Italian American Musical Culture and Its Contribution to American Music

In American music, Langston Hughes is one of the literary figures that hold a place similar to the aforementioned luminaries. In the literary field, Hughes is respected as one of the most important figures of the twentieth century. With the rise of African American Studies as an academic field in the 1970s, his life, writing, and influence has received frequent attention. What has not been documented in more specific terms is his importance to America’s musical culture in the twentieth century. Whether directly or indirectly, Langston Hughes has been a fixture in American musical culture, both popular and concert music, since the 1920s. In addition to his personal affinity for blues, jazz and other specifically African American musical forms such as gospel music, his vast contribution to American music specifically and American music culture in a broader sense can be separated into four general categories.

Download Full-text

Mirror to an Age: Musical America, 1918–30

Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle ◽

10.1080/14723808.1990.10540939 ◽

1990 ◽

Vol 23 ◽

pp. 137-147

Author(s):

Mary Herron DuPree

Keyword(s):

Stock Market ◽

First World War ◽

American Music ◽

Aaron Copland ◽

World War ◽

Musical Culture ◽

Stock Market Crash ◽

The Real ◽

The First World War ◽

First World

The time between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the stock market crash in 1929 has traditionally been considered an interregnum in American Music: before it, American music and musical culture largely reflected that of Europe, and after it, America found its voice in the distinctive compositions of Aaron Copland, Roy Harris and others. An examination of periodical writings on music from that time, however, reveals that this period marked not a state of anticipation but the real beginning of modern American music, of composition of international significance, and of distinctive styles of American composition. It was a period when traditionalism, modernism and jazz-influenced composition were each passionately defended and condemned not only in the music journals but in the pages of most of the general intellectual magazines.

Download Full-text

Italian-American Music

Journal of American Folklore ◽

10.2307/540647 ◽

1989 ◽

Vol 102 (405) ◽

pp. 333

Author(s):

Norm Cohen

Keyword(s):

American Music ◽

Italian American

Download Full-text

Mary Davenport Engberg: Pioneering Musician in a Bachelors’ Frontier

Journal of the Society for American Music ◽

10.1017/s1752196311000174 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 5 (3) ◽

pp. 365-394 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

ELIZABETH JULIANA KNIGHTON

Keyword(s):

Pacific Northwest ◽

Instrumental Music ◽

Symphony Orchestra ◽

The United States ◽

American Music ◽

Instrumental Performance ◽

Musical Culture ◽

The Pacific ◽

Orchestral Conducting ◽

Mixed Gender

AbstractMany women in the United States encountered resistance to their involvement in orchestral conducting and public instrumental performance—both solo and ensemble—in the early twentieth century. Mary Davenport Engberg (1880–1951), however, became involved in the developing musical culture of the Pacific Northwest without encountering opposition based on her gender. In 1911 Engberg founded the mixed-gender Bellingham Symphony Orchestra, which she conducted until she became the conductor of the Seattle Civic Symphony Orchestra in 1921, and she also performed extensively as a violinist in Seattle and along the West Coast. She was the director of an influential music school in Seattle and cofounded the Seattle Civic Opera Association in 1932. Engberg's life and accomplishments reveal the effect of regional differences in the experiences and reception of women in American music. An understanding of her contributions leads to a better appreciation of the varied roles played by women in instrumental music throughout our country's history.

Download Full-text

Charles Ives in the Mirror

10.5406/illinois/9780252037498.001.0001 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

David C. Paul

Keyword(s):

Cold War ◽

American Music ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Aaron Copland ◽

Leonard Bernstein ◽

Charles Ives ◽

Musical Culture ◽

Elliott Carter ◽

Henry Cowell ◽

Social Anxieties

This book, a sweeping survey of intellectual and musical history, tells the new story of how the music of American composer Charles E. Ives (1874–1954) was shaped by shifting conceptions of American identity within and outside of musical culture. The book focuses on the critics, composers, performers, and scholars whose contributions were most influential in shaping the critical discourse on Ives, many of them marquee names of American musical culture themselves, including Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, and Leonard Bernstein. The book explores both how Ives positioned his music amid changing philosophical and aesthetic currents and how others interpreted his contributions to American music. Although Ives's initial efforts to find a public in the early 1920s attracted a few devotees, the resurgence of interest in the American literary past during the 1930s made a concert staple of his “Concord” Sonata, a work dedicated to nineteenth-century transcendentalist writers. The book shows how Ives was subsequently deployed as an icon of American freedom during the early Cold War period and how he came to be instigated at the head of a line of “American maverick” composers. It also examines why a recent cadre of scholars has beset the composer with Gilded Age social anxieties.

Download Full-text

Americanism Musically: Nation, Evolution, and Public Education at the Columbian Exposition, 1893

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.2003.27.2.137 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 27 (2) ◽

pp. 137-155 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Kiri Miller

Keyword(s):

New World ◽

Active Role ◽

American Music ◽

World's Fair ◽

Musical Culture ◽

Speculative Philosophy ◽

Musical Thought ◽

Columbian Exposition ◽

History Of ◽

Definition Of

The Columbian Exposition (the World's Fair in Chicago, 1893) was intended to represent the entire progress of human history, with American civilization as its culminating triumph. The Exposition celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World; it restaged that discovery in myriad ways: from the display of ““savage races”” on the Midway to the construction of an emergent American middle class as civilization's newest noble savages, hungry for education. Music was an integral part of the Exposition. America's musical elite took an active role in the fair's promotion and design. The Exposition also stimulated a flood of writing on the nature and future of ““truly American”” music. This article examines American musical culture at the Exposition, with attention to music as art, science, and commerce three categories at the heart of the Exposition's formal definition of music. The network of mutual reinforcements, contradictions and the related concepts of nation, race, and evolution has powerful implications for the ensuing history of music in America. Analysis of the educational agenda of music at the Exposition suggests it taught its visitors--5 to 10 percent of the American population--a great deal about race, class, nationhood, and their identity as consumers. Reading the musical criticism, speculative philosophy, and patriotic grandstanding that accompanied the fair shows how musical thought of the day relied on evolutionary theory.

Download Full-text

American Musical Life Before 1900

Journal of the Society for American Music ◽

10.1017/s1752196314000042 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 125-129

Author(s):

KATHERINE K. PRESTON

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Hip Hop ◽

Music History ◽

American Music ◽

Musical Theatre ◽

Musical Culture ◽

Musical Life ◽

Wide Range ◽

Official Organ ◽

The Rich

The Journal of the Society for American Music is the official organ of the Society; as such, the articles published in its pages deal with a wide range of topics that both reflect its mission and illustrate the incredible diversity of music and musical styles composed, performed, and heard in the Americas. A glance at the tables of contents for issues published in the last three volumes of the journal (February 2011 through February 2014) provides an illuminating snapshot of the wondrous multiplicity that characterizes American music history. The thirteen issues published during that time include articles on popular music (hip hop, ragtime, swing, jazz, rock, country, soul), musical theatre, teachers, conductors, works by composers ranging from Ives and Copland to Feldman, Harrison, and Reich (and many in between), performers (Heifetz, Robeson, Zappa), jam sessions, ethnomusicological topics; in other words, the journal reflects in a truly impressive manner the rich and varied musical culture of the Americas. What is seriously underrepresented in this panoply of musical multiplicity, however, is the rich, diverse, and similarly wondrous American musical culture of any time before the twentieth century. Of the forty-two articles published over this three-year period, only two (5 percent) deal with American music or musical life before 1900, both of them on nineteenth-century topics.

Download Full-text