AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

136 saturday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
tenacious innovator, who revered tradition as well as experimental techniques. He also placed
a strong emphasis on the practical application of new ideas in addition to their theoretical
development. These traits, which made Cowell the ideal candidate to disseminate the compositional
practice from the late 1910s through the late 1950s, challenge current scholarly
depictions of the composer as an undisciplined bohemian.
THE COMPOSER AS WAR CORRESPONDENT:
ModerN MUSiC DURING WORLD WAR II
Beth E. Levy
University of California, Davis
In September of 1944, Minna Lederman wrote to Aaron Copland, “News from Europe is
all that people want right now.” Her words are noteworthy in part because they show her in
editorial command of the cadre of American composer-critics (including Henry Cowell and
Virgil Thomson) who manned the journal Modern Music, active in New York from 1924 to
1946. More remarkable still is the type of “news” that Lederman had in mind—not critical
reportage on Parisian premieres or analysis of the latest Viennese stylistic trends, but news of
the most baldly political sort: the latest edicts from Hitler’s Germany, accounts of American
soldiers “from the front,” and human interest stories from occupied France. On Lederman’s
wish list were reports from “London, Paris, Rome and any other place you can think of that’s
being what we call liberated. . . . If we could only have from all those countries and eventually
Germany and Austria a story of music under the swastika!” Lederman got what she wanted.
With regular columnists stationed in major European capitals, Modern Music was well positioned
to cover the conflict. In the process, however, the journal was radically transformed in
ways that even Lederman may not have foreseen.
Through close reading of Modern Music and broader engagement with the cultural histories
of the 1930s and ’40s, this paper will explore three such transformations. Most striking is the
sheer volume and powerful framing of war news, including articles with dramatic titles like
“Suicide in Vienna.” Recent emigrés chose to contribute under pseudonyms like “Fugitivus”
or “X-1941” in order to protect their associates. The journal’s readers knew precisely when it
became unsafe to have a Jewish wife under the Third Reich, and just how difficult it was for
Germaine Tailleferre to find both staff paper and food as the war unfolded. Lederman also
sought to capture the experiences of the many musician-soldiers who found themselves on
the European front. Perhaps unintentionally, such coverage quickly broadened the stylistic
scope of the journal, which began to cover band music, radio arrangements of swing, and
surveys of favorite army entertainments. The journal’s newly patriotic tone is proclaimed in
stars-and-stripes advertisements preserved at the Library of Congress: “music is a weapon of
modern war!” In my view the most far reaching side effect of Modern Music’s wartime coverage
involved the treatment of racial and national categories by American music critics. Horrified
by the Aryanism of Nazi Germany and its attendant politicization of musical style, American
critics became much more squeamish in their own references to typically “Jewish” traits, the
influence of “Latin blood,” or the musical habits of the Anglo-Saxon “race soul.” The demise
of the journal in 1946 makes it impossible to say whether its attention to popular music and
current events would have survived a transition to peacetime journalism. But the trenchant
attacks it published on the evils of “nationalism” (by Roger Sessions, Alfred Einstein, and