"Midsummer Night Symphonies", Southern California Federal Music Project, WPA, ca. 1937

The Federal Music Project (FMP), part of the United States federal government New Deal program Federal One, employed musicians, conductors and composers during the Great Depression. People in the music world had been particularly hard-hit by the era's economic downturn. In addition to performing thousands of concerts, offering music classes, organizing the Composers Forum Laboratory, hosting music festivals and creating 34 new orchestras, employees of the FMP researched American traditional music and folk songs, a practice now called ethnomusicology. In the latter domain the Federal Music Project did notable studies on cowboy, Creole and "Negro" music. The FMP's director—for the majority of its brief life—was Nikolai Sokoloff. Image File history File links Mns_fmp. ... Image File history File links Mns_fmp. ... A federal government is the common government of a federation. ... Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: New Deal The New Deal is the name given to the series of programs implemented between 1933-37 under President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the goal of relief, recovery and reform of the United States economy during the Great Depression. ... Categories: Historical stubs | New Deal ... Dorothea Langes Migrant Mother depicts destitute pea pickers in California, centering on Florence Owens Thompson, a mother of seven children, age 32, in Nipomo, California, March 1936. ... Ethnomusicology (from the Greek ethnos = nation and mousike = music), formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. ... A cowboy (Spanish vaquero) tends cattle and horses on cattle ranches in North and South America. ... The music of Louisiana, like other cultural aspects of the state, can be divided in to three general regions. ... Negro means black in the Spanish, Portuguese and ancient Italian languages, being derived from the Latin word niger of the same meaning. ... Nikolai Sokoloff (1886–1965), was a Russian-American conductor and violinist. ...

Further reading

• Bindas, Kenneth J., All of This Music Belongs to the Nation: The WPA's Federal Music Project and American Society, Knoxville, Tennessee: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995. ISBN 1572332522
• Sokoloff, Nikolai, The Federal Music Project, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936.