Music from the Vanguard: The Songs of the Composers Collective of New York, 1933–1936

The Composers Collective of New York was founded in 1933 by composers who shared an interest in both leftist politics and modernist music. For the next three years, the Composers Collective met in rooms obtained through the Communist Party apparatus, and its members tried to find a way to merge the self-proclaimed vanguard of American modernist music with the self-proclaimed vanguard of the proletariat, the Communist Party in its Third Period. In 1936, the group disbanded, with many of the members of the Collective moving on to get more involved in the folk music that was increasingly important to Communist Party activists during the period of the Popular Front.

To date, the Composers Collective has largely been a footnote in the writings of the relationship between the Communist Party and music. Indeed, the most extensive treatment of the Collective in recent years is a passing discussion in Richard Reuss’s extensive study of folk music and the left. Besides the excellent work in the 1970s and early 1980s by David Dunaway, who conducted several oral histories with Composers Collective members, and work on the individual composers involved with the Collective, there has been no scholarly consideration of the importance of the Composers Collective.¹

This lack of recent scholarship on the Collective is not in keeping with its importance either in the history of American radicalism or in the history of American music. Many of the most important New York City-based composers were members of the collective—Marc Blitzstein, Norman Cazden, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, Earl Robinson, Charles Seeger, and Elie Siegmeister were all members of the short-lived group, and even more important composers like Aaron Copland and Hanns Eisler were actively involved in the group’s work. Additionally, the Composers Collective represented the first organized attempt at creating a left-wing musical culture since the fall of the Industrial Workers of the World some 20 years earlier. Finally, as Reuss recognized, it represented the beginnings of the American Communist Party’s work with music, work that would eventually pave the way for the rise of the far more recognizable folk-inspired songs of the mid- and late 1930s.

The Composers Collective also represents an important opportunity for scholars. For decades top-down and bottom-up schools of historians have been locked in a fierce debate. Those historians who take the top-down position have argued consistently that the Communist Party was an organization where activists on the ground had little control or say in the running of the organization and where policy was largely set by Russian officials. The bottom-up historians have countered with the position that the day-to-day activities of the Communist Party were often decided by activists on the ground in response to local events and conditions, not necessarily in response to orders coming out of Russia.²

Beginning in the early twenty-first century, however, some historians have argued, convincingly, that it may be time to move on from these debates. In 2000, two of the most important historians of American communism argued fiercely over whether these debates could simply be moved on. Ellen Schrecker opened a commentary on the work of John Earl Haynes by asking a question: “Will the domestic Cold War never end? As historians, can’t we just call a truce and examine whatever pieces of the historical record challenge us intellectually without having to take sides?” Schrecker answered her own question: “Apparently not,” though she admitted that she was “not sure why the controversy continues,” that it was “increasingly redolent of political antiquarianism.” Haynes, for his part, responded that “communism and the Cold War in history are far from over,” that “making historical sense of these appalling phenomena will be a major preoccupation of scholars in the coming decade,” and that we cannot simply move on.³

In the Composers Collective we see some of the ways in which moving on might indeed be possible, despite Haynes’s contention. Certainly top-down influences played an important role in...