The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War

ISBN-13: 9780190649692 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 288 str.

Emily Abrams Ansari

Opis

After two decades of remarkable success, the quest to create a uniquely American classical music faltered in the 1950s. Many blamed the Cold War for its demise, but the conflict also brought Americanist composers unprecedented opportunities. This book examines this complex picture and its long-term effects.

Recenzje

We have long known that the Cold War containment also contained creativity on the U.S. American home front. But as Emily Abrams Ansari shows in this fine study, its mechanism went far deeper than we have hitherto known. The Sound of a Superpower reveals the extent to which anticommunism and the quest for a unified nation challenged and channeled U.S. American composer's efforts to develop a postwar American sound. As international tensions escalated, composers found it increasingly difficult to reconcile progressive composition with the demands of cultural programs extolling U.S. society's commitment to "high culture". The six artists portrayed in this book reveal the different responses to and, indeed, utilisation of U.S. governmental efforts to seize national culture in the service of international politics. A must-read for all students of Cold War music.

O autorze

Emily Abrams Ansari is Associate Professor of Music History at Western University in Canada. Her research examines relationships between music and politics across the Americas during the Cold War period. She has received a number of awards for her scholarship, including the ASCAP Foundation's Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award, the Kurt Weill Prize, and the Petro-Canada Young Innovator Award.