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Samuel Barber (1910–81) was one of the most important and honoured American composers of the 20th century. Writing in a great variety of musical forms—symphonies, concertos, operas, vocal music, chamber music—he infused his works with poetic lyricism and gave tonal language and forms new vitality. His rich legacy includes such famous compositions as the Adagio for Strings, the orchestral song Knoxville: Summer of 1915, three concertos, and his two operas, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Vanessa and Antony and Cleopatra, a commissioned work that opened the new Metropolitan Opera House at the Lincoln Center. Generously documented by letters, sketchbooks, original musical manuscripts, and interviews with friends, colleagues, and performers with whom he worked, this book covers Barber's entire career and all of his compositions. The biographical material on Barber is closely interspersed with a discussion of his music, displaying Barber's creative processes at work from his early student compositions to his mature masterpieces. The book also provides the social context in which this major composer grew: his education, how he built his career, the evolving musical tastes of American audiences, his relationship to musical giants like Serge Koussevitzky, and the role of radio in the promotion of his music. A testament to the significance of the new Romanticism, Samuel Barber stands as a model biography of an important American musical figure.

This book takes advantage of 30 years of recent scholarship, new biographical information, and deeper understanding of Schoenberg’s aims and significance to produce a newly revised guide to Schoenberg’s life and work. The book demonstrates the indissoluble links among Schoenberg’s musical language (particularly the enigmatic and influential 12-tone method), his personal character, and his creative ideas, as well as the deep connection between his genius as a teacher and as a revolutionary composer. Exploring influences on the composer’s early life, the book offers a new perspective on Schoenberg’s creative process and the emotional content of his music. For example, as a previously unsuspected source of childhood trauma, the book points to the Vienna Ringtheater disaster of 1881, in which hundreds of people were burned to death, including Schoenberg’s uncle and aunt, whose orphaned children were then adopted by Schoenberg’s parents. The book brings such experiences to bear on the music itself, examining virtually every work in the oeuvre to demonstrate its vitality and many-sidedness.

The first full-length study dedicated to Schoenberg’s life and music in the United States, this book dispels many myths and fills significant gaps in the existing literature on Schoenberg. Drawing on much new information, the book traces early American Schoenberg champions, who set the stage for Schoenberg’s arrival in 1933. The volume addresses in detail how Schoenberg, while coming to terms with his German and Jewish identities, developed an American identity both privately and professionally. New light is cast on Schoenberg’s relations with Americans, his interest in American culture, and changes in his religious and political thinking and lifestyle. As Schoenberg was committed to the advancement of American music and composed music inspired by and composed for American musicians, his American works are examined anew with regard to their contexts and the history of their performance and publication. Schoenberg’s many interactions with performers and publishers in the United States are explored as well. Illustrating how Schoenberg adjusted to the American educational system, the book delves into Schoenberg’s American teaching career, teaching methods, and materials and features some of the many remarkable students he taught in Boston and Los Angeles. Finally the impact of Schoenberg’s music and ideas on American performers, composers, and scholars after World War II is gauged in the light of major political and cultural changes during the Cold War era.

Drawing on archival research and including much new information, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created the Broadway musical Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, plus five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage—revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy—Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical and, more broadly, with popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound social transformations.

This book explores the development of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic Broadway musical South Pacific. In particular, it notes how the team balanced the creation of a commercially successful work with the desire to make a passionate statement against racial intolerance that they knew would almost certainly be controversial. Through the examination of archival materials, many of which are heretofore unexplored in the literature on Rodgers and Hammerstein, the book reveals the creative processes of two masters near the peak of their craft. In addition, this book explores the musical as a cultural, social, and political text of the postwar and early cold war eras. Using contemporaneous sources as well as recent scholarship, it analyzes South Pacific in terms of how it deals with, or reflects, postwar constructs of race, gender, colonialism, and the then new prototype of the rising young business executive. Moreover, each subject is examined from a unique perspective. For instance, Nellie Forbush’s racial intolerance is viewed through the lens of literature about race during the prewar era, the time when her ideas would have developed; and the chapter on gender reveals how Hammerstein altered the gender constructs of his principal characters from how they appeared in James A. Michener’s novel Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical was based. Through exploring the work’s development and reading it as an open text revealing of its time and of contemporary American society, this book offers new insight into South Pacific and its creators.

Renowned today as a prominent African-American in music theater and the arts community, composer, conductor, and violinist Will Marion Cook was a key figure in the development of American music from the 1890s to the 1920s. This book looks at his life’s story, drawing on his unfinished autobiography and his wife Abbie’s memoir. A violin virtuoso, Cook studied at Oberlin College (his parents’ alma mater), Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik with Joseph Joachim, and New York’s national Conservatory of Music with Antonín Dvořák. Cook wrote music for a now-lost production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, and then devoted the majority of his career to black musical comedies due to limited opportunities available to him as a black composer. He was instrumental in showcasing his Southern Syncopated Orchestra in the prominent concert halls of the United States and Europe, even featuring New Orleans clarinetist Sidney Bechet, who later introduced European audiences to authentic blues. Once mentored by Frederick Douglas, Will Marion Cook went on to mentor Duke Ellington, paving the path for orchestral concert jazz. Through interpretive and musical analyses, the book traces Cook’s successful evolution from minstrelsy to musical theater. Written with his collaborator, the distinguished poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Cook’s musicals infused American musical theater with African-American music, consequently altering the direction of American popular music. Cook’s In Dahomeym was the first full-length Broadway musical to be written and performed by blacks. Alongside his accomplishments, Cook’s contentious side is revealed—a man known for his aggressiveness, pride, and constant quarrels, he became his own worst enemy in regards to his career. The book also sets Cook’s life against the backdrop of the changing cultural and social milieu: the black theatrical tradition, white audiences’ reaction to black performers, and the growing consciousness and sophistication of blacks in the arts, especially music.

This is the first comprehensive, fully documented, intercultural history of tap dance, a uniquely American art form, that explores all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of contemporary tap luminaries. Tap dance evolved from the oral traditions and expressive cultures of the West Africans and the Irish that converged and collided in America, and was perpetuated by such key features as the tap challenge—any competition or showdown in which dancers compete against each other before an audience of spectators or judges. The book begins with an account of a buck dance challenge between Bill (“Bojangles”) Robinson and Harry Swinton at Brooklyn’s Bijou Theatre, in 1900, and proceeds decade by decade through the twentieth century. Vividly described are tap’s musical styles and steps—from buck-and-wing and ragtime stepping at the turn of the century; jazz tapping to the rhythms of hot jazz, swing, and bebop in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; to hip-hop-inflected hitting and hoofing in heels (high and low) from the 1990s up to today. Tap dancing has long been considered “a man’s game,” and this book is the first history to highlight such outstanding female artists as Ada Overton Walker, Kitty O’Neill, and Alice Whitman, at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as the pioneering women composers of the tap renaissance, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the hard-hitting rhythm-tapping women of the millennium.

This book examines Terry Riley's In C as a new paradigm of “classical” composition. In C is only one page long, consists of fifty-three compact modules, is of open instrumentation and length, and generates itself through a set of simple and direct rules. At a time when contemporary concert music was pushing the limits of complexity and information density, In C is an essay in economy; it explores how much can be gotten out of what seems to be so little. Riley's 1964 work is also important in the way it sets the standard for American minimalist repetitive practice, for the use of modality and slow harmonic progression for the acceptance of world music and non-“classical” models, and for the use of structured improvisation to create a new idea of form and development. The book explores the history of In C, in terms of Riley's development as a composer in California in the early 1960s; of the story of the 1964 San Francisco premiere; of the history of the “second premiere” in New York in 1968, when the piece was recorded for Columbia records; and of its influence and legacy as described by subsequent experts and a close examination of later recordings. Throughout there are extensive original interviews with Riley and most of the participants in the 1964 concert and 1968 recording.

This book is about the Six Brown Brothers, a musical act on the burlesque, vaudeville, minstrel, and Broadway stages (1911-33) that was once reputed to have initiated the “saxophone craze” of the 1910s and 1920s. Ontario-born circus musician Tom Brown (1881-1950), the group's leader, founded a saxophone quartet c.1906 within the Ringling Brothers' show that included two of his brothers, Verne (1887-1964) and Percy (1883-1918). By 1908, the quartet had become the Five Brown Brothers, also including brothers Alex (or Alec, 1882-1974) and Fred (1890-1949). Their brother William (1879-1945) joined later, as did many unrelated musicians. The act is placed in the context of the introduction of the saxophone into North American popular music. The early part of the saxophone craze is described and the act's role in it assessed. The shows in which they appeared are described. Tom's life is detailed, and those of the other brothers are sketched. A discography of their recordings for U-S Everlasting, Columbia, Victor, Emerson, and Vitaphone is incorporated, and the recordings are discussed.

This book portrays an important and previously unexplored corner of the history of new music in America: the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in the State University of New York at Buffalo. Composers Lukas Foss (founder), Lejaren Hiller, and Morton Feldman were the music directors over the life of the Center, the years 1964–1980. Foss's plan called for the Rockefeller Foundation to provide annual fellowships for young composers and virtuoso instrumentalists to be based in Buffalo for up to two years, thus creating a cadre of like-minded musicians who would spend their time studying, creating, and performing difficult—often controversial—new work. The now legendary group of musicians who participated in the Buffalo group included George Crumb, Terry Riley, Cornelius Cardew, Maryanne Amacher, Frederic Rzewski, Julius Eastman, David Tudor, and many more. The book provides valuable accounts of the Center's influential concert series, Evenings For New Music, its renowned recording of Terry Riley's In C, the political activism of the time, and the intersection between academic, private, and institutional funding for the arts. As Life magazine, reporting in 1965 on the Festival of the Arts Today stated, “Buffalo exploded last month in a two-week avant garde festival that was bigger and hipper than anything ever held in Paris or New York….”