This handsome book focuses on the work of African-American artists during the Depression and the war years, when government-sponsored programs led to a resurgence in artistic production throughout the United States.
As America's geography and societal demands expanded, the topics in The Etude magazine (first published in 1883) took on such important issues as women in music; immigration; transportation; Native American and African American composers and their music; World War I and II; public schools; new technologies (sound recordings, radio, and television); and modern music (jazz, gospel, blues, early 20th century composers) in addition to regular book reviews, teaching advice, interviews, biographies, and advertisements. Though a valued source particularly for private music teachers, with the de-emphasis on the professional elite and the decline in salon music, the magazine ceased publication in 1957. This Index to the articles in The Etude serves as a companion to E. Douglas Bomberger¿s 2004 publication on the music in The Etude. Published a little over fifty years after the final issue reached the public, this Index chronicles vocal and instrumental technique, composer biographies, position openings, department store orchestras, the design of a successful music studio, how to play an accordion, recital programs in music schools, and much more. The Index is a valuable tool for research, particularly in the music culture of American in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With titles of these articles available, the doors are now open for further research in the years to come. The Index is published in two parts and sold as a set for $250.00.
By 1929, the brief, brilliant career of Bix Beiderbecke -- self-taught cornetist, pianist, and composer -- had already become legend. As his genius blazed forth with a strange, doomed incandescence, Bix's career tragically reflected the chaotic impulses of a country suddenly awash in wealth, power, and a profound cynicism. Shy and inarticulate, Bix was beloved by both the raccoon-coated campus crowd and the men who nightly played alongside him. He is still celebrated in a yearly festival in his hometown of Davenport, Iowa. And that is where this novel begins, Davenport at the Bix Fest. Then it travels back in time to focus on the highlights of a meteoric career: at a Capone-controlled nightclub in 1926; the grueling cross-country tours with Paul Whiteman's "Symphonic Jazz" orchestra; the disastrous Whiteman trip to California to make the first all-color musical talkie; the stock market crash of 1929, which finds Bix in an asylum, victim of the era's signature product, bootleg gin; and finally, Bix's dying efforts to combine his piano compositions into a suite that would be the pinnacle of his life's work. Colored by some of the age's most popular characters -- Maurice Ravel, Bing Crosby, Al Capone, Duke Ellington and Clara Bow -- 1929 brilliantly illuminates a period in history, personified in the gifted, compelling and melancholy figure of Bix Beiderbecke. Book jacket.