Stock image for illustration purposes only - book cover, edition or condition may vary.
Sounds of War
Annegret Fauser
FREE Delivery in Ireland
Description for Sounds of War
Num Pages: 384 pages, 26 illustrations, 6 tables. BIC Classification: 1KBB; AVGC6. Category: (UP) Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly; (UU) Undergraduate. Dimension: 242 x 156 x 30. Weight in Grams: 764.
While music and musical life in Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Fascist Italy, and Stalinist Russia have been widely explored, concert music in the United States during World War II has remained markedly untouched. Music in this period - whether as an instrument of propaganda or as a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift - pervaded homes and concert halls, army camps and government buildings, hospitals and factories. Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and G.I.s stationed abroad with the sounds of swing and boogie-woogie. Yet, it was the role assigned specifically to classical music ... Read morethat truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States. Within U.S. spheres of influence during World War II, American and exiled European musicians alike contributed actively and self-consciously to the war effort. Indeed, on the day after 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 would be one of many classical composers deeply involved in the arts as part of the war effort. Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee were all mixed up with the propaganda missions of the Office of War Information (OWI); Samuel Barber served in the US Army Air Force, writing both his Second Symphony and his Capricorn Concerto, "a rather tooting piece, with flute, oboe and trumpet chirping away" and thus fit for the times, as he assured a fellow composer. Civilian commissions for new music focused on patriotic and "martial" subjects, most famously the series of fanfares that Eugene Goossens, the chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, requested from American composers and from European musicians in exile: Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man is a still much performed result. Similarly, the League of Composers (financed by the Treasury Department) commissioned numerous works on patriotic themes, including Bohuslav Martin?'s Memorial to Lidice and William Grant Still's moving In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy. Classical music was heard on the radio and in film scores; it was performed in the Armed Forces; and it even played a role in the work of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; the predecessor to the CIA), whose director, General "Wild Bill" Donovan, was known not only to support experiments about music as a cipher code, but also to involve himself in music-related affairs, including the case of smuggling Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony out of Russia. Classical music in 1940s America had a cultural relevance and ubiquitousness that is hard to imagine today, and it played an important role as a cultural counterpoint to the military effort as musicians and politicians were-in Henry Cowell's words-"shaping music for total war. No other war mobilized and instrumentalized culture in general and music in particular so totally, so consciously, and so unequivocally as World War II. Through author Annegret Fauser's in-depth, engaging, and encompassing discussion in context of this unique period in American history, Sounds of War brings to life the people and institutions that created, performed, and listened to this music. The book will have wide-ranging appeal among a general readership interested in the study of culture and war, as well as musicologists and historians studying World War II era America Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
Oxford University Press Inc United States
Place of Publication
New York, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About Annegret Fauser
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 (University of Rochester Press, 2005), and co-editor of Music, Theater and Cultural Transfer: Paris 1813-1914 (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
Reviews for Sounds of War
Annegret Fauser has devoted the recent phases of her distinguished career to exploring how circumstances of cultural contact affect the making of music ... Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II, extends this broadly contextual approach into the American orbit. It is a major contribution to the field.
Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Music & Letters
... Read moreSounds of War is a formidable book. It presents itself already as a benchmark not only for research about music during World War II but also for work on all music during all wars â Fauserâs book presents a point of reference as much for questions of methodology as for its empirical contributions, and not only for the history of the United States.
Esteban Buch, Transposition: Musique et Sciences Sociales
Fauser's book is eminently readable and grounded in an astounding amount of archival research. It is recommended to cultural historians and musicians alike.
Joy H. Calico, Journal of Cold War Studies
effort.
David Luhrssen, Milwaukee Express
Through author Annegret Fauser's in-depth, engaging, and encompassing discussion in context of this unique period in American history, Sounds of War brings to life the people and institutions that created, performed, and listened to this music.
Barry Forshaw, Classical CD Choice
Clear and well-researched, [this book draws] on a great many archival sources... Recommended.
D. A. Wells, Choice
the portrait she [the author] assembles is impressive.
Stephen Brown, The Times Literary Supplement
Fascinating ... Fauser looks beyond the commonplace memories of swing and Sinatra, touching on the mainstream embrace of classical music by way of addressing her main theme: the employment of 'serious' composers and musicians in the war effort.
David Luhrssen, Milwaukee Express
Show Less
