Making Music Modern

This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age. Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Virgil Thomson all began their careers then, as did many of their less widely recognized compatriots. While the literature and painting of the 1920's have been amply chronicled, music has not received such treatment. Carol Oja's book sets the growth of American musical composition against parallel developments in American culture, provides a guide for the understanding of the music, and explores how the notion of the concert tradition, as inherited from Western Europe, was challenged and revitalized through contact with American popular song, jazz, and non-Western musics.

Making Music for Modern Dance traces the collaborative approaches, working procedures, and aesthetic views of the artists who forged a new and distinctly American art form during the first half of the 20th century. The book offers riveting first-hand accounts from innovative artists in the throes of their creative careers and provides a cross-section of the challenges faced by modern choreographers and composers in America. These articles are complemented by excerpts from astute observers of the music and dance scene as well as by retrospective evaluations of past collaborative practices. Beginning with the careers of pioneers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, and continuing through the avant-garde work of John Cage for Merce Cunningham, the book offers insights into the development of modern dance in relation to its music. Editor Katherine Teck's introductions and afterword offer historical context and tie the artists' essays in with collaborative practices in our own time. The substantive notes suggest further materials of interest to students, practicing dance artists and musicians, dance and music history scholars, and to all who appreciate dance.

A wide-ranging exploration of how music has influenced science through the ages, from fifteenth-century cosmology to twentieth-century string theory. In the natural science of ancient Greece, music formed the meeting place between numbers and perception; for the next two millennia, Pesic tells us in Music and the Making of Modern Science, “liberal education” connected music with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy within a fourfold study, the quadrivium. Peter Pesic argues provocatively that music has had a formative effect on the development of modern science—that music has been not just a charming accompaniment to thought but a conceptual force in its own right. Pesic explores a series of episodes in which music influenced science, moments in which prior developments in music arguably affected subsequent aspects of natural science. He describes encounters between harmony and fifteenth-century cosmological controversies, between musical initiatives and irrational numbers, between vibrating bodies and the emergent electromagnetism. He offers lively accounts of how Newton applied the musical scale to define the colors in the spectrum; how Euler and others applied musical ideas to develop the wave theory of light; and how a harmonium prepared Max Planck to find a quantum theory that reengaged the mathematics of vibration. Taken together, these cases document the peculiar power of music—its autonomous force as a stream of experience, capable of stimulating insights different from those mediated by the verbal and the visual. An innovative e-book edition available for iOS devices will allow sound examples to be played by a touch and shows the score in a moving line.

This volume explores the notion of “affective media” within and across different arts in Japan, with a primary focus on music, whether as standalone product or connected to other genres such as theatre and photography. The volume explores the Japanese reception of this “affective media”, its transformation and subsequent cultural flow. Moving from a discussion of early encounters with the West through Jesuits and others, the contributors primarily consider the role of music in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. With ten original chapters, the volume covers a wealth of themes, from education, koto music, guitar making, avant-garde recorder works, musicals and rock photography, to interviews with contemporary performers in jazz, modern rock and J-pop. Innovative and fascinating, the book provides rich new insights and material to all those interested in Japanese musical culture.

Between the world wars, Paris welcomed not only a number of glamorous American expatriates, including Josephine Baker and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also a dynamic musical style emerging in the United States: jazz. Roaring through cabarets, music halls, and dance clubs, the upbeat, syncopated rhythms of jazz soon added to the allure of Paris as a center of international nightlife and cutting-edge modern culture. In Making Jazz French, Jeffrey H. Jackson examines not only how and why jazz became so widely performed in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s but also why it was so controversial. Drawing on memoirs, press accounts, and cultural criticism, Jackson uses the history of jazz in Paris to illuminate the challenges confounding French national identity during the interwar years. As he explains, many French people initially regarded jazz as alien because of its associations with America and Africa. Some reveled in its explosive energy and the exoticism of its racial connotations, while others saw it as a dangerous reversal of France’s most cherished notions of "civilization." At the same time, many French musicians, though not threatened by jazz as a musical style, feared their jobs would vanish with the arrival of American performers. By the 1930s, however, a core group of French fans, critics, and musicians had incorporated jazz into the French entertainment tradition. Today it is an integral part of Parisian musical performance. In showing how jazz became French, Jackson reveals some of the ways a musical form created in the United States became an international phenomenon and acquired new meanings unique to the places where it was heard and performed.

Making Music for Modern Dance traces the collaborative approaches, working procedures, and aesthetic views of the artists who forged a new and distinctly American art form during the first half of the 20th century. The book offers riveting first-hand accounts from innovative artists in the throes of their creative careers and provides a cross-section of the challenges faced by modern choreographers and composers in America. These articles are complemented by excerpts from astute observers of the music and dance scene as well as by retrospective evaluations of past collaborative practices. Beginning with the careers of pioneers Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn, and continuing through the avant-garde work of John Cage for Merce Cunningham, the book offers insights into the development of modern dance in relation to its music. Editor Katherine Teck's introductions and afterword offer historical context and tie the artists' essays in with collaborative practices in our own time. The substantive notes suggest further materials of interest to students, practicing dance artists and musicians, dance and music history scholars, and to all who appreciate dance.

Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.