Sound Commitments

The role of popular music is widely recognized in giving voice to radical political views, the plight of the oppressed, and the desire for social change. Avant-garde music, by contrast, is often thought to prioritize the pursuit of new technical or conceptual territory over issues of human and social concern. Yet throughout the activist 1960s, many avant-garde musicians were convinced that aesthetic experiment and social progressiveness made natural bedfellows. Intensely involved in the era's social and political upheavals, they often sought to reflect this engagement in their music. Yet how could avant-garde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny, initiated clique? In answer, Sound Commitments, examines the encounter of avant-garde music and "the Sixties" across a range of genres, aesthetic positions and geographical locations. Through music for the concert hall, tape and electronic music, jazz and improvisation, participatory "events," performance art, and experimental popular music, the essays in this volume explore developments in the United States, France, West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Japan and parts of the "Third World," delving into the deep richness of avant-garde musicians' response to the decade's defining cultural shifts. Featuring new archival research and/or interviews with significant figures of the period in each chapter, Sound Commitments will appeal to researchers and advanced students in the fields of post-war music, cultures of the 1960s, and the avant-garde, as well as to an informed general readership.

"Classical composers seeking to create an American sound enjoyed unprecedented success during the 1930s and 1940s. Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and others brought national and international attention to American composers for the first time in history. In the years after World War II, however, something changed. The prestige of musical Americanism waned rapidly as anti-Communists made accusations against leading Americanist composers. Meanwhile, a method of harmonic organization that some considered more Cold War–appropriate—serialism—began to rise in status. For many composers and historians, the Cold War had effectively “killed off” musical Americanism. In this book, the author offers a fuller, more nuanced picture of the effect of the Cold War on Americanist composers. She shows that the ideological conflict brought both challenges and opportunities. Some leftist Americanist composers struggled greatly in this new artistic and political environment, especially as American nationalism increasingly meant American exceptionalism. But composers of all political stripes would find in the federal government a new and unique channel through which to ensure the survival of musical Americanism, as the White House sought to use American music as a Cold War propaganda tool and American composers as cultural diplomats. The Americanists’ efforts to safeguard the reputation of their style would have significant consequences. Ultimately, they effected a rebranding of musical Americanism, with consequences that remain with us today."--Rabat de la jaquette.

Many religious people are alarmed about features of the current age - violence in the media, a pervasive hedonism, a marginalization of religion, and widespread abortion. These concerns influence politics, but just as there should be a separation between church and state, so should there be a balance between religious commitments and secular arguments calling for social reforms. Robert Audi offers a principle of secular rationale, which does not exclude religious grounds for action but which rules out restricting freedom except on grounds that any rational citizen would accept. The book describes the essential commitments of free democracy, explains how religious and secular moral considerations can be integrated to facilitate co-operation in a world of religious pluralism, and proposes ideals of civic virtue that express the mutual respect on which democracy depends. Audi offers a balanced and sophisticated treatment of the relations between religion and politics in a modern, secular society.

"Report of the Dominion fishery commission on the fisheries of the province of Ontario, 1893", issued as vol. 26, no. 7, supplement.