Excerpted from Sounds of War: Music in the United States During World War II (footnotes omitted) by © Annegret Fauser. Published by Oxford University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.
Introduction
On January 20, 2009, moments before Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States, “Simple Gifts”—a Shaker tune made famous by Aaron Copland’s ballet Appalachian Spring (1944)—sounded in an instrumental arrangement by Copland’s student John Williams. The tune was significant enough, but still more was its source, given the new president’s well-known appreciation for Copland. The previous week, at the start of the inauguration festivities, the actor Tom Hanks had narrated Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942) on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The composer’s Fanfare for the Common Man (1942) was also performed on this occasion. These iconic works of World War II were played, over six decades later, during the inauguration of a U.S. president who not only inspired worldwide enthusiasm but also inherited a protracted war. For American and global television audiences alike, the musical choices during the 2009 presidential inauguration made audible a connection, however unintended and unacknowledged, between what has come to be seen as America’s “good” war in 1941–45 and the positive musical identity that was forged in its cauldron.
World War II was, indeed, a defining moment in American history, when ideas about national identity were consolidated both in internal discourse and in internationally oriented propaganda. Although the 1920s and ’30s were rife with social, racial, and political tensions, the attack on Pearl Harbor pushed Americans together in a wave of patriotic fervor that swept the nation, creating “a unanimity of purpose that was shared by the government and people and extended solidly to the men on the fighting front.” Radio programs, presidential speeches, movies, and magazines celebrated the “American way” as a shining beacon of human civilization and cast U.S. involvement in the war as a noble act of defense thrust upon a peace-loving, enlightened society by barbaric enemies abroad. Until postwar McCarthyism and the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights movement broke this national covenant apart, America did indeed appear to be “the beautiful.”
The United States formally entered the war the day after Pearl Harbor, on December 8, 1941, more than two years after Germany had set in motion what would quickly escalate into a global conflict through the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Tensions had been brewing even before that attack, starting with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia (1935), the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), and the Japanese invasion of China in early July 1937. The United States had kept its distance in accordance with the isolationist Neutrality Acts, although it offered tacit support to its allies by way of the Lend-Lease Agreement, signed into law on March 11, 1941; the United States also instituted its first peacetime draft (in 1940) and increased its defense budget exponentially. The Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—made rapid gains upon the British, French, and other Allied forces (as well as those from British Commonwealth countries), including the invasion and fall of France and the Low Countries in May–June 1940, primarily because the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact kept the USSR neutral by dividing Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union.
The equation changed dramatically with the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, which pushed it into the Allied camp through an alliance with the United Kingdom. After Pearl Harbor, not only the United States but also China—which had been fighting since 1937—formally joined the Allies, so that the war was now fought in Europe and northern Africa, on the one hand, and the Far East and Asia, on the other. The next year, 1942, looked bleak for the Allies as the Axis gained victory after victory; the tables turned, however, with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s victory in El Alamein in November 1942. In 1943 Allied forces started to gain ground, from China and the South Pacific to the Soviet Union and Sicily. With Mussolini’s fall that year, the first of the three Axis leaders was vanquished. By 1944 the tide had turned decisively, and on May 8, 1945, the war in Europe was over. Three months later—soon after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing close to a quarter of a million men, women, and children—Japan surrendered, and World War II was over.
These bare details cannot do justice to a conflict that also generated unspeakable war crimes in countries from China to the Soviet Union and led to the genocide of the Holocaust. Bombings had destroyed cities on both sides of the war, from London and Rotterdam to Berlin and Tokyo, killing millions of civilians. The death toll among the armed forces on both sides was staggering. A few of the warring nations—mainly the continental United States, Canada, and Australia—remained untouched in territorial terms, though all paid a bitter price in the lives lost in battle and in prisoner-of-war camps. It was a global war that defies any kind of summing up, a war fought with every means, from weapons to words.
Music also played a role in the battle. Whether as an instrument of blatant propaganda or as a means of entertainment, recuperation, and uplift, music pervaded homes and concert halls, army camps and government buildings, hospitals and factories. A medium both permeable and malleable, music was appropriated for numerous war-related tasks. Indeed, even more than movies, posters, books, and newspapers, music sounded everywhere in this war, not only in its live manifestations but also through recordings and radio. So far as the United States is concerned, even today musicians such as Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington, and the Andrews Sisters populate the sonic imaginary of wartime. Whether performed by “all-girl” groups such as the International Sweethearts of Rhythm or by military bands conducted by Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw, swing and boogie-woogie entertained civilians at home and GIs stationed abroad. Numerous films created to boost both civilian and military morale—from Star Spangled Rhythm (1942) and Stage Door Canteen (1943) to Anchors Aweigh (1945)—featured star-studded numbers presenting country sounds, barbershop quartets, swing, sentimental ballads, and hot jazz, among other styles. Likewise, nostalgic songs such as “I’ll Be Seeing You” (1938) and bellicose tunes as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition” (1942) had their place on popular radio programs, United Services Organization (USO) shows, and V-Discs.
Star Spangled Rhythm, for example, brings together all the popular styles for which this period is so well-known, and indeed they are often regarded as iconic for the era. However, it does so in what might sometimes seem surprising ways, if with obvious programmatic intent. The big production number “Swing Shift,” set in an aircraft factory, combines jazzy swing with traditional barn dances, musical and dance styles that might otherwise have been criticized as incompatible. Another number merges the style and performance of the African American vocal group the Golden Gate Quartet with the more sentimental duet “Hit the Road to Dreamland” (marked as “white” by both its performance style and its crooning arrangement), performed by Mary Martin and Dick Powell. Hot jazz is represented, inevitably, by a Harlem street scene featuring the legendary African American dancer Katherine Dunham. And just as inevitably, the film ends with a patriotic number, “Old Glory,” in which Bing Crosby, in the front of a crowd standing before a stage set of Mount Rushmore, sings in praise of the U.S. flag, engages with a doubting Thomas, and leads representatives of the states (including a gospel group from Georgia) into a choral hymn of patriotic solidarity.
Yet that final number has still more surprises to offer, given its obvious, and no doubt deliberate, echoes of another well-known patriotic piece, John Latouche and Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans (1939). Here we move from “popular music” in the direction of a repertoire that was, and is, often labeled “classical.” I use that term with all due caution—and mostly for lack of anything better—without asserting value judgments on its superiority over other musical forms and acts. Nor do I limit my inquiry to elitist, “highbrow” domains: indeed, one of my points is that wartime classical music is not at all highbrow—just as popular music is not lowbrow— but instead does its cultural work in differently configured social spheres. However, for all the scholarly emphasis on popular culture in the wartime period, what in fact distinguished musical life in the United States during World War II from other times of war was the significant role assigned to classical music: in 1940s America it had a cultural relevance and ubiquity that is hard to imagine today.
The nation’s out-and-out involvement in the war meant that all music was to serve its needs, and that included types of music that had already gained a significantly broader presence in U.S. culture during the 1930s. This new prominence was achieved in New Deal America—and we shall see how New Deal institutions transferred to wartime ones—especially through music appreciation courses in schools and colleges, nationwide radio broadcasts of major orchestras and the Metropolitan Opera House, and phonograph catalogs that offered a repertoire of classics for the middlebrow household. Through these educational and marketing initiatives, classical music from symphonies to Schubert songs carried added value as cultural capital that moved beyond popular musical entertainment. Also at stake, however, was the United States’ role as not just a military power, but also a force for civilization. In the composer Henry Cowell’s words, musicians of all stripes were “shaping music for total war.” Indeed, no other event in U.S. history mobilized and instrumentalized culture in general, and music in particular, so totally, so consciously, and so unequivocally as World War II.
Musicians—from the singing cowboy Gene Autry to the Metropolitan Opera’s John Carter—saw themselves as cultural combatants. Copland was just one of many classical composers deeply involved in the war effort. Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, and Colin McPhee all participated in the propaganda missions of the Office of War Information (OWI). Earlier, in the summer of 1942, Blitzstein had become attached to the Eighth Army Air Force in London, where he was commissioned to compose his Airborne Symphony. Samuel Barber also served in the Army Air Force (but stationed in the United States), writing both his Second Symphony and his Capricorn Concerto, “a rather tooting piece, with flute, oboe and trumpet chirping away” and thus fitting for the times, as he assured Copland. Civilian commissions for new music focused on patriotic and “martial” subjects, most famously the series of fanfares that Eugene Goossens, the chief conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, requested from American composers and from European musicians in exile: Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man is a still much-performed result. Similarly, the League of Composers (financed by the Department of the Treasury) commissioned seventeen works on patriotic themes, including Bohuslav Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice and William Grant Still’s In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy. Classical music was heard on the radio and in film scores, whether Yehudi Menuhin playing Schubert’s Ave Maria in Stage Door Canteen or Victor Young infusing the entire score for Frenchman’s Creek (1944) with Claude Debussy’s Clair de lune. Concert music was performed in the armed forces, for example by the Camp Lee Symphony Orchestra or the U.S. Navy Band String Quartet; it even played a role in the work of the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor to the CIA), whose director, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, was known not only to support experiments in using music as a cipher, but also to involve himself in music-related propaganda efforts.
This rich field of Western classical music and its musicians during the war years in the United States forms the center of the present book. This is not to say that it existed in isolation from other musical styles, or that jazz, Tin Pan Alley, and country music played a less important role in the war effort. But numerous studies have already explored with great authority the role of jazz and other popular musics during World War II, including their extensions into either the concert hall, such as Duke Ellington’s “jazz symphony” Black, Brown, and Beige, or Broadway musical theater, in the case of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (both 1943). In contrast, research on classical music in the United States during these years has been limited in its scope and focused mainly on the experiences of such European émigrés as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Kurt Weill. Only recently have we begun to scratch other surfaces with specific case studies involving in particular the music of Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, and William Schuman. For the most part, classical music in America during World War II has only been addressed either as a chapter in broader studies, such as Barbara A. Zuck’s A History of Musical Americanism, or as a short interlude in studies and biographies dedicated to composers and performers such as Blitzstein and Arturo Toscanini.
This paucity on the one hand, and the relative lack of coverage of the United States in broader studies of music during World War II on the other, raise more difficult questions. American music during these years developed within a politicized framework similar at least in rhetoric and intent to those of Germany, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, for example. Like their counterparts in other Allied and Axis powers, American musicians found themselves in a cultural field ripe with contradictory demands from government institutions and the military, from the general needs of day-to-day musical life at home, and from their own private desire to continue composing and performing. And like music in the Soviet Union, American concert music gained new status as a direct result of world events. Musical life was shaped by the complex intersections between musical production and consumption and the political, social, and economic environment within the United States on the one hand, and their relationship to European countries—whether Allied or Axis—on the other.
If one were to believe both wartime propaganda and cold-war musicology, music composed in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy should and did sound markedly different from that written in democratic America, fiercely resistant Great Britain, and the socialist Soviet Union. As Pamela Potter has pointed out, however, wartime classical music may be more homogeneous than its different origins might lead us to expect. Likewise, a simple transposition of moral and aesthetic positions (e.g., the modernist avant-garde as socially progressive, neoclassical and neoromantic music as politically repressive) is inappropriate for a repertoire that was expected to fulfill precise political, social, and cultural functions. In the decades since the end of the war we have come to understand the propaganda value that music held for Nazi Germany, both in nation building before the war and in the years after 1939, whether of Carl Orff’s medievalizing Carmina Burana (1937), Elly Ney’s and Wilhelm Kempff’s Beethoven performances at the German front, or Richard Strauss’s nostalgic opera Capriccio (1942). Similarly, recent research by Kiril Tomoff and Marina Frolova-Walker has shown how nationalist concerns and Soviet ideology merged into an all-consuming revival of Russian pan-Slavicism in order to strengthen a positive cultural identity in the face of the Nazi invasion. Musical culture in Fascist Italy and under the Vichy government in France has elicited deep scholarly engagement with exploring the complex webs of political ideology and musical production. The apparent reluctance of scholars of American music (and, to a lesser extent, of British music as well) to engage in similar investigations raises intriguing questions. It also has a precedent in the times.
Allied propagandists during World War II tended to claim the ideological high ground typically by avoiding any engagement whatsoever with ideology. It is easy to accuse Fascist regimes of abusing music as an instrument of nationalist propaganda; it is harder to acknowledge that such forces were at work—with not so dissimilar results—on the other side of the wartime fence. While the Allies may never have overtly condemned “degenerate” music—defined by style or by ethnic origin (or both)—its production was strongly discouraged save in certain highly controlled circumstances. In both Allied and Axis spheres of influence, the typical prior instruments of musical internationalization (for instance, the International Society for Contemporary Music) declined sharply in favor of such bilateral organizations as the Council of American–Soviet Friendship and various German–Japanese cultural associations. And the tendency of the postwar West to deride the results of socialist realism as a sign of intolerable artistic oppression hardly squares with the mandates imposed upon and willingly accepted by Western composers as a necessity of, and for, war.
No less complex, and running no less counter to traditional historical narratives, were the questions raised by the patterns of musical migration across national boundaries and political spectra. Whereas during the 1920s and early ’30s the Western focus of music (and art in general) was on internationalization, during the war such transnational cross-fertilizations and migrations became problematic, and it was not clear whether they were to be embraced (as a sign of inclusivity or even cultural preeminence) or rejected (as a source of contamination). Thus the tensions between the international and the national—and even between the regional and the local—entered not just the battlefield of political domination but also, and necessarily, that of the moral high ground.
Serious Music
With the United States during World War II deeply immersed in these cross-currents, any exploration of American music making finds itself faced with a balancing act that acknowledges both national developments and their transnational context. Furthermore, musical life in the United States was shaped by institutions and individuals as much as by political and aesthetic trends. In particular, such bodies as the armed forces and the OWI were formative in this context because their centralized national reach was unprecedented in U.S. history (the country’s short and limited involvement in World War I had far fewer consequences in this respect). The agendas of government employees, orchestra conductors, individual composers faced with the draft, propaganda warriors, and medical professionals in military hospitals wove a complex fabric of musical production in which serendipitous alignments and ideologically crossed purposes could lead to musical commissions, their performances, and their cancellations in ways that sometimes defy logic. Both Barber and Blitzstein found themselves freed from day-to-day military duties in 1943 to write symphonies dedicated to the U.S. Air Force. Yet whereas Barber’s Second Symphony (1944) was performed to great acclaim in Boston, shifting priorities in the European war theater, where Blitzstein was stationed, impeded the planned première of his Airborne Symphony, delaying it for two years until 1946. Thus the complexities of civilian and military musical life—with its interconnections, contradictions, and rivalries—form an important part of exploring U.S. music during these years.
These institutional interconnections, personal rivalries, and aesthetic trends of the war years grew, of course, out of the musical and cultural developments of the 1930s. Three interconnected strands of musical practice in particular provided the foundation for the most characteristic developments of concert music in the United States during the war: the increased predominance of an accessible style—one that Copland dubbed “imposed simplicity”—among modernist composers from William Grant Still to Roy Harris; the institutionalization of a nationwide concert, opera, and dance infrastructure through the WPA, especially the Federal Music Project (FMP) and the Federal Theatre Project; and, finally, the impact, after 1934, of FCC regulation on radio broadcasts that encouraged “educational radio,” including the programming of “serious” music. When the United States joined the war in 1941, it had a cultural system in place that permitted, for the first time in U.S. history, a centralized implementation of cultural politics that—despite regional idiosyncrasies, political differences, and individual resistance— reached both music makers and consumers across the nation. Radio shows that delivered “serious” music to American citizens during the Depression, and FMP programs that had put into place music-educational mechanisms favoring so-called good music, could be transformed almost wholesale into music programs for the new military. Elements of these emerging political, institutional, and aesthetic practices that at first glance might be seen as specific to a world war—stylistic simplification, nationalist retrenchment, and the politicization of musical composition—are in fact a continuation and culmination of trends that already dominated American music in the 1930s. Yet pressures increased—not least owing to the need for propaganda and the short time frame in which it was to be produced—and changes occurred.
There are other challenges facing any musicological engagement with World War II. Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lili Marleen (1981), Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), and Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie (2008) are just three iconic films of the past thirty years that have shaped what our senses associate with these wartime soundscapes. In telling the stories of those six years between 1939 and 1945, films and documentaries have for over half a century added countless layers of invented, reconstructed, and recovered sound to this slice of history, creating a sonic imaginary whose vivid immediacy provides an acoustic framework not only for moviegoers but also for scholars who engage with the period’s music. In this respect, World War II is unique. Earlier historical periods rely on different representational imaginaries where sound can sometimes become fleetingly symbolic but more usually remains subordinate to the visual and verbal. Since World War II, on the other hand, recorded sound has become so commonplace that it has lost its historical specificity. Songs may still stand for a period—the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand” or Joan Baez’s version of “We Shall Overcome” are heard as embodying the 1960s—but these postwar soundscapes remain open and often fragmentary. World War II as a period, however, has been fashioned into a total soundscape of acoustic and musical signifiers fusing the sounds of war, oppression, and propaganda with those of the radio, concert hall, and opera house. The voices of Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin remain in our ears and merge with those of such actors as Colin Firth as he recreates King George VI’s address to the nation, underlaid with the Allegretto slow movement from Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 in the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech (2010). Analyzing the acoustic history of World War II thus poses unique problems that bring into sharper relief the broader concerns of anyone seeking to engage with sound, music, and culture.
There are two key issues in this study. The first is the challenge of defamiliarizing the soundscape of this period by reintroducing—or at least acknowledging—the topic’s historical, cultural, and sonic distance. Because of the sonic immediacy of modern media experiences, the chasm between the imaginary soundscape of postwar films and the lived sonic experience of that world war often remains unrecognized. A case in point is the soundtrack of Saving Private Ryan. In the DVD’s bonus material, members of the production team describe in striking detail how they worked on turning the acoustic representation of battle into an “authentic” experience in the cinema, the soundtrack acting as a “transporter” into historical reality that might seem to make time travel come true. Whereas we have learned to distance ourselves cognitively from the visual experience of film—we remain aware that Private Ryan also goes by the name of Matt Damon—the reception of soundtracks tends to be, for the most part, subliminal and unreflected. Therefore, the musicological commonplace of the impossibility of period listening—the fact that our ears are not historical ones, and that our listening experience has little or nothing to do with that of the 1940s—becomes an acutely important distinction for the acoustic history of World War II.
The second issue is that scholarship on the music of World War II also needs to face the political, cultural, and even acoustic exceptionality of this global conflict in terms of the deliberate employment of music, and of sound technology, within the military and for propaganda purposes. World War II was the first war in which modern media played a key role: radio, phonograph, and film allowed for the strategic distribution of sonic materials in entirely new ways. These sonic remnants pose different challenges to scholarship from text-based archives, especially when one seeks to emphasize the chasm between our own ears and those of the past. And then, the music itself hovers in the interstitial space between a past manifestation in performance, its notated form as score, and its continued reception in concert hall, recording, and advertising. Witness how Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring, for all their popularity today, owe everything to the time in which they were composed. And while they may have lost their wartime resonances—or perhaps not—the reconstruction of that context allows for a better understanding of how such musical identity markers were shaped. Add to that the complicated history of concert music in the United States, with its unique anxieties over European influence and national identity, and the musical fabric of this period becomes quite difficult to weave.
Thus at the heart of this book lie several thematic strands: the transnational complexities and nationalist trends of music during World War II, the institutional and individual forms of musical practice, and the past’s sonic and experiential alterity. My text is in two large parts: the first (chapters 1 and 2) treats the people and institutions that created, performed, and listened to this music; the second (chapters 3–5) explores its sonic manifestations. Chapter 1 focuses on individuals, both Americans and foreigners, and their musical activities during the war. It explores how men and women dealt with this global conflict, whether they were musicians in uniform, performers providing wartime entertainment, composers working on music appropriate for this time, or musical mediators such as radio hosts and newspaper critics. Chapter 2 flips the perspective from individual to institution. Music became a tool of choice in the cultural war that the United States fought in concert with its military campaign. Musical diplomacy aimed at winning the hearts of Allied and neutral nations; morale and propaganda operations employed classical music to uplift and impress; the military was faced with contradictory ideologies and agendas when it came to musical performance and education; and music therapy flourished in the desperate fight to “recondition” those soldiers whom trauma had left unable to return into combat or to reintegrate into postwar civilian society. Yet chapter 1 also addresses such organizations as the OWI and the USO in terms of the ways individual musicians tried to forge their own paths through the institutional matrix of the time; and individual performers and composers feature in the stories in chapter 2 about the institutions they served in and helped to shape. These two chapters thus form a dynamic pair with themes echoing across both.
The second part of the book then turns to the “classical” music that was composed and performed in the United States during the war. This section encompasses—to draw on Irving Lowens’s foundational formulation—both “music in America and American music.” Although this dichotomy, as Lowens himself acknowledged, does not allow for the many subtle hybridities in the repertoire, it offers a distinction between music that was conceived self-consciously as “American” and music whose universalist appeal or deliberate otherness had its own place in wartime concert life, independently of whether it was composed in or imported into the United States. Although each of the chapters in the second section approaches this repertoire from its own perspective, all share a concern with trying to reveal what was considered “American” in music. This is by no means an attempt to distill a distinctly national musical trait; rather, I show how musical signifiers are identified and instrumentalized in this nationalist endeavor in general and by individual musicians in particular. By looking at music composed for the American market both by Americans (chapters 3 and 5) and by European exiles (chapter 4), these markers of identity start forming a matrix of musical signifiers that can be seen codifying, well beyond the war years, the trope of American music.
Chapter 3 explores the historical underpinning of American music during the war, including how this conflict reframed the debate about a “usable past,” the appropriation of folk music, and strategies to Americanize European opera and employ it for “racial uplift.” These were not new issues in the history of American music, but with the country’s sharpened need for national delineation, the war intensified and crystallized the debates. Chapter 4 focuses on the music of foreign musicians who arrived on American soil as refugees from the war in Europe. As they continued to write music, they faced a new world in both their musical and their everyday lives. Discovering the United States through the eyes of exile composers offers a perspective on American music that breaks apart a number of familiar stories, including the often overplayed dichotomy between European progressiveness and American conservatism. Indeed, this chapter is equally about “American” music as filtered through exile musicians’ appropriations and about the individual responses to “America” by these composers in exile.
The final chapter tackles the music with the worst reputation in twentieth-century historiography: intentionally nationalist works including such blatantly obvious Americana as Morton Gould’s American Salute (1943) or Roy Harris’s Symphony no. 6, “Gettysburg” (1944). But Americana are made up of a much broader set of signifiers, especially in works of commemoration such as Still’s In Memoriam. Presenting these works at the end of my journey allows for a deeper contextualization that goes beyond a facile dismissal as nationalist trifles or bombast and instead shows that, for all their topicality, these works also responded to more sophisticated and long-standing concerns about musical and national identities in the United States.
Although the transnational context of American wartime music remains a constant frame throughout this study, my narrative privileges a U.S. perspective. Much of the material is presented here for the first time, filling an important gap in the historiography of American music between the well-researched developments of the 1920s and ’30s and those of music during the cold war. Archival work provides the foundation of this project, and my interpretations are anchored in a range of methodologies drawn from music history and theory, aesthetics, reception history, and cultural history, as well as exile and diaspora studies. They are more broadly informed by my previous work on musical identity, race, nationalism, cultural transfer, and gender studies, especially with respect to notions of masculinity in music.
Any attempt to address so substantial a topic will be defined as much by what is left out as by what is included. I have been able to focus on one set of repertoires rather than offering a more ecumenical overview embracing others precisely because of the scholarly studies of popular musics, jazz, and musical theater noted earlier. Similarly, recent work on Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Weill in their U.S. exile enabled me to concentrate more strongly on others less frequently considered in this context, including Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinů. Many of the composers discussed in this book (including Blitzstein, Copland, Thomson, and Weill) wrote film music during the war years—a subject that I hope will soon attract much-needed scholarly attention but that lies beyond the scope of this inquiry. Opera, too, sits on the margins—although I discuss some features of the repertoire—largely because it was less mobile and more foreign, and because its canon was more firmly fixed. Furthermore, the United States is a sizable nation, with numerous local traditions and activities that all deserve attention in their own right; but because so many of the institutions, concert halls, and radio stations were located on the East Coast, this book focuses mostly on that region. Inevitably, some of my choices of what to cover and what not were personal as much as professional, and sometimes (though rarely) I was hostage to archival accessibility.
At first glance, some potential protagonists may seem underrepresented in this book, especially those musicians whom we count as minorities by reason of either gender or ethnicity. Some of this absence has to do with U.S. cultural politics of the 1930s and ’40s, which limited access to concert halls and stages especially for African American concert artists and opera singers and led to a noticeable lack of visibility and presence of African American musicians, particular within such institutions as the State Department and the OWI. This circumstance is highlighted by my narrative strategy: I have chosen not to segregate African American and American Indian musicians into their own subsections. Rather, I have integrated composers (e.g., William Grant Still and Ulysses Kay); educators (e.g., Chauncey G. Lee); and performers (e.g., Dorothy Maynor) into my broader narrative about institutions, composition, performance, and cultural politics. Because of the cultural landscape of the United States during the war, therefore, minority musicians cannot be but underrepresented in this book: in that segregated and racist society, more often than not African American musicians remained ghettoized in Negro production units or even barred from performance altogether, whether in the USO or the armed forces. The picture that emerged from the archives and libraries was overwhelmingly white, even though some African American leaders considered the contributions of singers such as Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson vital to the war effort. But for African Americans, transgression into white territory could have dangerous results. When the world-renowned tenor Roland Hayes protested the shabby segregationist treatment of his wife and daughter in a shoe shop in Rome, Georgia, in 1942, he was beaten and jailed by police. The New York Amsterdam News reported that Mrs. Hayes had protested: “This sort of thing is out of place at a time like this. You ought to go over there with old Hitler.” Marian Anderson, for her part, was treated worse than German prisoners of war in Birmingham, Alabama, where she had to stay outside a train-station waiting room while enemy soldiers were allowed to come in.
As a feminist scholar, I kept looking for women in this musical war world. As performers, women were very active, especially in civilian endeavors from USO shows to radio programs, although—as we will see in chapter 1—a small group of performers enlisted to form the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve Band. Unlike in other professions, where Rosie the Riveter presented alternate models of female accomplishment, in music we find an entrenchment of traditional gender concepts that valued “feminine” qualities in female performers—from glamorous beauty to nurturing maternity. These seemed to preclude women being active composers during the war to a significant degree. Ruth Crawford Seeger spent the war years promoting folk song in nursery and primary schools, which culminated in her volume Folk Songs for School Children (1948). Marion Bauer wrote only a few compositions and worked mainly as a music educator. Others, such as Vivien Fine, who came to prominence in the postwar years, were primarily heard in their capacity as performers, even though she wrote a small number of compositions, including Rhapsody on a Russian Folk Song (1943) and Songs of Our Time (1943) in support of American–Soviet activities.
This book also represents a personal journey. For me, a scholar of German origin, the study of music during World War II remains a painful undertaking, given that it engages with a musical culture forever altered by a war started by the Axis powers. Encountering exile and death, devastation and loss, through the raw immediacy of historical documents was as challenging as the need to develop resistance to the often brilliant propaganda I found in the OWI archives, the power of which remains, after seven decades, undiminished. In addition, I teach at an American university located in an area with a large number of military bases. In Chapel Hill, the current war is a reality: many of my students are touched by this conflict, either directly (because of their own ROTC status or because of family) or indirectly, and I have been humbled by, and have learned from, their willingness to reflect deeply on the role of culture in wartime, if at a somewhat safer historical distance.
I have also taken comfort from recent scholarly trends. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq—one of three nations that the former president George W. Bush called, in a direct play on World War II rhetoric, the “axis of evil”— literature about music and war has exploded. Some contributions tackle current events head-on, most prominently Suzanne Cusick’s eye-opening work on the abuse of music for torture and as a weapon. Others engage with music and war more broadly, most often in essay collections. World War I and the American Civil War have also attracted renewed interest. As musicologists, we have begun to write, speak, and teach about war. The present book, too, is part of this broader network of reflective discourse concerned with the uses of music as a morale booster and source of comfort and consolation; as a signifier of individual and national identities; and as a political tool, instrument of propaganda, and military weapon. In World War II, as it is today, music was an agent in a global conflict. The performance of Copland’s Americana during a wartime presidential inauguration in 2009 was, indeed, a political gesture rallying Americans through these familiar sounds while projecting these sonic markers of identity across the globe to both enemies and allies. To understand how it could do so is the main aim of what follows.