In 1933 choreographer George Balanchine and impresario Lincoln Kirstein embarked on an elusive quest to found a ballet company and school in the United States. Though their efforts would eventually result in the creation of the New York City Ballet and the School of American Ballet, the first decade of their collaborative efforts was anything but assured. Tracing the tangled histories of two of the most important figures in twentieth-century dance, Balanchine and Kirstein's American Enterprise offers a fresh perspective on a pivotal period in cultural history. Deeply researched using sources only made available in recent years, the book challenges the mythologies surrounding the early years of the Balanchine-Kirstein enterprise. It also reveals the full extent of Kirstein's essential role and offers reconstructive analysis of lost works, as well as new and surprising details regarding some of Balanchine's most iconic ballets, including Serenade, Apollo, and Concerto Barocco. This history involved artists including Richard Rodgers, Martha Graham, George Gershwin, Katherine Dunham, Vera Zorina, and Igor Stravinsky, as well as dozens of lesser known players whose contributions have yet to be fully acknowledged. Capturing the full sweep of Balanchine and Kirstein's collaborative work across multiple genres and institutions, this book reveals their partnership in all of its exciting and ungainly complexity, showing how the 1930s Balanchine was not the artist that he would eventually become, and how the same was true of the institutions that he and Kirstein jointly created.

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz Lutteken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and evolution of creative cultures across civilizations. This fascinating panorama foregrounds music as a substantial component of the era and considers musical works and practices in a wider cultural-historical context. Among the topics surveyed are music's relationship to antiquity, the position of music within systems of the arts, the emergence of the concept of the musical work, as well as music's relationship to the theory and practice of painting, literature, and architecture. What becomes clear is that the Renaissance gave rise to many musical concepts and practices that persist to this day, whether the figure of the composer, musical institutions, and modes of musical writing and memory.