America in the nineteen-twenties meant prosperity, technological and industrial evolution, and cultural change; no other American city observed the culture shift more reluctantly than Boston. Locked in its conservative ways, the twenties came as a shock to Boston, particularly in the music world, where popular music, particularly jazz, seemingly looked to undermine the proud high art institutions like the symphony and the opera. Devotees of serious music snubbed their nose at this burgeoning banality, but when it found its way onto the stage of Symphony Hall, by way of modern orchestral compositions, there was no avoiding it-jazz was a significant and undeniable force in American music
This thesis seeks to explore the ways in which Boston's conservative "highbrow" community was able to reconcile the sounds of the seemingly "lowbrow" jazz within a symphonic setting and adopt America's new cultural values. In addition to taking into account the local and national discourse surrounding jazz, I argue that France contributed greatly to this social and musical change. This was accomplished though multiple avenues, from the providing Boston with a cultural model, to educating American composers and encouraging their experimentations with jazz, to the Boston Symphony's acquisition of the modernist conductor, Serge Koussevitsky, who previously had electrified and shocked Parisian concertgoers. As case studies, this paper will consider four works by the American composers Edward Burlingame Hill, Aaron Copland and John Alden Carpenter, focusing on the composers' differing interpretations of jazz as well as the distinctive responses their jazz-inspired works received from the critics and symphony patrons. These works challenged the conservativism of Boston's high society, yet they facilitated the necessary social change that other American cities had already undergone and helped maintain Boston's prominent status in American musical culture
