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Composing Modernism is the first book-length study to tell the fascinating story of a key strain of American composition during the Cold War. The Princeton School set aspirations for postwar music composition and discourse. Milton Babbitt especially sought a scientific conception of the composing researcher. Around 1967, J. K. Randall began challenging the School's tenets of twelve-tone composition, music-theoretical axiomatization, and electronic synthesis. Randall, Elaine Barkin, and Benjamin Boretz embraced Cagean experimentalism and turned to phenomenology, improvisation, and new forms of community making. This book explores these contrasting paradigms of the musical avant-garde, with a focus on the people, subjects, and aesthetic and formal aspects of a major force in Cold War music. By uncovering many of the ideologies of the Princeton School, Scott Gleason highlights the utopian thought that was central across several generations of Princeton composer-theorists.
Scott Gleason is Acquisitions Editor for Grove Music Online at Oxford University Press and an editor for the OPEN SPACE magazine and Perspectives of New Music.
“‘In the Princeton School,’ Scott Gleason writes, ‘we find an intellectual audacity that leads to a certain strangeness.’ Ah, reader, just wait! Gleason not only provides the authoritative account of one of the wildest, weirdest episodes in twentieth-century music but also reveals a lost country in which, for a few decades, institution and freedom produced the rarest crucible of hope and play. This is history at its most meaningful: a vision for the future of what now seems impossible.”—Seth Brodsky, author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious
“Gleason’s rigorous yet imaginative (and loving) historiography supports his audacious claim that the Princeton School ushered in both Cold War high modernism in the United States and the hybrid figure of the composer-theorist. He recuperates the compositional ambitions of the diverse personae involved, situating specific compositional practices within social, political, technological, philosophical, and aesthetic thematics while underscoring the role theory was meant to play in what we can now call their artistic-research endeavors: always as a means to grow and nurture creative practice, always, in the end, as liberatory.”—Chris Stover, author of Reimagining Music Theory: Contexts, Communities, Creativities
“In lucid prose, Gleason demonstrates how the Princeton School created the archetype of the composer-theorist and thereby a distinctive manifestation of musical modernism and musical academia. The picture that emerges depicts a group that was more diverse and complex than both its proponents and its detractors typically acknowledge. Composing Modernism combines superb scholarship, outstanding critical insight, and acute judgment, all in exemplary fashion.”—Björn Heile, Professor of Music, University of Glasgow
“An extraordinarily penetrating and richly contextualized account of the Princeton School, a group of composer-theorists associated with Princeton University and gathered around the central figure of Milton Babbitt. By delving so deeply into a single slice of American modernist music since World War II, Gleason sheds surprising light on the larger modernist scene. This is a significant work of intellectual history.”—Joseph N. Straus, author of Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability