John Alden Carpenter: A CHICAGO COMPOSER (Music in American Life)

With this biography, Howard Pollack restores to the public eye a prolific and gifted artist whom Walter Damrosch called "the most American of our composers."
Well respected and widely performed during his lifetime, John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) was one of the first American composers to be influenced by Debussy and Stravinsky and one of the first composers anywhere to incorporate elements of popular song and jazz into concert music. His original yet refined orchestral music was championed by Bruno Walter, Fritz Reiner, Otto Klemperer, Serge Koussevitzky, and other celebrated conductors, and his sensitive songs were performed by such legendary singers as Alma Gluck and Kirsten Flagstad.
Pollack skillfully balances Carpenter's personal and musical lives, covering his interactions with musicians of every stripe, his high profile in the Chicago Renaissance cultural scene, and his two marriages (first to the designer and art collector Rue Winterbotham and then, following a protracted affair, to the Chicago socialite Ellen Borden).