Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser (review)

Musicologist Annegret Fauser introduces her cultural history of music in the United States during World War II with the story of Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, in which World War II–era music by Aaron Copland was featured at numerous inaugural events to demonstrate the enduring nationalist appeal of a repertoire composed under those conditions. Copland is an apt point of departure because the music he composed in the first half of the 1940s remains the definition of American art-music style. Fauser’s book is both eminently readable and grounded in an astounding amount of archival research. It is highly recommended to cultural historians and musicians alike.

Fauser identifies her subject as the “acoustic history of World War II” in the United States, which for her means “defamiliarizing the soundscape of the period” by foregrounding the “lived sonic experience” of that era rather than the version so well established by postwar films about the era (p. 9). This is not an example of sound studies, however. Instead, it focuses on art music traditions because, while popular musics of the era are well documented, “what in fact distinguished musical life in the United States during World War II from other times of war was the significant role assigned to classical music” (p. 4). This study complements and engages with extant scholarship on jazz, musical theater, and popular musics of the era, as well as studies of émigré composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill. Fauser conscientiously integrates traditionally marginalized figures into her narrative, including female, African-American and American Indian musicians, even while acknowledging that, unsurprisingly, “the picture that emerged from the archives and libraries was overwhelmingly white” (p. 13). One wonders where other sources might remain awaiting discovery.

The book is divided into two sections. The first two chapters focus on people and institutions creating, performing, and listening to this classical music, while the last three focus on repertoire. Chapter one is jam-packed with stories about the types of jobs these musicians were able to carve out in private and government institutions, hoping to ply some semblance of their trade in service to the war effort. The African American composer Ulysses Kay enlisted in the Navy where he performed in the band and composed on the side, while better-known, slightly older, and, it must be said, white composers were able to exploit their privilege to negotiate more appealing roles for themselves. Others concertized (“music for morale”) both at home and on tour with the United Service Organizations (USO). Fauser records that at least one journalist marveled at the fact that violinist Yehudi Menuhin, clearly in excellent health and of draft age, performed before so many servicemen who must have wondered how he had managed to avoid the draft (I wonder too). Perhaps the most intrepid musicians working for the USO were the Russian-born conductor Andre Kostelanetz and the French-born soprano Lily Pons, who logged countless miles and concerts, frequently under perilous conditions. Finally, the list of musicians who worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) at one time or another reads like a who’s who of American composers at mid-century: Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Copland, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and the naturalized Weill, whose commitment to the American propaganda war exceeded that of all other émigré composers.

The second chapter documents the ways in which federal and local infrastructures established as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal Works Progress [Projects] Administration (WPA) were combined with government agencies to carry out the propaganda campaign at home and to U.S. soldiers abroad, in addition to serving the needs of cultural diplomacy in Latin America and China. Of particular note here is Fauser’s account of the rise of music therapy from its experiential roots in the WPA, where it was coded feminine and amateur, to its scientific place in...