Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint

MUSIC IN AMERICA Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint. By R. James Tobin. (Modern Traditionalist Classical Music.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. [xv, 283 p. ISBN 9780810884397 (hardcover), $55; ISBN 9780810884403 (e-book), $54.99.] Bibliography, selected discography, index.

In 2007, Carol J. Oja took note of a group of composers, active in the 1940s and 1950s, who "constituted a central artery of American composition, holding positions of leadership while winning Guggenheims and other prestigious fellowships"-part of what Oja called a "second wave" of neoclassicists that featured major voices in American music such as Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, and Arthur Berger ("Time Travel with Nadia Boulanger," Harvard Library Bulletin 18, nos. 1-2 [2007]: 52-53). Overshadowed by the powerhouses of mid-twentieth-century American composition-Milton Babbitt, John Cage, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein-and by narratives of music history that focus on serialism after World War II, these mid-century neoclassicists and their works are practically forgotten today.

In Neoclassical Music in America: Voices of Clarity and Restraint, the classical music writer R. James Tobin takes an important and determined step toward reviving interest in these figures, informed largely by Tobin's personal perspective as a fan of neoclassicism. Part of the series Modern Traditionalist Classical Music-a title that captures the difficulty of defining strains in twentieth-century music that do not fit the mold of high modernism-this book carries with it two interconnected goals: to bring the mid-century neoclassicists from the periphery to the center in music history, and to explore the specific musical character, origins, and legacies of the neoclassicists' musical aesthetic.

Tobin tackles the first of these goals with gusto, providing a survey of the works, lives, careers, and reception of twelve selected composers, some more familiar than others: Edward Burlingame Hill, Walter Piston, Harold Shapero, Irving...