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Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000 . Edited by Felix Meyer , Carol J. Oja , Wolfgang Rathert , and Anne C. Shreffler . Woodbridge and Rochester : Boydell , 2014.
When reading Wanda M. Corn's The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-1935 as an undergraduate art history major, I first became aware of the fact that many pioneering aesthetic innovations by the likes of Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O'Keeffe resulted from twentieth-century artists deliberately constructing, or resisting, transatlantic identities.1Corn investigates "le type transatlantique"--artists who moved back and forth between continents--to support her thesis that many of modern art's defining features emerged in the work of strong enthusiasts for internationalism and, paradoxically, in the work of artists who greeted this attitude lukewarmly and retreated to territories far off the beaten path, like the American Southwest. Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000 awed me with similarly complex revelations with respect to a vast array of musical repertoire. It is an incredibly valuable resource that further reveals the degree to which twentieth-century artistic interaction prospered due to fast-paced (and not necessarily positive) political and technological change. Moreover, the book further scrutinizes compositional techniques and stylistic idioms elicited from different types of twentieth-century displacement, including forced emigration for self-preservation; voluntary expatriation; and the frequent, but often overlooked, scenario of temporary relocation to escape dangerous conditions or for educational and opportunistic purposes.
Crosscurrents: American and European Music in Interaction, 1900-2000 is the conference proceedings of the "Crosscurrents" international conference, which met at Harvard University in the fall of 2008 and reconvened in Munich in the spring of 2009 at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. The conference conveners and volume editors (Meyer is the director of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel; Rathert is a professor of musicology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität; and Oja and Shreffler are professors of music at Harvard University) chose to investigate "trans-Atlantic musical exchange" and, for more practical purposes, organized the conference as a tangible way to alleviate the growing divide between American and European scholars (12). The editors acknowledge the impossibility of "comprehensive or representative coverage" and report that they "selected papers that illuminated salient moments of cross-cultural interaction and offered new research results" (15). One of the...