Nineteen seventeen, the year the United States entered World War I, was transformative for American musical culture. The European performers who had dominated classical concert stages for generations came under intense scrutiny, and some of the compositions of Austro-German composers were banned. This year saw the concurrent rise of jazz music from a little-known regional style to a national craze. Significant improvements in recording technology facilitated both the first million-selling jazz record and the first commercial recordings of full symphony orchestras. In a segregated country, as the US military wrestled with how to make use of several million African Americans who had registered for the draft, James Reese Europe broke down racial barriers with his Fifteenth New York National Guard Band.
This book tells the story of this year through the lives of eight performers: orchestral conductors Karl Muck and Walter Damrosch, violinist Fritz Kreisler, pianist Olga Samaroff, contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, jazz cornetists Dominic LaRocca and Freddie Keppard, and army bandmaster James Reese Europe. Their individual stories, traced month by month through the eventful year of 1917, illuminate the larger changes that convulsed the country’s musical culture and transformed it in uniquely American ways.
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