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Voices in the Wilderness
6 American Neoromantic Composers
by Walter Simmons
Scarecrow Press, 419 pages, $70
Walter Simmons's argument in this book, the first of a projected series from Scarecrow Press on 20th Century traditionalists, is that the modernist and avant-garde trends, though they get most of the attention from the academic musicologists who write music history, are only one stream--and not necessarily the most significant one--in modern American music. Composers who stayed closer to classic tonality and form not only wrote much that pleased (and still pleases) large concert audiences; they produced an imposing and valuable body of work "comparable in expressive power, individuality, and craftsmanship to the revered masters of the past".