Mavericks and other traditions in American music / Michael Broyles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Broyles, Michael, 1939-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Composers--United States.

Composers.

Music--United States--History and criticism.

Music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource (ix, 387 p.) ) ill., ports.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New Haven : Yale University Press, c2004.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

From colonial times to the present, American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves in large part as outsiders. In this stimulating book Michael Broyles considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what these mavericks reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society itself.Broyles starts by examining the careers of three notably unconventional composers: William Billings in the eighteenth century, Anthony Philip Heinrich in the nineteenth, and Charles Ives in the twentieth. All three had unusual lives, wrote music that many considered incomprehensible, and are now recognized as key figures in the development of American music. Broyles goes on to investigate the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music-classical, popular, and jazz-and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa. The history of the maverick tradition, Broyles shows, has much to tell us about the role of music in American culture and the tension between individualism and community in the American consciousness.

Contents:

We, the rebels

Pioneers. William Billings : rebel with many causes ; The log cabin composer

New concepts and forces in American culture. Precursors : Charles Ives and Leo Ornstein ; "Prologue to the annual tragedy" ; The community of the ultramoderns

After the war. New directions : the serial wars ; Postwar experimentalism : John Cage ; The maverick core ; Minimalism and strange bedfellows

The legacy of the mavericks. Looking back : Puritanism, geography, and the myth of American individualism ; Looking forward : "The end of the Renaissance!"

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references (p. [363]-376) and index.

ISBN:

9786611729806

9781281729804

1281729809

9780300127898

0300127898

OCLC:

1023995387