ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1936, the American Music League, affiliated with the American Communist Party, held a music festival in New York City.1 The party’s newspaper, the Daily World, noted that 1500 people attended two sessions where the Fur Workers Chorus, Freiheit Gezang Ferein, the New Singers, the Daily World Chorus, and African American baritone William Bowers performed. Classical composers Aaron Copland and Norman Cazden, among others, contributed original compositions. According to the Daily World, “The festival was an encouraging triumph for the League, which proposes to inaugurate extensive and far-reaching activities for the future-to defend musical culture against the dangers of fascism, censorship and war, and to develop a healthy musical life in America.”2 This event was a single moment during an extraordinary eruption of insurgent cultural creativity across virtually every art medium that gave aesthetic form to one of the most radical movements in American history and had permanent effects on the mainstream parts of those arts (Denning 1996). But the left-wing musical movement, while fostering fundamental dialogue about the role of music in society, failed in its initial strategy of making “good” music for the masses to promoting what they saw as the people’s own music, folk music.
