The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity
Nadine Hubbs
Abstract
This book 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 circle that included Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, and David Diamond, the book 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.
Keywords: gay composers, American identity, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, David Diamond, tonal music, French culture
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2004 | Print ISBN-13: 9780520241848 |
| Published to California Scholarship Online: May 2012 | DOI:10.1525/california/9780520241848.001.0001 |
