“America is the original version of modernity,” wrote Jean Baudrillard, looking back on the twentieth century from 1986. But musically, at least, that judgment had seemed far from obvious eighty years before, when the country was still seen as a musical backwater that had been measured and found wanting by the standards of progress set in Vienna or Paris. Over the coming decades, however, American composers—among them George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Duke Ellington—forged their own distinctive visions of musical modernity. What was the modernist movement in American classical music? What was its relationship to its European counterpart, to American folk music, and to Black modernisms like jazz and the blues? Is there a distinctively American sound? And how did the country’s music reflect and shape its self-image, during the era in which it came to dominate the globe?
In this course, we will trace the development of American musical modernism, considering its influences on both sides of the Atlantic, its cultural and intellectual context, and its artistic and political legacy. Along the way, we will listen to the music of Gershwin, Seeger, Copland, and Ellington, as well as Charles Ives, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Henry Cowell, William Grant Still, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, and others. We will study the musical portraits of America painted by immigrants, from the sentimental patriotism of Irving Berlin to the exuberant dissonance of Edgard Varèse, and discuss the events and ideas that influenced this music, from New England Transcendentalism to the New Deal. What visions of American identity—radical and reactionary, parochial and cosmopolitan—did these composers help to shape? And how should we understand their vision of the country, their hopes and fears for its future, as the era of American hegemony comes to an end? Course readings will include works by Seeger, Bernstein, Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis, and Albert Murray, among others.
