In summer 1937, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) commissioned from playwright Paul Green and composer Kurt Weill a work to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Green had provided the text for Weill's first American musical play, Johnny Johnson (1936), which the FTP took up with some enthusiasm, and he had scored some success with his outdoor historical drama The Lost Colony (1937). He was also interested in music on the stage following his encounters with Russian director Alexei Granowski in Berlin in 1928–29. Weill, in turn, was involved in various spectacle-driven projects in 1937, not least with fellow émigré Max Reinhardt. Green's first scenario for the new drama focused on the constitutional implications of recent labor disputes in the U.S. South. However, the controversy of summer 1937 surrounding the overt agit-prop of Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock—sponsored but then dropped by the FTP—put an end to such political aspirations. Green rewrote his outline in favor of a more conventional treatment of the American Revolutionary War, to be called The Common Glory. Although he produced a rough script, and Weill started composing the score, the project collapsed, in part because of their incompatible visions for the play and its music. Nevertheless, newly uncovered sources reveal them attempting to grapple with the potentials of nationalistic subject matter in the theater, and with the search for U.S. cultural identities in changing times.

Scholars have largely ignored Aaron Copland's lengthy career as a cultural diplomat, although the documentation surrounding it sheds new light on his political views. Through a consideration of his work with the U.S. government during World War II and the Cold War this article argues that a brand of universalist internationalism, rooted in his earlier musical experiences in Europe and in his leftist politics, motivated many of Copland's political activities at home and overseas during this period. Copland remained committed to this perspective both before and after his McCarthy hearing in 1953, but the Cold War inevitably brought new challenges to a man with such an outlook. Copland's work with the U.S. Information Agency during this period shows that although his beliefs and attitudes remained unchanged, he felt the need to participate in a reconstruction of his image that better matched the new climate. His music written during the Cold War, furthermore, provides an artistic realization of this interaction between pragmatism and idealism.

Many women in the United States encountered resistance to their involvement in orchestral conducting and public instrumental performance—both solo and ensemble—in the early twentieth century. Mary Davenport Engberg (1880–1951), however, became involved in the developing musical culture of the Pacific Northwest without encountering opposition based on her gender. In 1911 Engberg founded the mixed-gender Bellingham Symphony Orchestra, which she conducted until she became the conductor of the Seattle Civic Symphony Orchestra in 1921, and she also performed extensively as a violinist in Seattle and along the West Coast. She was the director of an influential music school in Seattle and cofounded the Seattle Civic Opera Association in 1932. Engberg's life and accomplishments reveal the effect of regional differences in the experiences and reception of women in American music. An understanding of her contributions leads to a better appreciation of the varied roles played by women in instrumental music throughout our country's history.

During the 1920s, in a bid to elevate musical taste in Houston, Texas, arts patron Ima Hogg anonymously underwrote a series of public lectures on music at the Rice Institute, now Rice University. A trained musician who had spent considerable time in New York and Europe, Hogg recommended potential lecturers for the series, and her collaborator, the music-loving president of the Institute, Edgar Odell Lovett, worked to engage them. Not all of Hogg's candidates were available, and Lovett used his own contacts to supplement them. The resulting slate of lecturers was a diverse mix of musicians and scholars: Maurice Ravel, Arthur Honegger, Nadia Boulanger, John Powell, Harold Morris, George Birkhoff, and Henry Hadow. Their lectures survive in printed form in a scholarly journal published by Rice; they provide some of the most important statements about music by their authors. Hogg's patronage was made possible by an increase in her family's wealth, but her goal of public enlightenment was inspired by her family's tradition of public service (her father had been the governor of Texas) and by her longtime involvement in women's music clubs. Her model for the lectures may have been the didactic music club meeting; Lovett's was the university extension lecture directed toward a community audience. This article details and contextualizes Hogg's patronage in light of contemporary views of women's involvement in the support of music.