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 that
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
General
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