Sounds of War

What role did music play in the United States during World War II? How did composers reconcile the demands of their country and their art as America mobilized both militarily and culturally for war? Annegret Fauser explores these and many other questions in the first in-depth study of American concert music during World War II. While Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s abroad with swing and boogie-woogie, Fauser shows it was classical music that truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States. Classical music in 1940s America had a ubiquitous cultural presence--whether as an instrument of propaganda or a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift--that is hard to imagine today, and Fauser suggests that no other war enlisted culture in general and music in particular so consciously and unequivocally as World War II. Indeed, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Group Theatre director Harold Clurman wrote to his cousin, Aaron Copland: "So you're back in N.Y. . . ready to defend your country in her hour of need with lectures, books, symphonies!" Copland was in fact involved in propaganda missions of the Office of War Information, as were Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee. It is the works of these musical greats--as well as many other American and exiled European composers who put their talents to patriotic purposes--that form the core of Fauser's enlightening account. Drawing on music history, aesthetics, reception history, and cultural history, Sounds of War recreates the remarkable sonic landscape of the World War II era and offers fresh insight to the role of music during wartime.

Auteur

Annegret Fauser is Professor of Music and Adjunct Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She is author of Musical Encounters at the 1889 Paris World's Fair and co-editor of Music, Theater and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1813-1914.

Contenu

Table of Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1: "We, as Musicians, are Soldiers, too..." Musicians in Uniform Performing for Victory Composition in the War Effort Cultural Mediators and Educators Chapter 2: "Shaping Music for Total War" Music in the Service of Propaganda: The Office of War Information Crossing Borders: Music, Diplomacy, and the State Department The Singing Army: Uplift and Education for a Nation Music Therapy and the "Reconditioning" of Soldiers Chapter 3: "I Hear America Singing..." Sounds of a Usable Past Salutes to American Folk Song Voicing Opera in America Chapter 4: "The Great Invasion" Exile Experiences French Connections, Czech Identities Refugees from Axis Nations Chapter 5: "Hail Muse Americana!" Commemoration and Patriotic Celebration Celebrating the American Way New World Symphonies Works Cited