Focusing on a musical institution that sponsored regular concerts in New York City during the second half of the 1930s, Melissa de Graff weaves biographical research, in-depth musical analysis, and audience reception studies of divergent contemporary musical styles together with detailed research on social, cultural, and political issues connected to 1930s musical life. In so doing, de Graff's book builds upon Carol Oja's groundbreaking research on modern music in the United States during the 1920s and invites future scholarship that considers the importance of institutions and the many ways they shape U.S. musical life.Footnote ¹ De Graaf's narrative is thoroughly grounded in primary source research, including both meticulous work with the Composers’ Forum archive (housed in the National Archives II, College Park, Maryland) and detailed research in collections housed at the New Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, among other institutions. Drawing on contemporary published source material, the author constructs a detailed description of musical culture and thought together with intersecting ideas about politics, race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity. Furthermore, de Graff engages copious secondary sources to trace the historical development of the aforementioned social ideas and contextualize their relationship to the diverse musical culture flourishing in New York City during the 1930s.

Divided into two parts, the book's first section examines the institutional operations and infrastructure of the Composers’ Forum concerts together with the ideas, approaches, and reception of so-called “modernist” styles. The introduction and first chapter explore what made the concerts so distinctive, notably a diversity of musical styles ranging from traditional to ultramodern, audience interaction with the featured composers, and careful documentation of each concert through program notes and transcripts of the question-and-answer session. Designed to foster interaction and understanding between composer and audience, the Composers’ Forum concerts also sought to expose the general public to contemporary music they might not otherwise hear. In the second chapter, de Graff examines the series’ diversity of so-called “modernist” styles together with the composers’ thoughts and audience reactions. These perspectives were discussed during the question-and-answer sessions following the concerts and carefully documented by a stenographer. Jazz and ultramodernism are usually relegated to discussions of modernist music during the 1920s; de Graff's research, however, reveals that during the 1930s jazz was still regarded by composers and audiences as a modern compositional style and that the experiments of ultramodern composers continued. Composers such as Norman Cazden, Johanna Beyer, Edwin Gerschefski, and Béla Rózsa responded to and negotiated within their compositions the negative labels of modernist styles as decadent, degenerate, neurotic, unintelligible, and diseased. Responding to the Great Depression, some ultramodern composers, such as Ruth Crawford and Beyer, fused their experimental styles with Marxist ideology while others, including Cazden and Gerschefski, tempered their music to promote mass appeal and thus align with the Popular Front movement. So as to not pigeon-hole their output and compositional approaches, it should be noted that Beyer and Crawford composed works that aligned with the Popular Front as well. Chapter 3 explores contemporary views of masculinity and femininity and how they informed views on modern music. De Graff demonstrates the impact of the back-to-the-home movement and the ideology of separate spheres on expectations of female modernist composers, who often faced criticism for writing in a style deemed “virile” by male composers. Using Johanna Beyer and her music as a case study, de Graff explores these issues and also sheds necessary light on a relatively unknown composer, whose biography was recently published by Amy Beal.Footnote ²

The second part of the book focuses on the construction of identities. Chapter 4 addresses the conflation of Jewish music with orientalism. De Graff also examines how, given anti-Semitic currents in 1930s U.S. culture, the Forum's Jewish composers grappled with their identity and its connection to their compositions that addressed either religious or diasporic ethnic traditions. In the fifth chapter, the author examines the ways that white Forum composers, notably Paul Bowles, Daniel Gregory Mason, and Elie Siegmeister, incorporated African American genres into their works; how they portrayed African Americans in their stage works; and how Forum discussions following the performances of these works focused on issues surrounding authenticity, appropriation, and stereotypes. Chapter 6 examines the varied definitions of U.S. music held by composers and audiences, often comparing works by U.S. composers with European musical accomplishments. Drawing on Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, Donald Tweedy, and Burnet C. Tuthill, De Graaf also explores the Forum composers whose works incorporated and commented upon Anglo-American folk tunes. Finally, appendices list composers and works, student composers and works, and selection committee members. Given the many people involved with the Forum concerts, these carefully organized and useful appendices present further detailed information for readers whose research may intersect with specific individuals mentioned.

De Graaf uses the Forum transcripts and programs to reconstruct the lives of composers and musical works that have been lost to history, for example, ultramodern composers Jessie Baetz, Beyer, and Cazden. (In the case of Bowles's opera, Denmark Vesey, the majority of the work is lost.) Her research provides a detailed view of institutions, composers, works, audience perceptions, and the composers’ ideologies and processes that shaped classical music culture in 1930s New York but are commonly overlooked in survey approaches to music during the period. Rather than viewing the decade as a time of accessible musical Americana and stylistic retrenchment from the experiments of the 1920s, de Graaf demonstrates that 1930s U.S. musical life included varied musical approaches and ideologies, including those that had thrived during the 1920s. In their works, composers applied these methods in ways that were quite nuanced and often interconnected. Thus, de Graaf's approach invites new methods for structuring required music history coursework that move beyond a survey, which tends to stereotype the music and ideas of historical times and places as period style history.

Although the Composers’ Forum concerts represented only one facet of New York concert life during the second half of the 1930s, de Graaf's research provides a case study of many intersecting strands of U.S. cultural and political life: New Deal politics, Marxist ideology and the struggle of the working class, the Popular Front movement and accessibility for the masses, women's work during the Works Progress Administration, institutional racism against Jews and blacks, and the struggles associated with defining a national identity for the United States. Many of these concepts continue to have resonance today in our daily life and national discussions: “trickle-down” economics, minimum wage, universal health care, Occupy Wall Street and “the one percent,” the gender wage gap, Black Lives Matter, and the use of so-called “religious freedom” to institutionalize evangelical Christian bias against the LGBTQ community. Although focused on classical music in the concert hall, de Graaf's book reminds us that music from classical, folk, and popular traditions is imbricated with issues faced by underrepresented groups. Her work offers a model for scholarship and teaching that probes into systems of privilege and oppression, whether it involves examining the ways in which the concert hall and its canonic repertoire may not be accessible to many people living in the United States or the cultural biases that led one musicologist to extol opera's ability to help prison inmates, who are “mostly accustomed to the blatant lyrics and pounding beat of rap music,” recognize and express their emotions.Footnote ³ By illuminating the complexity of musical life during the 1930s, de Graff invites music scholars and teachers to construct courses exploring various musical styles from the classical, folk, and popular traditions and the connected social issues that will resonate with and inspire the people we teach to take action.