Dangerous Melodies Classical Music In America From The Great War Through The Cold War

A Juilliard-trained musician and professor of history explores the fascinating entanglement of classical music with American foreign relations. Dangerous Melodies vividly evokes a time when classical music stood at the center of twentieth-century American life, occupying a prominent place in the nation’s culture and politics. The work of renowned conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—and the activities of orchestras and opera companies—were intertwined with momentous international events, especially the two world wars and the long Cold War. Jonathan Rosenberg exposes the politics behind classical music, showing how German musicians were dismissed or imprisoned during World War I, while numerous German compositions were swept from American auditoriums. He writes of the accompanying impassioned protests, some of which verged on riots, by soldiers and ordinary citizens. Yet, during World War II, those same compositions were no longer part of the political discussion, while Russian music, especially Shostakovich’s, was used as a tool to strengthen the US-Soviet alliance. During the Cold War, accusations of communism were leveled against members of the American music community, while the State Department sent symphony orchestras to play around the world, even performing behind the Iron Curtain. Rich with a stunning array of composers and musicians, including Karl Muck, Arturo Toscanini, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Kirsten Flagstad, Aaron Copland, Van Cliburn, and Leonard Bernstein, Dangerous Melodies delves into the volatile intersection of classical music and world politics to reveal a tumultuous history of twentieth-century America.

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States.

America's Gilded Age was a time of great musical evolution. As the country continued to develop a musical style apart from Europe, its church and religious music and opera took on new forms. Music-as-entertainment also evolved, with marching bands at public events and the new musicals in theaters. This volume presents the composers, musicians, songwriters, instruments and musical forms that uniquely identify the Gilded Age. Chapters include: Concerts and Symphony orchestras; Grand Opera; Composers, Critics, and Conservatories; Amateurs and Music at Home; Sacred Music, Black and White; Ragtime, Vaudeville, and the American Musical Stage; Music, Politics, and the Progressive Movement; and Music Industries and Technology

Aimed at readers interested in the history of the Cold War and of space exploration, the book makes a major contribution to the history of rocket development and the nuclear age.

World War I and the peace settlement -- Between the wars -- From World War II to Vietnam.

The book surveys the broad sweep of music among Jews of widely diverse communities from Biblical times to the modern day. Each chapter focuses on a different Jewish cultural epoch and explores the music and the way it functioned in that society. The work is structured as both a college text and an informative guide for the lay reader.

This volume is composed of transcripts from the secret recordings that Presidents Kennedy and Johnson made of White House meetings and phone conversations about the violent Civil Rights crisis. As fly-on-the-wall history, this book gives an unprecedented grasp of the way the White House affected civil rights history and consequently transformed America.

Transatlantic Relations and the Great War explores the relations between the Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary and the modern US democracy and how that relationship developed over decades until it ended in a final rupture. As the First World War drew to a close in late 1918, the Mid-European Union was created to fill the vacuum in Central and Eastern Europe as the old Danube Monarchy of Austria-Hungary was falling apart. One year before, in December 1917, the United States had declared war on Austria-Hungary and, overnight, huge masses of immigrants from the Habsburg Empire became enemy aliens in the US. Offering a major deviation from traditional historiography, this book explains how the countdown of mostly diplomatic events in that fatal year 1918 could have taken an alternative course. In addition to providing a narrative account of Austrian-Hungarian relations with the US in the years leading up to the First World War, the author also demonstrates how an almost total ignorance of the affairs of the Dual Monarchy was to be found in the US and vice versa. This book is a fascinating and important resource for students and scholars interested in modern European and US history, diplomatic relations, and war studies.