Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1965. / Typescript. Vita. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [394]-424).

American composer, author and conductor Leonard J. Lehrman (b. 1949) has spent a majority of his lifetime devoted to the scholarship on the music of Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964). Lehrman completed Blitzstein’s Idiots First in 1973, and finished his own one-act opera Karla in 1974. In an effort to honor Blitzstein, Lehrman included Karla along with Idiots First to begin the set of one-act operas to be titled Tales of Malamud. Lehrman coined the term “selective serialism” in reference to Blitzstein’s use of serial techniques representing something associated with death or something diabolical. Lehrman applies a similar technique in that he uses serialism to reference the presence of a handwritten notes that are tied to the dramatic context of the opera. This study examines Lehrman's use of serialism in Karla as it was directly influenced by Blitzstein’s use of serialism in Idiots First.

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The period from the end of World War I through the 1950s has been called “the Golden Age of Drama on Broadway.” Subsumed within this period is another sort of golden age, of music in the American spoken theater, Broadway and beyond, c. 1935-60. Unlike more familiar, and better-studied, genres of dramatic music such as opera, ballet, and the Broadway-style musical, music composed for spoken dramas is neither a definitive part of the dramatic form nor integral to the work’s original conception. Rather, it is added in production, like sets, costumes, and lighting. This study traces the roots of this rich period of spoken-dramatic music to the collaboration of producer John Houseman, director Orson Welles, and composer Virgil Thomson on the Federal Theatre Project, beginning in 1936. The musical ramifications of that collaboration eventually extended to include composers Paul Bowles and Marc Blitzstein, influential theater companies such as the Theatre Guild and Group Theatre, innovative directors such as Elia Kazan and Margo Jones, and major playwrights such as Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams. Following a consideration of the forces that gave rise to this musically rich nexus and the people, materials, and practices involved, three high-profile theatrical collaborations are examined, along with three scores that resulted from them: Thomson’s score for Houseman’s 1957 “Wild West” Much Ado About Nothing; Blitzstein’s score for Welles and the Mercury Theatre’s 1937-38 “anti-Fascist” Julius Caesar; and Bowles’s score for the original production of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944-45). Each score is located within the musico-dramatic history that produced it, and analyzed within the context of the production for which it was written. This work aims to begin to recover a vast body of forgotten American dramatic music, to limn the role of the spoken theater in the careers of these three noteworthy American musical artists, to probe a busy intersection of high and commercial art forms, and to suggest music’s important role in the development of the American spoken theater.

The Composers' Collective, founded by leftist composers in 1932 New York City, sought to create proletarian music that avoided the "bourgeois" traditions of the past and functioned as a vehicle to engage Americans in political dialogue. The Collective aimed to understand how the modern composer became isolated from his public, and discussions on the relationship between music and society pervade the radical writings of Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger, and Elie Siegmeister, three of the organization's most vocal members. This new proletarian music juxtaposed revolutionary text with avant-garde musical idioms that were incorporated in increasingly greater quantities; thus, composers progressively acclimated the listener to the dissonance of modern music, a distinctive sound that the Collective hoped would become associated with revolutionary ideals. The mass songs of the two Workers' Song Books published by the Collective, illustrate the transitional phase of the musical implementation of their ideology. In contrast, a case study of the song "Chinaman! Laundryman!" by Ruth Crawford Seeger, a fringe member of the Collective, suggests that this song belongs within the final stage of proletarian music, where the text and highly modernist music seamlessly interact to create what Charles Seeger called an "art-product of the highest type."