{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026301663982823402, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005367686527106817, 'mean_word_length': 5.31864406779661, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Composer Revealed Anew

American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905–64) lived and worked during tumultuous times. Two world wars, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the conflict between capitalism and communism, the struggle for the rights of workers and minorities, the McCarthy years: these forces and more shaped his political and social world. Modernism, expressionism, neo-classicism, debates over the role of the arts in society, the development of distinctively American voices in the arts: these and other forces shaped his artistic world—a world to which he made substantial contributions across the boundaries of medium and genre. The rich interaction of the person, the environment, and the work makes for an exciting and important story, and an especially valuable one now, because of the obscurity into which Blitzstein’s work fell following his untimely and tragic death shortly before his fifty-ninth birthday. Howard Pollack tells this story with extraordinary skill and care in his comprehensive study Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World, published by Oxford University Press in 2012. Pollack comes to this study as a distinguished scholar of American music, having published books on George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and John Alden Carpenter, and his deep knowledge of the “founding generation” of twentiethcentury American composers is a palpable presence in his most recent book. Pollack’s research is wide-ranging and meticulous. In addition to detailed study of Blitzstein’s papers and musical manuscripts, he has delved into important dance, theater and cinematic documents, essential in illuminating the work of an interdisciplinary composer. He takes into account current and past scholarship inside and outside of music, citing the work of Eric A. Gordon and Leonard J. Lehrman as particularly important to his