"Persuasively argued and engagingly written, Matthew Mugmon's Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler sheds considerable light not only on Copland's artistic indebtedness to Mahler, but also on his important role as and advocate for Mahler's music in the United States." –Howard Pollack, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Music, University of Houston, and author of Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man.
In a new book from University of Rochester Press, Matthew Mugmon takes a look into Copland’s relationship with Gustav Mahler’s music and the effect it had on American music. Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler presents the first detailed exploration of this relationship and how it affected not only Copland’s own music, but his relationships and influence on American music in the 20th century as a whole. Drawing extensively on archival and musical materials, Mugmon compellingly illustrates how Copland's engagement with Mahler's music not only influenced his own music, but also intersected with his Jewish identity and with his links to such towering figures in American music as Nadia Boulanger, Serge Koussevitzky, and Leonard Bernstein.
Matthew Mugman is currently an assistant professor in music at the University of Arizona. He received his Ph.D. in historical musicology from Harvard University in 2013 and taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst before joining the faculty at Arizona in 2014. During the 2015-16 season, he also served as the New York Philharmonic Orchestra's Leonard Bernstein Scholar-in-Residence. Mugmon's research brings together two strands of recent interest in music history: the study of the transmission, reception, and circulation of music in interpersonal networks, and the development of American musical modernism as a transnational phenomenon.
For more information about Aaron Copland and the American Legacy of Gustav Mahler and Matthew Mugman, visit the links below.
