Modernism in Canada and The United States
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
In Canada and the United States modernism emerges from transnational engagements with global intellectual movements while also grappling with local intellectual, cultural, and political developments…
Jazz trumpeter, bandleader, and composer Miles Davis is one of the most significant artists in the history of jazz. He stood at the forefront of…
Born in Düsseldorf and eventually settling in Montreal, Canada, Otto Joachim was a composer, violist, painter, and instrument builder. Joachim fled Nazi Germany in 1934…
In a modernizing society undergoing rapidly increasing mechanization, industrialization, urbanization, commercialism, and consumerism, the dance marathons of the 1920s and 1930s reflected social developments of…
Bruce Mather is a Canadian composer. He first studied music at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto (1952–57) and at the University of Toronto…
In 1952, Pierre Mercure became the first director of the CBC musical television broadcasts. His long-standing concern with the interaction between the different arts gave…
New Musical Resources is a book written by Henry Cowell in 1919, unpublished until 1930. In it, Cowell proposes a theory of musical relativity in…
Donald Patriquin is a composer known chiefly for contributing to choral repertoire in Canada. Born in Sherbrooke, Quebec, he studied composition as a teenager with…
George Perle (1915–2009) was an American composer and scholar, awarded a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Pulitzer Prize (1986) for his Wind Quintet no. 4, and…
American composer James Tenney produced a wide range of innovative works, including computer music, Fluxus-inspired text scores, and chance-based instrumental pieces founded on the overtone…
Claude Vivier is perhaps the best known of all Quebec composers, both in Canada and abroad. In 1967, after being removed from the religious establishment…
John Zorn is an American avant-garde saxophonist and composer. Zorn performs on alto saxophone and is one of the leading figures in New York City’s…
Edwin Denby is best remembered as one of the preeminent critics of dance modernism, yet he was also an accomplished poet and an experienced dancer,…
Although he was known as a historian during his lifetime, the work of Henry Adams—like that of Henry James—is often seen as an American precursor…
Barney Allen was the pseudonym of Solomon Allen, a Jewish-Canadian novelist from Toronto, Ontario. His writing combined influences from James Joyce and Sigmund Freud. His…
Jane Dudley, a key figure in the radical dance movement of the 1930s, was a choreographer who developed her own distinctive voice within the modern…
Born in Vancouver, Washington, Mary Barnard was a writer best known for Sappho: A New Translation (1958) and her correspondence with Ezra Pound, which she…
Julien Benda was a French writer, literary critic, and political thinker. An atypical figure in French literary history, Benda opposed most of the intellectual trends…
In 1978, Asian American poets Garrett Hongo, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Alan Chong Lau published The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, a collaborative anthology of…
The Federal Dance Project (FDP) was formed in January 1936, as part of President Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA). Although it was originally a component…
American author John Fante (8 April 1909–8 May 1983) is best known for his Arturo Bandini novels, including The Road to Los Angeles (written 1933,…
Loie Fuller was a founding figure of modern dance. After an early career in American vaudeville, she moved to Paris where she created a new…
Alan Chong Lau is an American poet and visual artist. Lau began his poetic career in the wake of the 1970s Asian-American movement, a surge…
Dorothy Livesay was a Canadian poet, journalist, activist, social worker, instructor, field worker, and author of short fiction, literary criticism, radio plays, and autobiography. Her…
Lester Horton, regarded as one of the founders of American modern dance, worked outside the established center of New York City, establishing a permanent dance…