Review of Carol Oja. 2000. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press

Abstract

Carol Oja's Making Music Modern is a rare achievement, at once an essential musicological study and a major contribution to our general fund of knowledge on America in the twentieth century. Over fifteen years in the making, and encompassing a vast amount of knowledge, it is a prodigious labor of organization and distillation of materials. Many crucial figures, works, and artistic milieus of the early twentieth century are discussed in its pages, and much of the information presented is new, long-forgotten, or only vaguely familiar.