Serenading the Reluctant Eagle: American Musical Life, 1925-1945 - Hardcover

Tawa, Nicholas E.

9780028717609: Serenading the Reluctant Eagle: American Musical Life, 1925-1945

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0028717600 ISBN 13: 9780028717609

Publisher: Wadsworth Pub Co, 1984

Excerpt from the Preface: This book is offered to the reader with the hope that it will abet a fuller comprehension of American musical culture in the twentieth century. It describes how contemporary American art music struggled to exist during the twenties and early thirties, and how the Great Depression seemed poised to wipe it out altogether. But, wonder of wonders, music took a new lease on life. Men and women began to flock to concerts as never before; performing ensembles proliferated; and composers felt they might have a real function to perform in American life. The period of the thirties and early forties has been described as the Golden Age of American music, a time when composers created vital works that audiences greeted with curiosity and which they often learned to enjoy. How this period of great cultural achievement came about and why it ended is the subject of these pages.

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