Art music activism : aesthetics and politics in 1930s New York City /

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Includes bibliographical references (pages 177-209) and index."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, the 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 protest 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. Fava then reveals how composers and theater practitioners from these two groups achieved prominence within endeavors promoted by the Works Project Administration. In addition, Fava teases out fascinating details from performances and offstage activity attached to works by composers like Lan Adomian, Marc Blitzstein, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Earl Robinson, and Elie Siegmeister. Endeavors encouraged avant-garde experimentation while nurturing innovations friendly to modernist approaches and an interest in non-western music. Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock offered a memorable example that found popular success, but while the piece achieved its goals, it became so wrapped up in myths surrounding workers' theater that critics overlooked Blitzstein's musical ingenuity. 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."--Introduction -- Bourgeois modernism for the proletariat : the Composers' Collective -- The Workers' Theater Movement and the politicization of the musical revue -- Keeping politics at bay : Composers' Forum Laboratory -- The living newspaper unit and innovative musical approaches -- A leftist myth : Marc Blitzstein's The cradle will rock.