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Surrounded by the widespread misery of the Depression, left-leaning classical music composers sought a musical language that both engaged the masses and gave voice to their concerns. Maria Cristina Fava explores the rich creative milieu shaped by artists dedicated to using music and theater to advance the promotion, circulation, and acceptance of leftist ideas in 1930s New York City. Despite tensions between aesthetic and pragmatic goals, people and groups produced works at the center of the decade’s sociopolitical and cultural life. Fava looks at the Composers’ Collective of New York and its work on proletarian music and workers’ songs before turning to the blend of experimentation and vernacular idioms that shaped the political use of music within the American Worker’s Theater Movement. Provocative and original,
Art Music Activism considers how innovative classical composers of the 1930s balanced creative aims with experimentation, accessible content, and a sociopolitical message to create socially meaningful works.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Bourgeois Modernism for the Proletariat: The Composers’ Collective
Chapter 2. The Workers’ Theater Movement and the Politicization of the Musical Revue
Chapter 3. Keeping Politics at Bay: Composers’ Forum Laboratory
Chapter 4. The Living Newspaper Unit and Innovative Musical Approaches
Chapter 5. A Leftist Myth: Marc Blitzstein’s
The Cradle Will Rock Epilogue
Notes
Index
About the author
Maria Cristina Fava
