Inclusive Publics and Modern Technologies: An Introduction to Three Essays on Early Twentieth-Century American Opera

The three essays brought together in this cluster are immersed in themes that characterize “Americanness” in the twentieth century. They provide a microcosm of critical issues that define opera in the United States during these first decades when the nation helped shape the creation of opera rather than principally being a site for importing European works. Although most of the composers discussed in these articles were born in Europe (Giacomo Puccini, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek) and only a few in the United States (Marc Blitzstein and George Antheil), all of them spent significant time in the United States, and all of the works discussed are either set in the United States, utilize American characters, or tied to important American themes.

The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends

The pioneering attempts to capture an original Broadway production were limited by the technology of the bulky 78 rpm album sets. Still, innovators such as Jack Kapp, producer at Decca Records, and Marc Blitzstein, creator of The Cradle Will Rock, attempted to package larger musical narrative experiences for the home listener. In the middle of a boycott from the American Federation of Musicians in 1943, Oklahoma! opened to phenomenal success on Broadway; Jack Kapp took advantage of a quick settlement with the AFM and put the cast album set to the show (twelve songs on six discs) out before Christmas, turning it into a financial blockbuster and reimagining the commercial product of a Broadway recording.

Carter

This book surveys the life and work of the great American composer Elliott Carter (1908–2012). It examines his formative, and often ambivalent, engagements with Charles Ives and other “ultra-modernists”, with the classicist ideas he encountered at Harvard and in his three years of study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris; and with the populism developed by his friends Aaron Copland and Marc Blitzstein in Depression-era New York, and the unique synthesis of modernist idioms that he began to develop in the late 1940s. The book re-groups the central phase of Carter’s career, from the Cello Sonata to Syringa in terms of Carter’s synthesis of European and American modernist idioms, or “neo-modernism,” and his complex relation to the European avant-garde. It devotes particular attention to the large number of instrumental and vocal works of Carter’s last two decades, including his only opera, What Next?, and a final legacy project: seven works for voice and large ensemble to poems by the founding generation of American modern poetry: e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.