2. Nationalism
It was a happy coincidence that the cultivation of a music with American character should be a major concern of American composers in the decadeof the WPA for since about the mid-twenties they had been advocating that it was time for American music to “come of age”—a catch-phrase that I recall encountering rather frequently when I came onto the scene around 1930. One of the first achievements necessary to reach that goal, some ofus were pretty well convinced, was to establish an identity so that the music would be recognizable as American in the way that French music wasrecognizable as French and German music as German. A music based onthe national scene was also precisely what a country that supported it would expect. But there was mighty little of it before about 1920. Charles Ives had been writing distinctly American music since before the turn of the century but he had done so in oblivion. There had also been isolated instances like Copland's jazz concerto or Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune of 1928, which was not performed until 1945 with the composer conducting the New York Philharmonic.[1]
The quest for a national character is not to be confused with breastbeating patriotism, “my country right or wrong,” which is somethingmany of us involved in the tendency would vehemently disavow. So it is unfortunate that the rubric “Americanism” fits it so well and is the one commonly used since that locution carries an aura of discrimination against the foreign-born among us, and it has been exploited, as Edmund Wilson once pointed out, “to serve some very bad causes, and is now a wordto avoid.” I have never felt comfortable with the slogan “Americanism,” with its undercurrent of flagwaving, and so Wilson's admonition will beacceded to here and we shall find a very good alternative in “national character” or “nationalism.”[2]
One composer for whom this apologia seems quite unnecessary was Roy Harris, who was politically reactionary and boasted of it. In terms ofwhat his reputation is today it is hard to believe that Harris around the timeof his Third Symphony (1939) was one of the two best-known American composers, the other, of course, having been Copland. Harris made a bigpoint of claiming Beethoven as a model at the same time that he insisted onthe American style and content of his music. He offered as collateral hisbirthright to American sources for his inspiration, having been born on Lincoln's birthday and in Lincoln County on the Oklahoma Panhandle.[3] Heonce told me how important it was for him to feel at one with the American soil, and he confided in me that as a youth he would go out naked in uninhabited areas in the wildest storms to relish that feeling and to consolidate his identification with the western earth.(After age five he lived in California.)
The employment of folksong is, of course, no guarantee that a national character will be embodied in the music. Dvorák, Ravel, and many othershave felt free to borrow from the folksong literature of countries other thantheir own, frankly in the spirit of a tourist, so to speak, without forfeitingtheir own national identity. What is required if a truly national character isto be achieved is that the entire texture be impregnated with what we recognize as indigenous to the compiled material. This was not the case amongcomposers around 1900—composers who took as an example Dvorák's “New World” Symphony and compiled American folk tunes in a European symphonic setting. Joseph Horowitz, a specialist in American music of thatera, has recently taken issue with this view of the failure of those composers to mold a valid American idiom and has deplored our neglect ofthem, blaming Bernstein and Thomson as well as historians of Americanmusic for a delinquency in this affair.[4] It's true that Americans have shortmemories and that there were a few, very few, composers active around 1900 and in the earliest decades of the twentieth century who deserve moreattention now—though what native composers get the attention they deserve? I remember, however, during my Harvard days (the thirties) the composer Arthur Foote, for one, was quite a presence on the Boston scene;he and his contemporaries were performed, including George Whitefield Chadwick who died in 1931. So we had opportunity to judge their musicand many of us were impressed neither by its national character nor by the aesthetic quality of much of it.
Most of the time Harris did not literally quote folk sources (thoughthere are examples such as the variety of kitsch of 1941 for band, When Johnny Comes Marching Home). What he did, rather, was skillfully fashion
Ex. 2. Roy Harris, Third Symphony (opening)
Of all the numerous claims that have been made as to what constitutes the essential nature of American music surely the most penetrating is the one
Ex. 3. Aaron Copland, Variations for piano (opening)
If a certain manner of exploitation of rhythmic devices is to be taken as adistinguishing feature of American music, it is inevitable for us to assume that it must have a great deal to do with jazz, pop, and rock. Today thosegenres are just as much a part of the ambience in which a British youngster grows up as they are a part of that in which an American youngsterdoes. But it was not always so. There was a time when just the American environment was saturated with jazz or ragtime rhythm wherever youwent, and it left its imprint, as it does now, on every boy and girl whetherthey were fans or groupies or not. And if they grew up as composers thisexperience was bound to manifest itself, taking a form in their music quitedifferent from what Europeans like Milhaud and Stravinsky did with the genres in the twenties. For those composers used jazz as they might useany other folk music, preserving their own national identity while borrowing from another.
For the American composer the paradox is that the rhythmic complexities of jazz are likely to assume a guise in which their origin is no longer discernible, and the impression we have when we hear it is not one of jazzat all. The tricky rhythms of jazz, when rhythm is a matter of deep concernto one, can go through so many metamorphoses as to not inconceivablyend up with Elliott Carter's metrical modulation. Carter wrote a very insightful article on this subject, first published in the Score and I. M. A. Magazine back in 1955. It resurfaced in the recent collection of his writingsand like all of his pronouncements it is well worth attention.[6] Of special interest in terms of the present discussion is what he had to say about Roger Sessions and by implication himself. During the years when striving deliberately for an American style was all the rage, Carter and Sessions wereopenly hostile to the idea. They believed American composers are American because of who they are. Both of them were respected for a certain degree of weightiness and seriousness in music without any of the fashionable local color. It is a revelation to have attention drawn to the rhythmic intricacies that establish the American parentage of these two predominantly abstract masters. I think Walter Piston might be added to their number to make it a triumvirate, though Carter would probably find himwanting the complexity of Sessions's music and his own. This would not, Iam sure, affect his admiration for Piston.
It is ironic that it should have been a Brooklynite with none of the credentials of someone born on the western plains or in New England, a composer
A curious and amusing sidelight to this development is that the nearest the composer of Billy the Kid and Rodeo ever came to a cow was whenthe car he was driving ran into a heifer (or rather, the heifer ran into the car, probably attracted by the bright lights) outside of Tanglewood ona dark night. It happened I was in the car behind his. We were going to Copland's studio after a concert at the Berkshire Music Center for refreshments and our usual post mortem on the event we had just attended. Copland was talking animatedly and when he talked he drove slowly, so onecould scarcely say he was being reckless. Like good citizens we called the cops, and they interrogated him (and the rest of us) as if he had committedsome heinous crime. The local Berkshire inhabitants at that time (the mid-forties) were still resentful of Tanglewood for having intruded on their peaceful existence, so the Pittsfield papers made a big affair out of the delinquency of the head of the Berkshire Music Center. (The charge was “endangering lives and property….”)
Normally I tend to be skeptical of images of this variety that music canevoke by virtue of the unspecific nature of its emotional content. But Icould not help thinking of these two British music critics when I encountered the same theme in an old essay of Alfred Kazin's with the title “The Stillness of Light in August,” in which he refers to a “curious effect of immobility in Faulkner's characters as they run (as if they were held up in the air by wires).”[12] I was convinced that here there must be some shared American experience. Faulkner's characters are from the south and Copland's cowboy tunes are from the west. But though one may legitimatelyask whether in a country as vast and diversified as ours there is a pervasive American character, some traits could be nationwide.
What Copland proposed was not widely adopted by the most seriouscomposers as their American manner, its fate being rather its wide spread exploitation by so many hack, commercial composers of the day. But whathe accomplished did help establish a recognizable American profile somewhere
In any discourse on the American character in music the name of Charles Ives will figure prominently. Ives was very much involved in the Americanscene in a way that urban composers would not be. Yet like Carter and Sessions he did not believe in deliberately cultivating an American style sinceif one were an American it would take care of itself, provided, as he put itsomewhere, “the Yankee can reflect the fervency with which his gospelswere sung.” His own credentials as a purveyor of American tradition wereas strong as they come. He was much attached to his native New England, and of no little consequence was the fact that his father had been a member of a Civil War band. According to the psychoanalyst Stuart Feder, Iveswas uncommonly identified with his father.[13]
It is no surprise that Ives's music is larded with folksong includinghymns, patriotic anthems, marches, and the like. The second movement of the Fourth Symphony is teeming with examples, a veritable blockbuster, with “Columbia the Gem of the Ocean” holding forth among many tunesmost of us do not know. And yet as I have become more familiar with the music I have been troubled by the sense that the infrastructure is essentially a traditional European one which has been fractured—in the orchestral works, symphonic European. What makes the music sound so modernistic and dissonant is the way elements not too original are pulled out ofshape, and if one takes a closeup of the music, as I like to do, the extraordinary atmosphere, the drama, the inspiration dissolve, and one becomesaware of a certain sheer disorder.
The earliest musicians to recognize Ives (according to Henry Cowell, hischief advocate, I may include myself among them)[14] were ecstatic and looked beyond his deficiencies. We excused him for his less than exemplary technique, his habit of not bothering to edit, polish, and otherwise put the final touches on a work because he knew it would not be played anyway. Also, there was the unfortunate circumstance that he had not enjoyed the opportunity of profiting from the feedback from critics, peers, and audiences
Cowell, who should receive most of the credit for the discovery of Ivesand his promotion, declared that the recognition dated from the first public concert in which his music was played, presented by an avantgarde New York organization called Pro Musica in 1927. This concert, Cowell recalledalmost three decades later, “was a milestone in the career of Ives's music because the two most influential American critics made a real attempt tounderstand the music.” The critics Cowell referred to were Olin Downesof the New York Times and Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune. Cowell described the attendance as “a sophisticated musical audience” and even though most of those present rejected the music violently, it was a notable occasion since it witnessed Ives's “coming out.”[15]
Copland had another idea of the decisive moment when he later took abackward look—a moment in which he himself played a decisive part. Hefastened his attention on an event that took place five years later. It seemsthere existed, modeled after the French “Six,” a Young Composers Group that Copland, as stated above, had brought together for the purpose ofmeeting fairly regularly to exchange ideas. I was a member of the groupbut my position was ambiguous since I was not composing at the time. Asa critic I was welcomed among them to do the kind of public relations that Paul Collaer had done for the Six. My fellow members were Henry Brant, Israel Citkowitz, Lehman Engel, Vivian Fine, Irwin Heilner, Bernard Herrmann, Jerome Moross, Elie Siegmeister and, for a while at the beginning, the expatriate Paul Bowles who was living at that time in Paris—a circumstance much resented since we were very pro-American.[16]
We decided all together to join Cowell in discovering and promoting Ives. Our enthusiasm for Ives, especially that of Herrmann, later of Hollywood fame for his scores for Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock films, wassuch that Copland could not refuse us when we approached him to includea work of Ives on a program of a prestigious festival of contemporary American music he was planning for the artist colony Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. He even agreed to play the piano part himself in agroup of songs that would represent Ives. The audience, made up mostly ofavantgarde composers, rose to the challenge of the music, especially the song “Charlie Rutledge” with its tone-cluster accompaniment and spokenvocal line.
In his recollections Copland remarked, “this was the first time a groupof professional musicians were paying serious attention to Ives. It was aturning point in the recognition of his music. Arthur Berger was propheticwhen he wrote in his review for the Daily Mirror:‘History is being madein our midst.’”[17] It is perfectly plausible that Copland was unaware of the 1927 concert or deliberately ignored it since the schism maintained between the more avantgarde composers and his (our) crowd was such that Cowell and his far-out experimentalists inhabited an entirely differentworld from ours. We were regarded as a bit Francophile and elite, whichwere precisely the locutions the extreme radicals (Cowell, Varese, Ruggles, etc., who wrote “ultramodern” music) were likely to apply to the League of Composers, the concertgiving organization “our crowd” had establishedin 1923 before I was part of it.
The last place one would look for a review of the Yaddo event is a Hearstscandal sheet, a tabloid like the old New York Daily Mirror, but I was ayouthful stringer for that paper, and I wrote up the festival, making the statement that Copland quoted: “History is being made in our midst.” Itwas also quoted by Cowell in his book on Ives.[18] Another of my earliestwritings about Ives appeared in 1934. It was something more substantialthan a music review for a tabloid paper; it was an article on the songs of Ivesfor a new music publication.[19] While I was a graduate student in music at Harvard University I was editing a publication called the Musical Mercury, published by Edwin F. Kalmus for the purpose of advertising the miniaturescores that he had started publishing on a grand scale.[20] (He had worked inthe copyright office and had learned that many valuable foreign twentieth-century scores were not protected.) Each issue had a score in the centerusually unrelated to the content. I took advantage of my access to a musical readership (limited though it was) to write about the 114 songs which Ives had published at his own expense in a bound volume. In my article, along with expressing certain reservations that I already had in those days, I wrote, “those who would call Ives the father of indigenous music wouldseem justified.” The title seems to have endured, except we say less pretentiously “American” music, without the implications “indigenous” mighthave in our multicultural society. But I am no longer sure it is apposite. One expects a father to beget offspring, but young composers for a longtime did not emulate Ives as they have, for example, emulated Copland. That may very well change. The young new Romanticists are likely to beattracted more to the Ives approach than to that of Copland. Anyone using
The education Ives could get at Yale when he attended—or anywhereelse in America—was, I assume, probably academic and mired in nineteenth-century Romanticism.[21] It had not changed much by the 1920s when young composers reacted against it by initiating a pilgrimage to Nadia Boulanger in France. Everything we know about Ives indicates that itwould be preposterous to envision him joining such a pilgrimage even ifhe were of the generation that made it. As I have said, though he did notbelieve in being deliberately American in music by artificially contriving devices to make you sound American, he did believe your music's being American was a virtue and that it will be as American as you are. But hewould still have been fearful something European might rub off on him ifhe had gone abroad to study. Boulanger, while well aware of la grandeligne, was adamant about the musician (creator or performer) having control over the tiniest detail. (I recall from my own studies with her justbefore World War II the shower of invectives she poured upon me when Iillustrated on the piano a point in our discussion with a passage from Wagner and got the wrong inversion of one chord—which did not seem to matter since it was not germane to the point I wanted to make. But I was subjected to a volley of abuse that I never forgot whenever I illustrated a pointagain.) Such attention to detail might have helped Ives clean up the surfaceof his music. On the other hand, it might have ruined him as we now knowhim. His music is the product of the spontaneous outpouring of highlycharged emotions at the expense of elegance of detail. Herein lies my ambivalence when it comes to making a final evaluation of Ives. However, heis certainly, I must admit, a figure who looms on the American music sceneand who provides an experience we do not get elsewhere. This should beenough to stamp the mark of immortality on his brow.
As a member of the Young Composers Group and a critic who wroteabout Ives's music, I was welcome to visit Ives as most of my cohorts did. That I did not do so, something I now regret, could be attributed to my concern over his reputation for getting very agitated if he were crossed in a discussion; owing to his ill health he would have to retire at once and go upstairs to bed. I was an argumentative young man and I was afraid my leftistpolitics would clash with his political orientation; also I might let slip a remark
Let me return to the matter of the quotation of folksong in composers like Ives before going on to other things. One of the main problems for someexacting listeners is the price a composer pays for leaning heavily on compiled folksong, which will obviously be a singable, memorable linear component. But this kind of writing tends to give up its secret more easily thanother, more dense writing. Much as I admire Stravinsky, as well as the inspiration and workmanship of his Petrushka, I tend not to be enthusiasticat the prospect of a rehearing of the work since I have it so thoroughly internalized by now. The same is true of my attitude toward certain folkishworks of Bartok or Copland, both of whom I consider highly admirable composers.
It cannot be stressed too much that ideally works of the fine arts are notconsumer products.[22] We might start to consume them but we never consume them completely as we do ordinary consumer products because wecan, and we want to, return to them again and again to discover new dimensions within them, things we had missed before. If this were moregenerally understood we might not have the inclination toward crossover concerts which have the often insurmountable problem of requiring us toshift gears in our listening, since they inevitably include compositions thatjuxtapose serious and pop music without properly synthesizing them, and we listen very differently to music we consume than we do to other music.(Note: It is not a question of one type of music being better than another.)
I am talking about prototypes, a matter of emphasis, since in real lifethe categories may not always be clean-cut at the borderline. Thus there are, to be sure, the inspired pop songs that endure—songs by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, George Gershwin, or the Beatles. (I wonder how much nostalgia has to do with their durability.) Also, one might start out to writea catchy tune with the sole idea of having a hit and making money and still come out with a minor masterpiece. Inspiration is not something we knowhow to turn on and off, and it may show up in unexpected places. And I certainly would not deny that pop music (jazz, rock, etc.) has fed serious music
Where commercial pop music is concerned, the idea of immediacy is in both its conception and the aim for quick success. We remark on the productivity of Mozart tossing off work after work in an instant because it isin contrast to the practice of most serious composers who relish the composing process enough to dwell on it. They would no doubt expect that reciprocally their listeners dwell on it too—perhaps listening at first severaltimes before they grasp a given work.(I doubt whether the current marketers of pop songs anticipate such an audience response for their wares.) Copland and Stravinsky were once comparing notes on their composing practices, and they agreed that there was one thing they certainly had incommon: the slow pace that they preferred to maintain in the activity. Copland mentioned that it was not unlikely for him to do just one big work a year. “Yes,” said Stravinsky, adjusting the collar of his jacket in that familiar gesture to make it sit better around the neck, “I like to feel comfortablewith it.” On another occasion Copland was asked why he did not use opusnumbers. He responded by saying he did not think it necessary because, since he wrote about one work a year, putting the year of composition onthe score should be sufficient to indicate the place and order in which the work stood in his oeuvre.
When we consider the amount of time serious composers spend on awork it seems sacrilege to grant it the short life we usually grant a popsong. We need new pop songs all the time because the older ones arequickly consumed. That this is not the case with serious music makes for a fundamental difference. When Philip Glass was preparing a live performance of a soundtrack he had created fifteen years earlier for a movie that was being revived, he thought it might sound dated. But instead he was quite impressed that, at least to his own way of thinking, it retained its freshness all through what he considered a long time for any work. As I interpret his reaction, he was perfectly aware of having crossed the line intothe field of pop (and also was evidently satisfied with himself for having done so) where such things as going in and out of style in a brief period arean issue and where his music would be expected to go out of style in the same way as a popular song does. There are some works, like the three I
Obviously, there are elements other than those provided by folk music that define the American character, elements along the lines of the immobility that I have mentioned. But it is not too clear what they are. Bernard Holland of the Times, writing about what I consider the utterly Francophile music of Ned Rorem, observed, in a left-handed fashion, “If it is a duty to identify Mr. Rorem as an American composer, one can point to certain characteristics. First is the strain of puritanism in his spare, harsh linesand textures and next to it the paradox of openhearted melody in generous, long-breathing tunes.” (I have little doubt that if these two characteristics came to sparring with each other for supremacy, the “open hearted” melody would win out in Rorem's highly sensuous and expressive music.) Holland goes on to cite evidence of Protestant American part-singing and evensome bop chords. But I do not find it particularly convincing.[23]
There are, to be sure, some things, more concrete things, that serious American music has contributed to the whole world, though it would behard to identify them as American unless you knew their genealogy. I amthinking, for example, of Cowell's tone clusters. I am not aware that he ever copyrighted them but Bartók, in gentlemanly fashion, is said to have written to Cowell for permission before using them himself. In addition to tone clusters, in the same area there is the John Cage prepared piano—prepared with nuts, bolts, screws, and bits of rubber. Cage, of course, with his theories of “non-music” acquired a reputation in Europe and Asia wider thanany other American composer, with the possible exception of George Gersh win, has ever achieved. Finally there is minimalism, popularized by Philip Glass but early on practiced more effectively by Steve Reich, and perhaps also Terry Riley and La Monte Young. And as everyone knowswhen it is a matter of music it is not by its “serious” products that America is known abroad but by its jazz, rock, and so on. This, however, spoilsthe reception of serious music since we have been type cast as dispensers ofa form of entertainment music, and music more profound is not expectedof us. However that may be, the matter of music having an American castno longer has priority, as I have already indicated, because we have enteredan international stage and feel quite content with it. If achieving an American character assisted us in believing American music had “come ofage,” then our efforts have been quite sufficiently rewarded by the few manifestations I have mentioned. Mission accomplished. We need not push it anylonger. Let it take its own course.