This book recreates an exciting and productive period in which creative artists felt they were witnessing the birth of a new age.

With an innovative historical framework, Carol J. Oja explores the emergence during World War II of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, his own compositions became an imaginative hybrid of Balinese and Western music, anticipating the later work of such figures as John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Steve Reich.