| Contents |
The rise of American art music and the impact of the immigrant wave of the late 1930's: Ernst Krenek -- The northeastern academic establishment and the romance of science: Milton Babbitt -- American intellectual composers and the "Ideal public": Elliott Carter -- The American experimental tradition and its godfather: John Cage -- Romantic defiance, enlightened patronage and misanthropy in the Midwest: Ralph Shapey -- The return of tonality, the orchestral audience and the danger of success: David Del Tredici -- The romantic revival and the dilemma of the political composer: Frederic Rzewski -- Post-Cageian experimentation and new kinds of collaboration: Robert Ashley -- The Orient, the visual arts and the evolution of minimalism: Philip Glass -- Women composers, performance art and the perils of fashion: Laurie Anderson -- Electronic and computer music and the humanist reaction: David Behrman -- Environmental composers and ambient music: Max Neuhaus -- Musique concrete and composition beyond music: Walter Murch -- Jazz, group improvisation, race and racism: the Art Ensemble of Chicago -- Mystical romanticism, popularity and the varied forms of fusion: Keith Jarrett -- Free jazz, body music and symphonic dreams: Ornette Coleman -- Latin music, folk music and the artist as craftsman: Eddie Palmieri -- Urban popular song, the Broadway musical, the cabaret revival and the birth pangs of American opera: Stephen Sondheim -- Rock, populism and transcendental primitivism: Neil Young -- Art-rock, black vs. white and vanguard cross-pollination: Talking Heads. |
| Abstract |
The author, director of the Lincoln Center Festival in New York City, wrote about music of all kinds for The New York Times for twenty years. Here he delineates the heritage, actuality, and potential of American music, demonstrating not only the possibility but the necessity of dealing with artists as seemingly unrelated as Elliott Carter and David Byrne, Milton Babbitt and Laurie Anderson, John Cage and Neil Young, Philip Glass and Ornette Coleman. In twenty chapters that each bring to life the work of a specific composer, Rockwell tells the whole story of American musical composition in our time. |
