Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s

“Carol Oja’s Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s is a work of remarkable ambition and of equally remarkable achievement. … Drawing on extensive, impressively documented research into primary sources and secondary literature, Oja illuminates both history and reception history in a gracefully written text that is enhanced with generous pictorial ad musical illustrations. This is a book that will command the attention of any reader with an interest in twentieth-century musical culture. … This book is in every respect a major addition to the literature on American music.”–Journal of the American Musicological Society

“Pioneering….This is important history, and [Oja] cover[s] all of it, conservatives and radicals alike, with fascinating sidelights on critics, female patrons of contemporary music and of course on individual composers….[Oja reveals] that modern music in the 20’s was diverse and multicultural, with jazz and Latin overtones, women composers and one strong African-American, William Grant Still. And [she shows] that American modernism could be provocatively different from the European kind.”–The New York Times Book Review

“[A] superb exploration of the classical music scene in New York City during the 1920s and early 1930s….Profiles a variety of composers, both well known (Aaron Copland) and little remembered (Dane Rudhyar)….[Oja’s] ability to show how styles such as neoclassicism and the use of technology or dissonance combined to form a new genre of `American’ music is a distinguishing feature….Exhaustively researched and written in an intelligent, engaging style, this book is highly recommended.”–Library Journal

“Marvelous….[Oja] wisely recognizes both the internationalism of the music scene during the 1920s [and] the huge importance of the developing new music infrastructure that emerged during the 1920s….Oja avoids the cultural exclusivity so prevalent among musicologists in her virtuosic contextualization of the emerging new music in the broader world of arts and ideas….A remarkable study.”–Institute for Studies in American Music

“Brings a multidimensional perspective to examining the music scene in 1920s New York. Having unearthed extensive archival materials (including interviews, correspondence and little-known music manuscripts), Oja dispels many myths and considers art in conjunction with contemporary social, cultural, and political issues.”–Publishers Weekly

“A richly nuanced history that illuminates particular compositions as well as the general relationship between modern music and modern life….A compelling, insightful, and readable study of the fascinating world of new music in New York.”–Notes

“In its rich accumulation of detail, its overlapping and sometimes conflicting perspectives, and its occasional confusion of the substantial and the imaginary, Oja’s book on New York is a mirror of its wonderful subject….Making Music Modern will be for many readers a bridge to an enticing new world.”–Music & Letters

“If the visual art and literature of that era has so far received considerably more attention from historians than has its musical legacy, this absorbing study by Carol J. Oja goes a long way towards correcting the deficiency.”–usic & Letters

The first in-depth study of a crucial moment in American music