Musicologist Annegret Fauser of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has won two major awards for her book, “Sounds of War: Music in the United States during World War II” (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Fauser is the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Music and an adjunct professor of women’s and gender studies in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on music of the 19th and 20th centuries, in particular that of France and the United States.
“Sounds of War” is the first in-depth study of American concert music during World War II. While Dinah Shore, Duke Ellington and the Andrew Sisters entertained civilians at home and soldiers abroad with swing and boogie-woogie, Fauser shows that it was classical music that truly distinguished musical life in the wartime United States.
Fauser received a Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation, given for outstanding print, broadcast and new media coverage of music.
She was also presented the 2014 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society. The award recognizes the best writing on music in American culture. Work by a broad range of authors, including musicians, journalists, music critics and academic scholars are considered for this honor.
The Milwaukee Express said Fauser’s book “looks beyond the commonplace memories of swing and Sinatra, touching on the mainstream embrace of classical music by way of addressing her main theme: the employment of ‘serious’ composers and musicians in the war effort.”
