Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (review)

Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. By Carol J. Oja. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. [xii, 493 p. ISBN 0-19-505849-6. $39.95.] Music examples, illustrations, discography, bibliography, index.

In her much anticipated study of modern music between World War I and the Great Depression, Carol J. Oja captures the diverse energies and breathless excitement of contemporary composition in New York City. She surveys an impressive range of composers and works, both familiar and obscure, in what reads as a series of related essays on the subject of American musical modernism during the twenties. Declining to offer a concrete definition of modernism —a movement with "no dominating center or clear line of authority" (p. 4), Oja nonetheless finds a line of argument to develop in focusing on modernism's international and collaborative nature. She dispels two pervasive "truths" about the period: first, that American composers single-mindedly pursued a national identity in their music; and second, that these same composers were isolated prophets of modernism, "lone innovators storming the musical fortress that refused them entrance" (p. 6). Instead, she discusses such figures as Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Paul Rosenfeld, and George Gershwin in relation to their social, political, and cultural contexts, considering in the process such contemporaneous issues as theosophy, neoclassicism, nationalism, and pluralism. The result is a richly nuanced history that illuminates particular compositions as well as the general relationship between modern music and modern life.

The book is divided into twenty chapters of varying lengths, grouped under broad topics. In a section on "The Machine in the Concert Hall," for example, Oja presents the important insight that the history of music and technology should begin with the early moderns, not with the postwar avant-garde. "A potent wild card," she writes in characteristically vigorous prose, "machines and the new ideology that surrounded them were among a few key elements that helped make American modernism the high-stakes game that it quickly became" (p. 62). The development and dissemination of recording technology forced American composers to compete not only with their contemporaries but also with past masters. The radio—far from being the democratizing force that Copland hoped it would become—was more often used to perpetuate the Victorian ideal of edification through highbrow music.

One notable work to ally musical experimentation with technical innovation was George Antheil's Ballet mécanique, originally conceived for a film by Fernand Léger. Oja relates this "percussive extravaganza" (p. 78) to the aesthetics of the international Dada movement and to the theory of "hyperspace" (considered to be the fourth dimension). Hyperspace theory serves as a philosophical influence "inspiring the long stretches of silence at the end of Ballet mécanique, as well as other experimental techniques" including the "extreme use of repetition" (pp. 84-85). Using a 1926 manuscript score of the Ballet, Oja demonstrates precisely how and where the cult of the machine, Dada aesthetics, and hyperspace theory can be found in Antheil's music. "These traits," she concludes, "bear witness not only to raw native talent but also to a richly interconnected Western culture" of transatlantic artistic exchange (p. 94).

Perhaps the most compelling chapters concern the music of French-American composer Dane Rudhyar, New Englander Carl Ruggles, Californian Henry Cowell, and New Yorker Ruth Crawford—a motley crew brought together under the heading "Spirituality and American Dissonance." Oja resurrects the spiritual dimension of modern music, arguing that formalist analysis has unfairly trumped other strategies for understanding dissonance. Theosophy, a nebulous philosophical mysticism with which these composers were associated, offers an anti-formalist language and context of meaning for the aural assault of Cowell's tone clusters and Crawford's acerbic harmonies. In a virtuosic display of cultural contextualization, Oja explores the relationships among theosophy, East Asian culture, transcendentalism (epitomized by American modernism's aesthetic progenitor, Walt Whitman), and music by these ultra-moderns. "Spirituality—especially as conveyed through theosophy—provided a way of bringing meaning" to...