308 PART 3 | FROM WORLD WAR I THROUGH WORLD WAR II
arrangements, excerpts, and simplifi cations had made operas and symphonies
into fare for the general public. By the 1930s, thanks to new kinds of musical trans-
mission, such works were being widely listened to in their original versions—
as composers’ music.COMPOSERS, THE GOVERNMENT,
AND THE MARKETPLACE DURING
THE GREAT DEPRESSIONIn 1923, two years after the founding of the International Composers’ Guild, a
group of American composers, fi nding Varèse’s idea of the time’s “true spirit” too
exclusive, left the guild and formed the League of Composers. Their stated goal,
“to bring the entire range of modern tendencies before the public,” indicated
a broad platform that embraced more traditionalist styles as well as ultramod-
ernism. Both groups shared an interest in internationalism with a third orga-
nization, the Pan American Association of Composers, founded in 1928, whose
manifesto called for composers “to make still greater effort toward creating a
distinctive music of the Western Hemisphere.” The creation of these three orga-
nizations, all based in New York, signaled that composers in America were now
banding together, regardless of nationality, in the name of modernism.
Also founded in 1928 was yet another organization devoted to modern music
that cut across a broad stylistic spectrum: the Copland-Sessions Concerts,
named after its two founding composers, Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions.
The organization produced ten concerts between 1928 and 1932. Sessions, an
American who was living in Europe during that period, wrote music that dis-
played his mastery of the new vocabulary of European modernism. His disso-
nant, chromatic idiom testifi ed to his belief in continuous stylistic evolution as a
“universal principle” that outweighed nationalism, which he considered a mere
“accident of locality.” Aaron Copland, on the other hand, became
a leading proponent of a music that spoke to a wide audience in
a musical language that sounded distinctly American. Copland’s
two-pronged search—for a musical style that had an American
accent and that had broad communicative power—came to be a
dominant theme of American composition in the 1930s.
The 1930s was also the era of the deepest economic depression
in U.S. history. The country had emerged from World War I as a
creditor nation—one that took in more money from overseas than
it spent. And the economy boomed during the 1920s: the United
States saw a 50 percent increase in manufacturing output, and by
1929 was producing major shares of the world’s coal, petroleum,
hydroelectric power, steel, and natural gas. In October 1929, how-
ever, the stock market collapsed. And when many banks failed
during the next couple of years, production, consumption, and
investment declined, unemployment rose sharply, and confi -
dence in the economic future crumbled. Farming, heavy indus-
try, and the blue-collar workforce in general bore the brunt of the
hardship.K Composer Aaron
Copland (1900–1990)
in the 1930s.172028_13_305-331_r3_ko.indd 308 23/01/13 8:39 PM