Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity
ISBN: 9780520937956
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Gender and Sexuality in Music; Critical Theory of Music American Music;

In this vibrant and pioneering book, Nadine Hubbs shows how a gifted group of Manhattan-based gay composers were pivotal in creating a distinctive "American sound" and in the process served as architects of modern American identity. Focusing on a talented circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, and Ned Rorem, The Queer Composition of America's Sound homes in on the role of these artists' self-identification--especially with tonal music, French culture, and homosexuality--in the creation of a musical idiom that even today signifies "America" in commercials, movies, radio and television, and the concert hall.

Nadine Hubbs is Associate Professor of Music and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.