Music Media Monthly

Sounds of War:  Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser

Stories from the “good war” never cease to engage Americans. However, the music discussed in this fascinating and difficult book is not usually what comes to mind when we think of World War II: the Glenn Miller band, the Andrews Sisters, etc. Instead, this book bills itself as the first one to take an in-depth look at the role classical music and musicians played in the United States and abroad during the conflict.

What’s fascinating is how much ground Annegret Fauser covers — from the pop singalong Army Hit Kit to the treatment of luminaries like Béla Bartók as “enemy aliens,” from music as trauma therapy to the notion that “concert” music was a far more powerful force in the U.S. then than it is now. What’s difficult is Fauser’s style.  She can be ponderous, and uses words like “imaginary” (as a noun) and “performative” that make this reader wince.

The best parts deal with propaganda, a term which did not have negative connotations on the Allied side 70 years ago.  The list of those who worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), the leading propaganda agency, reads like a roll call of major figures:  Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Colin McPhee, Daniel Saidenberg and Kurt Weill among them.  Carter produced the first recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto as an OWI specialist.

Performers who entertained the troops included Yehudi Menuhin, Lily Pons, Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern.  Pons and conductor Andre Kostelanetz were said to have appeared before more than 2 million troops on one  long 1944-5 tour, including some in occupied Germany. (A hilarious photo in the book shows Pons cozying up to a huge phallic brass artillery shell.)

Government officials and private citizens were responsible for making records and stocking foreign libraries with American classical music. A major military project involved creating and shipping to troops “V-Discs,” which Fauser, a professor of music and women’s studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says constituted “a new medium – ‘12-inch practically unbreakable plastic platters.’” (V was for victory, not vinyl.)  The first ones were of popular music, but there were classical selections too.

Sounds of War is filled with wonderful facts and anecdotes about how orchestras and symphonic works supported the battle against the Axis powers. Both Barber and Blitzstein wrote symphonies dedicated to aviation. Soldiers and sailors formed bands, symphony orchestras and string quartets. The Marine Corps had a women’s reserve band. Given the millions who served in the U.S. military during the war, this shouldn’t be surprising, yet the sweep of the effort is remarkable.

Not only was there much more to wartime music-making than “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” there were reputations to be made on the wartime stage.  Pianist Eugene List was the “poster child” for classical music draftees. Fauser says his broadcasts and tours boosted his post-war career. Arturo Toscanini, already famous as a refugee from fascism, conducted his very first all-American concert in 1942. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man was just one of the fanfares commissioned by conductor Eugene Goossens; others were by Harris, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu.

Eleanor Roosevelt offered a ringing battle cry in the magazine Musical America: “Music should go on!” Meanwhile a seaman from the Bronx was earthier. Hearing Menuhin, he said: “Jeez, Dat guy c’n do more wit’ a G-string dan Gypsy Rose Lee!”

While there were issues about some programming of “enemy music,” particularly that of Richard Strauss (who was still alive and serving Hitler’s Germany with operas like Capriccio), American radio and live concerts did not avoid the dead German titans of the canon from Bach to Brahms; indeed, “entire concert series were dedicated to Beethoven.” On the Russian front, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”) was played and discussed so much that it irked Americans like Virgil Thomson and Roy Harris, who wanted more “native” music to be publicized.

How important was “good music” (as it was sometimes referred to, during the “good war”) to the American public? It was huge.

The Army broadcast a show twice weekly for troops called “Soldiers’ Symphony.” Toscanini’s radio concerts were renowned, and OWI also oversaw regular broadcasts devoted to American contemporary music by such composers as Barber, Copland, Cowell, Robert Russell Bennett, George Chadwick, and Charles Ives, whose  seventieth birthday program was sent all over the world for radio use.

Here was “propaganda” of the most refined kind, played for armed forces whose white and almost entirely male troops loved classical music almost as much as swing and jazz, and much more than country and western, according to wartime surveys. As for African Americans, that was a different story. Operas were staged for “racial uplift” by the National Negro Opera Company, founded in 1941. Its first production: Aida, natch.

In her final chapter, Fauser asserts that the attempt to create an American “art music” identity led to “chauvinism,” “provincialism,” “Americanism,” the blurring of lines that separate patriotism from “blinkered jingoism,” and, in the case of Roy Harris, what she denigrates as “hooray patriotism.” Really? While many of her interpretations are nuanced, this is not. I wonder if her take on “cultural politics” isn’t creating controversy where none exists.

One wrong note: the author writes that Henry Cowell was “notorious for his conviction and imprisonment on a morals charge.” Cowell biographer Joel Sachs has pointed out that “conviction” is a mistake too often repeated; Cowell never appeared before a jury, instead pleading guilty without the advice of counsel because he distrusted lawyers. And Fauser should have made clear that the charge was having consensual sex with a young man, a crime applicable to anyone, gay or straight, in California in 1936.

Fauser’s turgid writing can make Sounds of War a tough slog in spots for non-academics. But the book covers a critical period in music history. It should be of interest to serious listeners both on and off campus.

Sounds of War:  Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser. 2013. 384 pages. ISBN: 9780199948031. Oxford University Press.

– Grace Lichtenstein

Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison

The wreckage of lives and artistic endeavors wrought by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet government before and after World War II is on full display in Simon Morrison’s diligent biography of Sergey Prokofiev. Already an important Prokofiev biographer, Morrison had the cooperation of Prokofiev’s grandson for this book and uses newly-found information to describe the double-barreled horrors inflicted first by Prokofiev himself and second by the Soviets on his Madrid-born, American-raised first wife.

Being married to a great composer is rarely a picnic, even for as accomplished a musician as Clara Schumann or as worldly a serial celebrity spouse as Alma Mahler. For Lina, who was an aspiring soprano raised in New York, falling in love at 21 with a nasty piece of work like Prokofiev led to a disappointing early life and eight years in a gulag later on.

Lina was not without her own shortcomings, including an anti-Semitic streak. But she should have listened to her Ukrainian mother, who warned her that musicians could make terrible partners. (Lina’s father was a mediocre Spanish tenor.) Despite her mother’s warnings, when she heard the tall, thick-lipped Prokofiev perform at one of his earliest New York piano recitals, she was “smitten.” Ignoring his multiple romantic involvements, she traipsed after him to France, where he lived with the permission of the Bolshevik government.

Prokofiev may have been a child prodigy on a par with Mozart, as Morrison contends, but as a human being he was a creep: arrogant, overconfident, and singlemindedly focused on his own gifts. According to Morrison “his lack of basic human feeling could be shocking.” What, then, was his appeal for the exotically beautiful Lina? It was his very genius, suggests the author. Wishing to be “more than a fetching accoutrement,” she thought maybe “she could be the one person to break through his cerebral exterior and enchant him.”

It was a tragic miscalculation. He taunted her with his other dalliances and cynically used her extroverted charm as cover for his own indifference to others. When Lina became pregnant, they married.

For a time, after the birth of their second son, they lived a glamorous, peripatetic life. The Soviets campaigned for  Prokofiev and his wife to relocate to Russia permanently. In 1935, they did move to Moscow.  Not only did they naively dismiss signs that their phones were tapped and their movements monitored, but Lina also believed she could be a great advantage to Sergey in meeting the Russian hoi polloi. As Morrison writes, “his talent was writing a score, hers was working a room.”

The move turned out badly. The Prokofievs did not get the lodging they wanted.  Lina’s radio concerts did not go well. Sergey traveled constantly. In 1938,the year he wrote the score for the movie Alexander Nevsky while spending a summer apart from Lina in the North Caucasus, he met Mira Abramovna Mendelson, a student whose parents were well connected. He was 47, she was 23. Soon they were a couple.

After much drama, in 1941 Sergey moved out of the family flat. As the war made life difficult in Moscow, he and Mira were evacuated to the Caucasus. Lina remained in Moscow. She worked for a time as a translator; her contacts with Westerners stirred suspicions that she was a Western spy.

Nothing went right once the war ended. Sergey’s musical output deteriorated. He wound up destitute and the Soviet regime began to denigrate his work. He died in 1953, on the same day as Stalin. Lina suffered much more; she was sent to horrible prisons and labor camps located in the frozen north. Not until 1956, aided by the intervention of Dmitri Shostakovich, was she freed.  In 1974 she won the right to move to the west.  She died in 1989.

Morrison has clearly burrowed through massive research material. But there’s nothing dry or academic about his vivid portrayal of a woman who spent a tragic twentieth century life serving a genius whose heart was as cold and barren as Siberia.

Lina and Serge: The Love and Wars of Lina Prokofiev by Simon Morrison. 2013. 336 pages. ISBN: 978-0547391311. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon by Touré

“Stars entertain us. Icons do something much more. They embody us….Icons can see and feel the Zeitgeist of their Generation more clearly than the rest of us,” writes Touré in this brief meditation on the artist who put Minneapolis on the rock music map.

This is not a standard biography. Basic biographical information is covered, yet the only time the author interviewed Prince was in 1998, so he relies on many secondhand sources for quotes. He did talk to several important Prince collaborators. His focus is on the artist’s amazing work ethic, his songs, and the  characteristics of Generation X, which makes up the lion’s share of Prince fans.  Touré contrasts Gen X with  Boomers, who came before, and Millennials, who came after. Prince, a late Boomer born in 1958, acts, in Touré ‘s thesis, as a cool older brother to Gen-Xers.

It’s easy to be put off by his emphasis on demography; however, Touré, a TV personality and Rolling Stone contributor, makes some interesting points as he seeks to identify the touchstones (events, moments, movies, music) that shaped each generation.

For Boomers, he says, those touchstones were Woodstock, Vietnam and the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. For Millennials, it was 9/11. He posits that for Gen X, the defining factor is a private one – divorce.  “For many young people, divorce is akin to an apocalypse. It is not a death in the family, it is the death of a family. It changes their world forever and causes permanent damage.”  He interprets “When Doves Cry” as an “opaque musical poem about the complexity of difficult relationships.”

Prince is also the king of what the author dubs “porn chic,” a Gen X taste based on a “harder, rougher, loveless vision of sex.”  Touré goes into detail about how the video cassette recorder led to the normalization of porn and to the production of mainstream “pornish” movies, including Purple Rain. Then he dismisses porn chic in Prince’s work as a “loss-leader’ that helps get attention for his real message–Christian salvation.  In this interpretation, Prince really wants to present himself as a religious messiah for the masses. Touré’s evidence includes lyrics about water, bathing and Prince’s habit of giving his lovers baths, which the author sees as baptismal symbolism.

Finally, he takes the song title “I Would Die 4 U” literally.  Prince, now a Jehovah’s Witness, has become super serious about religion as a healing balm to the divorce-battered Gen X millions, Touré argues. I am not sure this book–part biography, part criticism–convinces me.

I Would Die 4 U: Why Prince Became an Icon by Touré. 2013. 176 pages. ISBN: 978-1476705491. Atria Books.

– Grace Lichtenstein