Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music

New Haven, CT, U.S.A: Yale University Press, 2004. First Edition. Hard Cover. As New/As New. From colonial times to the present, many American composers have lived on the fringes of society and defined themselves as outsiders; this book considers the tradition of maverick composers and explores what they reveal about American attitudes toward the arts and about American society; it begins by examining the careers of three unconventional composers, William Billings, Anthony Philip Heinrich, and Charles Ives, and then goes on to investigate the proliferation of eccentric individualism in all types of American music, classical, popular, and jazz, and how it has come to dominate the image of diverse creative artists from John Cage to Frank Zappa (black cloth with gold lettering; black dust jacket with small photos of various maverick composers)