Composing the Century: American Musical Modernism

As theorist Jean Baudrillard observed in 1986, "America is the original version of modernity." Yet this assessment would have seemed questionable just eight decades earlier, when American music was regarded as provincial and inferior by the European standards of Vienna and Paris. Over the subsequent decades, however, American composers including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Duke Ellington developed innovative and distinctive approaches to musical modernism. What defined modernism in American classical music? How did it relate to its European influences, American folk traditions, and African American modernist forms like jazz and blues? What constitutes a distinctively American sound? And how did the nation's musical creativity reflect and shape American identity during the era of global dominance?

This course traces the development of American musical modernism from multiple perspectives, examining transatlantic influences, cultural and intellectual contexts, and lasting artistic and political impact. Listening assignments include works by Gershwin, Seeger, Copland, Ellington, Charles Ives, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Henry Cowell, William Grant Still, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, and many others. We examine musical portraits of America created by immigrant composers, from Irving Berlin's sentimental patriotism to Edgard Varèse's experimental dissonance, and investigate the historical events and ideas that shaped this music. These influences range from New England Transcendentalism to New Deal policies. What visions of American identity, whether radical or conservative, parochial or cosmopolitan, did these composers help construct? How should we interpret their hopes and concerns for America's future as the era of American global leadership changes? Course readings will include works by Seeger, Bernstein, Theodor Adorno, Angela Davis, Albert Murray, and others.