Populism and nationalism in the realm of classical music held a high place between the world wars with composers such as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein creating a soundtrack to the lives of everyday American men and women. While biographies of these individual composers exist, no single book has taken on this period as a direct contradiction to the modernist dichotomy between the music of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. In Nationalist and Populist Composers: Voices of the American People, Steve Schwartz offers an overdue correction to this distortion of the American...