There are few books that take an integrative approach to the history of the arts in the United States. Of those books an even smaller number are as ambitious in scope as Richard H. Pells's Modernist America, which sweeps through more than a century, covering everything from the music of Charles Ives to the fad for Danish Modern furniture, from Tin Pan Alley to Spaghetti Westerns, from Charlie Chaplin to the advent of the big box store. Pells is an old hand at managing broad narratives, as anyone who has read his previous books will attest.Footnote ¹ But until Modernist America his panoramic surveys of American culture have tended to pass over music, lingering instead in the realms of literature, film, and theatre. It is cause for celebration that Pells, a respected and influential American historian, has ventured to incorporate music into his new book – and all the more so because he does not circumscribe the subject by focusing exclusively on popular music. Here modernist composers such as Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson are presented alongside their jazz and Tin Pan Alley confrères. Outside the field of musicology such composers have received little attention from Americanists, and the lack of commentary has had the effect of confining them to the gilded cage of highbrow irrelevance.Footnote ²

Pells divides his book into three sections, each devoted to one of the media in the subtitle: a series of chapters devoted to visual art and architecture is succeeded by others devoted to music, which, in turn, are followed by several chapters about film. As a result, he ends up cycling through his hundred-year period multiple times. Such an organizational scheme could create the impression that each art and its practitioners operated in separate spheres. But Pells offers an overarching thesis to unify his material: ‘[American artists] translated an array of modernist ideas and techniques into a distinctively American idiom. And then […] converted an artistic revolution that was originally foreign, especially European, into a global culture that has dominated our lives and our perspectives all through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century’ (ix–x). Modernism and globalization thus serve as the principal themes organizing the narrative. They are linked by a further subsidiary idea, namely that most American artists have possessed a savvy commercialism. Capitalizing on the modernist penchant for effacing boundaries, mingling things high and low, Americans created works that were palatable to the heterogeneous public at home and abroad. As Pells explains, ‘it was precisely the blending of highbrow and popular styles that enhanced the appeal of America's culture for multiethnic and domestic and foreign audiences by capturing their varied experiences and tastes’ (401).

There are precedents to this argument. In Terrible Honesty, for example, Ann Douglas maintains that during the 1920s white and black New York artists, singly and in collaboration, sought to overturn the Victorian values of the Gilded Age, creating an ‘egalitarian popular and mass culture [that] aggressively appropriat[ed] forms and ideas across race, class, and gender lines’.Footnote ³ Similarly William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff in New York Modern identify Manhattan as the locale for ‘the confluence of a long-standing tradition of urban realism, a more recently arrived European modernism, and the ever present, ever changing American vernacular’.Footnote ⁴

Where Pells departs from these precedents is in the extent to which he explores processes of global exchange. Many scholars have recognized the importance of transatlantic networks, of the role that sojourns in Europe – particularly Paris and Berlin – played in acquainting Americans with the foment of modernist insurgencies. But they tend to neglect the other half of the equation, which is precisely what Pells stresses: how American transformations of the ideas animating these insurgencies were exported back to Europe and beyond. Thus the ethos of German expressionist films of the 1920s spurred the ascendancy of film noir in the United States, which, in turn, became formative for New Wave directors in Europe (indeed, as Pells notes, it was French critics who coined the term ‘film noir’). Similarly the architecture and the design of the Bauhaus underwent a process of Americanization and re-exportation. The utopian ideals were stripped away, leaving behind a style that was suited to the requirements of public and commercial construction in American cities. Then, dubbed the ‘international style’ by the curators of the influential Museum of Modern Art in New York, it would subsequently alter the profile of urban spaces around the world. As Pells traces these and many other global trajectories, he consistently and convincingly addresses issues of agency. In many chapters he invokes the role of émigré refugees fleeing Fascism in the 1930s and American cultural diplomacy programmes of the Cold War years, these two factors providing consistent lines of sight across his sprawling panorama.

Despite Pells's best efforts, however, modernism and globalization do not always work effectively as a means of connecting the material covered in his book. And of all the media he explores, music proves most resistant to his integrative strategies. Some of the problems arise from the hazards of defining modernism, a term that has been ‘notoriously elastic’, as he acknowledges. ‘For my purposes’, he explains, ‘modernism means the effort – beginning in the early twentieth century – to invent a new language to describe the scientific, political and social upheavals of the modern world’ (x). Though this definition attempts to balance precision and flexibility, its suitability for the musical genres he discusses varies widely.

One could do much worse than Pells's definition to describe the 1920s music of Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, the two composers who provide the main focus of a chapter devoted to classical music. Copland's archly urbane Music for the Theatre (1925) and Thomson's equally cheeky Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1928) are not wholly new in their musical language, but they do break with the expressive agenda of the musical past. Like many American composers trained in Nadia Boulanger's Paris studio, Copland and Thomson emerged as neoclassicists. The watchwords ‘clarity’ and ‘objectivity’ governed the music they created, antithesis to the emotionally laden scores of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁵ The problem is that Pells concerns himself not with their output from the 1920s, but with the scores they produced in the late 1930s and 40s, when nationalist populism was in its ascendancy. Copland, Thomson, and other composers of their milieu, he argues, tried to balance competing aesthetic paradigms: ‘On the one hand, they wanted to write the kind of music their audiences yearned to hear, and in so doing contribute to the rediscovery and commemoration of America's history and its culture. On the other hand, they tried to remain faithful to the modernist lessons they had learned in Paris in the 1920s’ (119). But the tension is overstated, for the ballets of Copland and film scores of Thomson, their best-known output of the period, move decisively away from Parisian modernism. Both composers abandoned the pose of ironic distance so crucial to neoclassicism in favour of active social engagement and good old-fashioned sentiment.

In Pells's chapter about jazz, the application of the term ‘modernism’ becomes more confused. At the outset he sweepingly proclaims that the genre, across its history, is ‘irrefutably modernist’ (130). Near the end of the same chapter, however, there is a section entitled ‘modernist jazz’ that deals specifically with bebop, thus raising the question of whether the term is apropos to the genre or subgenre level. Pells seems to want it both ways. In defence of the larger claim, he identifies stylistic traits that link jazz with other modernist art: it was ‘raucous, dissonant, and disturbing to the genteel middle class’, and it emphasized ‘the innovative […] the desire (in Ezra Pound's dictum) to make it continually new’ (130). Here, though, Pells is conflating modernism and modernity, terms that he is careful to keep separate elsewhere in the book. Jazz of the teens and twenties was certainly taken by many contemporary commentators to be an emblem of modernity, the music most representative of the fast pace of modern, urban life. But for jazz musicians, entertainment was the prerogative, not the self-conscious pose of modernist artists desirous of ‘invent[ing] a new language to describe the scientific, political, and social upheavals of the modern world’. That kind of self-consciousness, though, does apply to bebop artists, as Pells makes clear in his section about them. They revolted against swing, the popular music of the 1930s, and, in some cases, Charlie Parker's most notably, declared affinities for Stravinsky and other modernist classical music composers.

Sensibly Pells all but abandons ‘modernism’ as a unifying concept in a chapter about American musicals; the genre, after all, makes a virtue of papering over any tensions with the inevitable nuptials of the lieto fine (at least before Bernstein and Sondheim came along). One might wonder then why this chapter appears at all in a book titled Modernist America. The justification comes from Pells's second unifying concept: globalization. This chapter traces a long trajectory that begins with the cosmopolitan origins of American musical theatre in Vienna and London, moves on to the transformation worked by American-Jewish songwriters as they combined European and African-American idioms, then lingers over the ‘Golden Age’ of Broadway before concluding with the global dissemination of Hollywood musicals. This is all handled well.

Globalization also serves as a compelling theme in the jazz chapter, as Pells tracks changes in the international profile of the genre across the twentieth century. In the chapter about classical music, however, it proves much less effective as a unifying device, as the author concedes. Here he invokes the issue in connection with the internationalization of American classical music that occurred as a result of the émigré influx during the 1930s. Thus it was not so much a question of American modernist composers striding successfully onto the international stage, but of the players who already occupied that stage – Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók – moving to America and bringing the stage with them. Curiously, Pells omits one of best examples I know of processes of transnational exchange impacting American art music. As Amy Beal has shown, it was against the backdrop of Cold War Germany that the so-called ‘American experimental tradition’ first cohered, with its lineage extending from Ives through Henry Cowell to Lou Harrison, John Cage, and beyond.Footnote ⁶ That lineage has since been exported back home to the United States and now thrives under the rubric ‘American mavericks’.

As a final point of criticism, it should be mentioned that the material about classical music contains a number of mistakes. Sometimes it is a matter of nuance. Pells writes of Charles Ives, for example, that he ‘wanted to create an indigenous American music, but he was equally entranced with the dissonant styles emerging in Europe before World War I. So he occasionally injected into his Protestant hymns, patriotic anthems, marches, and folk songs an atonal complexity worthy of Schoenberg’ (112). The final sentence would be accurate if the order was reversed, something that makes all the difference: ‘So he occasionally injected Protestant hymns, patriotic anthems, marches, and folk songs into an atonal complexity worthy of Schoenberg.’ In other instances, Pells's errors are factual, and again the material on Ives furnishes examples. At one point Ives is described as having attended the salon of Walter and Louise Arensberg, where he mingled with the likes of Isadora Duncan and Marcel Duchamp in the late teens (37). As far as I am aware, there is no evidence to substantiate this claim – and, besides, it seems wholly out of character. Subsequently, Pells observes that during the 1920s ‘the works of both [Edward] MacDowell and Ives were rarely heard, and their names grew increasingly obscure’ (112). In fact precisely the opposite was true for Ives, who was just beginning to make headway at the end of the 1920s. What all this speaks of is a general lack of familiarity with the history of American musical modernism and its antecedents, and while I commend Pells for braving terrain that other historians have avoided, I wish he had been a little bit more thorough in his research.

Modernist America is really an extensive and engaging survey of American arts during the twentieth century. Yes, modernism and globalization provide some means of connecting the material, but those connections are much less useful and satisfying than the thorough introduction Pells supplies to so many artists and their output. There is much to appreciate here: the vivacious prose style, the many happy juxtapositions (Art Deco ziggurats are just a few pages removed from the spiky archaisms of Stravinsky), and the trenchant interpretations of Hollywood films (something of a Pells speciality). If this book prompts some of Pells's historian colleagues to do a bit of explorative listening, something I think quite likely, then it will have done a great service to those of us whose primary scholarly engagement is American music in all its varieties.