An American Music: The Search for an American Musical Identity

Kroeger, Karl; Tischler, Barbara L.

doi:10.2307/940981

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Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West. By Beth E. Levy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

Whitmer¹

2014

J Soc American Mus

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When composer and native New Yorker Jerome Moross traveled through New Mexico on his way to California in 1936, he was enthralled: "The dimensions of everything starting with the Great Plains just overawed me. I remember I just had to get out of the bus at Albuquerque and stay. I just couldn't go on, I had to get out and wander around the town.. .. The whole thing was just too much for me. .. it was marvelous, and I just fell in love with it. I wandered all around the West, I was ecstatic about it." 1 Moross was not the only composer to fall in the love with the West, as Beth Levy tells us in her seminal book Frontier Figures: American Composers and the Mythology of the American West, and the results of this attraction significantly influenced American art music. With some compositional models becoming too "modern" for contemporary audiences, the infusion of Western lore-inspired music and culture into art music breathed new life into American music. Levy's book presents a series of loosely chronological case studies, centered on nine American composers: Arthur Farwell,

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