the eponymous 1920s store (phone number “DRY dock 3732”) variously located on East 48th Street and East Broadway.

Even more impressively, Oja avoids the cultural exclusivity so prevalent among musicologists in her virtuosic contextualization of the emerging new music in the broader world of arts and ideas. Thus chapter 4, “Engineers of Art,” effortlessly moves from the Model T through the rise of mass communication and Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine Camera Work, to “the Theremin, the Clavilux, the Crea-tone, the Vitaphone, and the Martenot,” all of which “promised to liberate composers from the constraints of historic instruments” (p. 67). Elsewhere, well-chosen and extremely pertinent quotations from Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, Frank Zappa, Paul Rosenfeld, Alexis de Tocqueville, E. M. Forster, and F. Scott Fitzgerald complement and counterpoint the topics under consideration. A further example of Oja’s inclusivity is demonstrated in the extensive appendix, which gives a comprehensive listing of the “Programs of Modern-Music Societies in New York, 1920-1931,” from Joseph Achron to Massimo Zanotti-Bianco, and Orlando Gibbons (!) to Henry Brant. Perhaps most admirable of all is Oja’s democratic thoroughness in attending not only to the contributions of figures both obvious (Varèse, Copland, Gershwin) and obscure (Marion Bauer, Frederick Jacobi, Emerson Whithorne, Louis Gruenberg), but also in making convincing arguments for the restitution of neglected pioneers including Leo Ornstein and Dane Rudhyar. Additionally, she does much to exorcise the myths concerning the critical reception of Varèse, who—contrary to received wisdom—“had attained considerable stature” by 1927 (p. 41), and the vitally important role of “Women Patrons and Activists” (chapter 12) in fostering musical developments in America (and especially New York) during the first quarter of the twentieth century.

Inevitably, one has a few quibbles. Oja’s approach does lead on occasion to some very short chapters: that discussing “Virgil Thomson’s ‘Cocktail of Culture,’” for instance, contains a mere twelve pages, of which five are largely occupied by illustrations or music examples; for “Ruth Crawford and the Apotheosis of Spiritual Dissonance” the figures are nine and three respectively. Couldn’t this material have been included in other chapters? A further result of Oja’s primarily “individual” treatment is a perhaps inevitable reliance on a “biography followed by commentary” format, this being found in perhaps half of the book’s twenty chapters. There is also the suspicion that the text at times strays from its principal purpose—the examination of “the extraordinary network of composers and ideologies that made up the modernist movement in New York City from World War I until the early years of the Depression” (p. 4)—in order to include figures now perceived as more important than perhaps they were at the time. Ruth Crawford, for instance, arrived in the city in 1929, and before 1930 had received only two performances there (the same number as Henry Eichheim and Carl Engel). George Antheil, meanwhile, spent much of the decade based elsewhere, including a long stint in Paris.

None of this, however, should be allowed to diminish the impact and importance of Oja's remarkable study. For while neither Crawford nor Antheil was physically based in the city, both were able to achieve a virtual presence because “New York had become an international marketplace of modernism…[and was] one of the main sites where the newest compositions were written, performed, and”—most importantly in this respect—“discussed” (p. 3). Ultimately, then, it is not individual composers or their works that take pride of place in Oja’s book, but rather New York City itself, which “placed young composers at an auspicious cultural crossroads. There they could stand, with all their belongings in one suitcase, free to roam in whatever direction their imaginations might lead” (p. 6). I, for one, feel the same way about this pathbreaking, highly readable, and enticing volume, for it, too, has led my imagination to many new thoughts and insights.

—University of Southampton

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