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Mathematical rigor made music respectable to the midcentury cult of scientific progress. Melody and consonance were replaced by spiky disjunction, harmony by dissonance.īy the middle of the 20th century, Schoenbergian serialism was the heterosexual high road. Hubbs calls "the great-man and masterwork ideologies of the Germanic musical tradition." And by the 1920s the avatars of Austro-German music were proclaiming that tonality, based on the traditional major and minor scales, was dead.Īrnold Schoenberg and his followers constructed music by mathematical formulas rather than sound. The divide wasn't, and isn't, definitive, but it's surprising how easy it is to line up a dichotomy.įrom Ives on, the edgier modernists tended to be products of what Dr. Indeed, Ives seems to have set up a kind of socio-cultural war between the edgier modernist composers, most of whom were straight, and the "softer" modernists (Copland et al.), most of whom were gay. The openly homophobic Ives chided hostile listeners to stand up and take dissonance "like a man." Real men don't listen to string quartets. Thanks to our Puritan heritage - and a cult of the macho - the arts and their practitioners have often been viewed as suspect if not subversive, effete if not downright unmanly.
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(Copland was pretty discreet about his private life, which included a series of relationships with much younger men, but he didn't hide it.)īut then, as Hubbs points out, the land of the free and home of the brave has long had an uncomfortable relationship with the arts. Army promotional recording featuring music by Copland, who, of course, couldn't serve in the Army if he acknowledged his sexuality. Her book opens with the delicious irony of a recent U.S. "American music didn't have much of a banner to fly until Copland hit it big in the late ?30s," says Nadine Hubbs, a University of Michigan professor whose book, "The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity" (University of California Press), explores how these composers, together with certain cultural trends, created those distinctively American sounds.
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Through their movie and ballet scores, notably, and knockoffs by others, they helped define in sound what it means to be an American. At the height of their collective influence, from the late 1930s to the early ?50s, they were a potent force. The gay composers all knew one another and networked extensively. If it took the Czech Antonin Dvorak to interest American composers in the folk music all around them, maybe it took another set of outsiders to define our shared musical identity.īy contrast, most of the pricklier modernists, including Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, were straight. Ironically, these celebrations of outdoorsy, big-sky Americana, and of WASP home and hearth, were created by a homosexual Jew from Brooklyn. Their wide-eyed clarity and tunefulness radiate working-class idealism and traditional family values.
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It's what's for dinner." It's hard to imagine a movie about the American West without music inspired by Copland's wide-open sonorities.Ĭopland's scores are part of our national mythology. "Rodeo" even backs James Garner's growl, "Beef. More than half a century on, and 15 years after Copland's death, these works still define a distinctively American sound. Modern Identifier lp_charles-ives-chamber-music_charles-ives-paul-zukofsky-gilbert-kalish Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t50h5j59f Lineage Technics SL1200MK5 Turntable + Audio-Technica AT95e cartridge > Radio Design Labs EZ-PH1 phono preamp > Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Arabic Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.5354 Ocr_module_version 0.0.14 Ocr_parameters -l eng+ita Original-ppi 1200 Pages 4 Pdf_module_version 0.0.17 Ppi 600 Ripping_date 20210804232224 Ripping_operator Ripping_scanner archivelp-rip-cebu02 Ripping_software_version ArchiveCD Version 2.2.57lp Ripping_stylus archivelp-rip-cebu02-20210629-0e3a7668 Ripping_time 4074 Scandate 20210708230112 Scanner archivelp-cat-cebu02 Scanningcenter cebu Software_version ArchiveCD Version 2.2.Along with the boom of rockets and crackle of firecrackers, the sounds of the Fourth of July include the brassy flourishes and drum-poundings of Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," and the composer's "Lincoln Portrait" and "Billy the Kid Suite." IA1661426 Catalog_time 290 Country US Derive_submittime 02:15:19 Disccount 1 External-identifier Adaptive_ocr true Addeddate 00:51:17 Betterpdf true Bookreader-defaults mode/1up Boxid IA1599911
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