April 4, 2003 - You know how some ideas just seem to be ripe for the picking? How different people discover something at just about the same time? Well, that's what happened in American music at the turn of the 20th century.... So begins "American Mavericks" a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
April 11, 2003 - In program 2 of "American Mavericks" we trace American traditions of music writings and the break with European music styles as early as the Revolutionary War. William Billings was a Boston tanner that wrote music in direct opposition from European traditions. "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
April 18, 2003 - As the 1920s celebrated the birth of the machine age, American composers were surprised to find that Europe was looking to them as the key to the future of music. There was so much money floating around that commissions were numerous, and composers tried to out do each other in modernist innovations. The age was summed up by George Antheil's "Ballet Mecanique," written "like a solid shaft of steel," with its worship of the machine, its decadent excess of airplane propellers, and 16 player pianos.
April 25, 2003 - The audience at Aeolian Hall on February 12, 1924 included composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ernest Bloch, conductors Walter Damrosch and Leopold Stokowski, violinists Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler … well, you get the picture. The cream of the New York musical society. They'd all assembled to join Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra in what Whiteman called "an experiment" … an attempt to prove whether one band could excel in both jazz and classical music.
May 2, 2003 - In the 1940s, John Cage began experimenting with percussive music, invented "The Prepared Piano" and influenced a surprisingly varied new style of music. "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
May 9, 2003 - Composer Colin McPhee wasn't the first Westerner to have his life changed by Asian music. Claude Debussy, too, had heard a Javanese gamelan at the 1889 Paris World Exhibition and had tried to imitate its harmonies. But McPhee went further much further - all the way to Bali. "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
May 16, 2003 - In 1951, the photographer Hans Namuth made a film of the painter, Jackson Pollock, at work. Using his famous "drip technique," Pollock made a painting on glass, so that Namuth could film from the point of view of the canvas. Pollock in the film is unselfconscious, spontaneous, consummately in control - you can sense that he's riding the crest of his fame as the bad boy of modern art. "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
May 23, 2003 - In the good old 1960s, the Bohemian life was cheap in lower Manhattan and artists could afford to live there by doing things like driving cabs. Composer Steve Reich, for example.
May 30, 2003 - Born in 1912, Conlon Nancarrow was the wayward son of the mayor of Texarkana, Arkansas. Like so many left-leaning Americans in the 1930s, he joined the Communist Party which seemed like the best way to help the working class. Nancarrow was so committed to the movement, in fact, that in 1937 he ran off and fought against Franco with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003.
June 6, 2003 - "American Mavericks" is a thirteen episode series on American composers who broke with European tradition to innovate a pure sound. The series won a Peabody Award in 2003. In this episode, the evolution of the orchestra is explored.