Download Defining American Music

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On 21 May, 1893, Antonín Dvořák—recently installed as Director of the National
Conservatory of Music in New York—opined in the New York Herald that “the future music
of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies . . . These are the
folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them . . .”
1
Dvořák subsequently
modified his view, suggesting that Native American melodies were also worthy of
consideration; and in 1895, in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, he finally conceded that “the
germs for the best in music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great
country.” From our perspective, over a century later, Dvořák’s remarks are noteworthy on
three counts: first, for their failure to understand the profound demographic and socio-cultural
differences that existed between America and Europe; second, for their ignorance of both
earlier and contemporaneous attempts at creating an American music; and third for the fact
that they were taken so seriously, by so many people, and for so long.2
Let me deal with each of these points in turn. At the end of the nineteenth century, it
was perfectly possible for European composers like Dvořák, Grieg, or Tchaikovsky to write
genuinely nationalistic music, by integrating into the existing European musical lingua franca
the folk music of their compatriots: they spoke a common musical tongue, but with
characteristic and identifiable ethnic or regional accents. But in polyglot America no such
musico-linguistic purity was possible: by the 1890s, America was already a nation of many
peoples, from Native Americans, through African Americans and Asian Americans, to the
multiple immigrants who, like Dvořák himself, had traveled to the New World from the Old
and beyond. Indeed, although the statistics are a little crude, and take no account of the
involuntary immigration that resulted from the slave trade, between 1820 and 1910 5 million
Germans, 4 million Irish, 3½ million Britons, 3 million Austrians, 3 million Italians, over a
million Jews of various nationalities, 1 million Swedes, and nearly 1 million Asians, were
among the 28 million people who relocated to the United States.
3
As Brooke Hindle has
written, “The transfer of peoples and cultures to America is one of the great themes of
American history and, indeed, of the history of man. Migrations take place everywhere, but
1
The sources of this and the following quotations are reproduced in John C. Tibbetts, ed., Dvořák in America,
1892–1895 (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1993), 355–84.
2
See Arthur Farwell, “Pioneering for American Music,” Modern Music, 12 (1934), 116–22; Adrienne Fried
Block, “Boston Talks Back to Dvořák,” I.S.A.M. Newsletter, 18/2 (May 1989), 10-11, 15; Block, “Dvořák’s
Long American Reach,” in Tibbetts, Dvořák in America, 157–181.
there has never been anything like the movement that produced the United States of
America…” 4
Accordingly, although some ethnic or regional groups such as Native Americans or
long-established New Englanders might have wished to claim precedence over their
compatriots, it is clear that even at the turn of the twentieth century, there existed a plethora of
clearly identifiable, and individual, regional and ethnic accents, all of which might reasonably
claim to be to some extent “American.” For Dvořák to privilege one or two of these accents
above the many others that coexisted was clearly not practicable, and thus there was the
potential in his remarks for offence to be caused to almost everyone. Moreover, given the
historical relationship between black and white Americans, the specific suggestion that art
music composers who were mainly Northern whites should appropriate for nationalistic
purposes the traditional musics of mainly Southern blacks, shows a remarkable lack of
sensitivity.
Dvořák was also insensitive in appearing to assume that America’s composers of art
music were somehow unaware of the need for—let alone the possibility of—a genuinely
American music. As has been demonstrated by a number of scholars, the debate concerning
the representation of nationalist features in American music was already well underway by
the time of Dvořák’s arrival. For instance, J. Bunker Clark has argued that an earlier
Bohemian settler in the United States, Anthony Philip Heinrich, wrote music in the early
nineteenth century “with an even more fervent expression of American nationalism than can
be attributed to Dvořák’s ‘American’ works.” 5 By 1822, Heinrich was already being hailed as
“The Beethoven of America,” and a year later was referred to as “the first regular or general
American composer.” 6 A number of Heinrich’s pieces make implicit or explicit reference to,
or use of, the musics of Native Americans and African Americans, while others are overtly
nationalistic in tone.
Later in the nineteenth century, similar observations can be made regarding the music
of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, a composer and virtuoso pianist whose stylistic eclecticism
resulted from his upbringing in cosmopolitan New Orleans, where he was exposed to French,
Spanish, Latin-American, and African American influences. Interestingly, however,
3
Statistics adapted from Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg, A
Concise History of the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), T14–T15.
4
Brooke Hindle, “Introduction,” in Peter C. Marzio, ed., A Nation of Nations (New York: Harper & Row, 1976),
xv.
5
J. Bunker Clark, “Anthony Philip Heinrich—A Bohemian Predecessor to Dvořák in the Wilds of America” in
Tibbetts, Dvořák in America, 20–26.
2
Gottschalk’s talents—and by implication his credentials as a composer of American music—
were downplayed by the powerful Boston musical establishment, not least John Sullivan
Dwight, whose influential Dwight’s Journal of Music championed Austro-German (rather
than homegrown American) musical tastes.
As a consequence of Dwight’s aesthetic preferences, by the mid-1870s the exotic
nationalistic tendencies of Heinrich and Gottschalk—which, ironically, were in general quite
similar to those subsequently promoted by Dvořák—had been suppressed in favour of the
more conservative Eurocentric practices of the so-called Second New England School, whose
principal members included John Knowles Paine, George W. Chadwick, Horatio Parker, and
Amy Cheney Beach. Even this group, though, had to some extent preempted Dvořák.
Following the 1893 publication in the New York Herald of Dvořák’s initial pronouncements,
ten prominent New England musicians were invited by the editor of the Boston Herald to
respond. Among them was the composer George E. Whiting, who found himself in agreement
with Dvořák’s remarks, not least as “more than eight years ago in a paper read before the
American Music Teachers’ National Association I advocated the same thing: that is, failing to
find anything in the shape of American folk songs the native composer would do well to avail
himself of these negro melodies for hint of local color…”
7
One or two other respondents
were similarly enthusiastic: B. J. Lang—a Boston-based conductor and pianist—stated that “
If [the American musician] knows anything of American music…it is either of a sort of
psalmody…or of a class of songs of which ‘Old Folks at Home’ may be a proper type.” Lang
therefore goes on to wish that “Dr. Dvořák would write something himself, using themes from
these [negro] plantation songs. Such an act would set an example for our American
composers.” 8 Dvořák duly complied, not least in the “New World” Symphony.
However, John Knowles Paine—at that time head of the music department at Harvard—
was more critical, suggesting that “Dr. Dvořák is probably unacquainted with what has
already been accomplished in the higher forms of music by composers in America,” a
reference not so much to the earlier achievements of Heinrich and Gottschalk, but rather to
those of his contemporaries Chadwick and Beach. 9 Chadwick—who was quite scathing in his
own response to Dvořák’s ideas—had already been singled out by commentators for the
American traits in his music, not least in the Second String Quartet of 1878, and in the
6
Statements from, respectively, The Euterpeiad, or Musical Intelligencer and the Boston Daily Advertiser;
quoted in Clark, “Anthony Philip Heinrich,” 22 and 20.
7
Whiting, quoted in Block, “Boston Talks Back to Dvořák,” 10.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid.
3
scherzos of his First and Second Symphonies (both of which were written in the 1880s).
Indeed, the writers of the New Grove article on Chadwick go so far as to claim that “the
scherzo of the Second Symphony…uses a pentatonic melody resembling black American
song nine years before Dvořák included the better-known example in his Symphony No.
9…” 10 Beach, meanwhile, made extensive use of another kind of traditional music in her
“Gaelic” Symphony: completed the year after Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, the
“Gaelic” actively supports the views expressed by Beach in her own published response to
Dvořák’s comments.
Without the slightest desire to question the beauty of the negro melodies of which
[Dvořák] speaks so highly…I cannot help feeling justified in the belief that they are not
fully typical of our country. The African population of the United States…represents
only one factor in the compilation of our nation…
…to those of us of the North and West there can be little, if any, “association”
connected with negro melodies…We [are] more likely to be influenced by old English,
Scotch or Irish songs… 11
No wonder, then, given this critical context that by 1895 Dvořák had modified and nuanced
his initial views. Indeed, given the reaction to his New York Herald article, a cynic might read
much into Dvořák in 1894 awarding to Chadwick a prize, instigated by the National
Conservatory of Music, for his Symphony No. 3. Chadwick, apparently unlike the other
winners of the award, was notified of his success in a personal telegram from Dvořák. 12
Thus far I have addressed two of the three noteworthy features of Dvořák’s 1893
pronouncements: their failure to understand the profound demographic and socio-cultural
differences which existed between America and Europe; and their ignorance of both earlier
and contemporaneous attempts at creating an American music. Let me now turn to the third
noteworthy feature: the fact that his remarks were taken so seriously, by so many people, and
for so long. Evidence for this seriousness of response has already been heard in the published
comments that appeared in the Boston Herald on 28 May, 1893: the New Englanders
approached by the Herald’s editor may not have been unanimous in their support for
Dvořák’s stance, but they were certainly provoked by it; and, as I have already pointed out, at
least some of the Second New England School were already engaged in the composition of
American music that at the very least parallels the approach advocated by Dvořák. However,
10
Steven Ledbetter and Victor Fell Yellin, “George Whitefield Chadwick,” in The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians (second edition; London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 5, 421.
11
Beach, quoted in Block, “Boston Talks Back to Dvořák,” 11.
4
the New Englanders were by no means the only composers active in America at the time; nor
were their responses the only ones that emerged. Indeed, Adrienne Fried Block has asserted
that “Not only was [Dvořák’s] influence still strong two decades after he left the United
States, but there is also considerable evidence that his definition of Americanism in music
determined the parameters of the debate over nationalism for almost half a century”—that is,
until the 1940s. 13
There are several routes by which Dvořák’s continuing influence came to be felt
during this period; I will comment briefly on three. First there were those composers who
followed Dvořák’s initial advice—and, indeed, that of George Whiting—by exploring the
ways in which African American music might be employed in the service of nationalistic
aims. Two not untypical works of this type are both entitled Negro Rhapsody, the first having
been written in 1912 by Henry Gilbert, and the second in 1919 by Copland’s first teacher,
Rubin Goldmark. In each case, explicit reference is made to existing African American
musics: Gilbert employs two ring shouts—these being traditional religious practices—while
Goldmark quotes a spiritual, and emphasizes such supposedly stereotypical technical features
of black music as syncopation, flat sevenths, and subdominant harmonies. A second, and
larger, group of composers constitute what came to be termed the “Indianist” movement:
here, we find the traditional melodies of Native American peoples being similarly
appropriated in order to imbue art music works with a supposedly American accent. Although
Amy Beach, Edward MacDowell, and Charles Tomlinson Griffes all made occasional use of
Native American materials in their works, the principal exponent of “Indianist” tendencies
was Arthur Farwell, who became—in his own words—“the first composer in America to take
up Dvořák’s challenge…in a serious and whole-hearted way.”
14
Farwell founded the Wa-
Wan Press in order to facilitate the publication of “Indianist” works by both himself and a
number of other composers.
Perhaps the most interesting example of Dvořák’s continuing influence, however, is
found in the work of America’s first internationally lauded composer, Charles Ives, as is clear
from a brief examination of Ives’s works in the symphonic medium. The First Symphony,
written at the turn of the twentieth century, is explicitly modeled on the “New World”
Symphony, both in its general shape and in the detail of three of its four movements. The
Second Symphony, meanwhile, written soon afterwards, follows in similar—albeit five12
See Tibbetts, Dvořák in America, 69.
Block, “Dvořák’s Long American Reach,” 157.
14
Quoted in ibid., 163. See also Farwell, “Pioneering for American Music.”
13
5
movement—fashion, though here Ives draws heavily for his thematic materials on the rich
traditions of American church music and popular music with which he had grown up; he also
alludes to a whole roster of European art musics, ranging from Bach’s keyboard music
through to the symphonies of Brahms and Tchaikovsky. The result is a glorious scrapbook of
melodic snippets, culled from the broad musical life of late-nineteenth-century New England.
In three of Ives’s four other symphonies—the exception being the unfinished Universe
Symphony—similar traits may be observed. In the Third Symphony, subtitled “The Camp
Meeting,” Ives narrows his focus onto a small collection of New England hymns, while in the
Fourth Symphony and the so-called Holidays Symphony he returns to the broad panoply of
borrowings typical of the Second Symphony.
However, although Ives’s symphonies seem at a superficial level unquestioningly to
follow Dvořák’s suggestions, they can also be interpreted at a deeper, less clearly
nationalistic, level. In his Essays Before a Sonata, first published in 1920, Ives contemplates
at some length what he sees as the problematic search for a “national” American music. In
doing so, he distinguishes between what he calls “manner” (the superficial detail of the
music) and “substance” (its inner being); and unlike Dvořák (and George Whiting) he
specifically disputes the notion that using “local color” can create a successful national style:
A true love of country is likely to be so big that it will embrace the virtue one sees in
other countries, and in the same breath, so to speak. A composer born in America, but
who has not been interested in the “cause of the Freedmen,” may be so interested in
“negro melodies” that he writes a symphony over them. He is conscious (perhaps only
subconscious) that he wishes it to be “American music.” He tries to forget that the
paternal negro came from Africa. Is his music American or African?…
…But the sadness of it is that if he had been born in Africa, his music might have been
just as American, for there is good authority that an African soul under an X-ray looks
identically like an American soul…
…In other words, if local color, national color, any color, is a true pigment of the
universal color, it is a divine quality, it is part of substance in art—not of manner. 15
In other words, whereas Dvořák in effect argued that any “local” music could be used to
create a national style by virtue of its superficially American accent, Ives believed that “There
is a futility in selecting a certain type to represent a ‘whole,’ unless the interest in the spirit of
15
Extracted from the “Epilogue” to Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings (ed. Howard
Boatwright) (London: Calder and Boyars, 1969), 78–79, 81.
6
the type coincides with that of the whole.” 16 This stance not only casts Ives’s own music in a
very particular light; it also brings into question the whole issue of how one might define
American music, for as I suggested earlier, in polyglot America no musico-linguistic purity of
the Dvořákian kind was possible.
~
Given this background, it is rather paradoxical that back in the 1890s, at the very time
when Dvořák was encouraging American art music composers to borrow freely from African
American sources, several interrelated popular music genres (all of which were to some extent
intrinsically linked with African American culture) were about to enter the mainstream of
American—and subsequently European—cultural life. The meteoric rise between 1895 and
1925 of ragtime and blues (with their love-child jazz), together with musical theatre and Tin
Pan Alley songs, could not have been predicted by Dvořák or anyone else; nor could the
extent to which they would be perceived in the public imagination as the first (and for a while
the only) authentic examples of American culture. The degree of their ubiquity by the mid1920s is easily demonstrated: think of Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cake-walk, Milhaud’s La
Création du Monde, Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper or
Shostakovich’s Taiti Trot, an arrangement of the song “Tea for Two.” (Incidentally, anyone
doubting the threat that American popular musics apparently posed to the European cultural
establishment at this time is directed to the outrageously racist remarks contained in part three
of Constant Lambert’s book Music Ho!, published in 1934.17 )
But African American musics also, of course, proved influential among American
composers of concert music at this time: the most obvious examples range from Ives’s
allusions to ragtime, in such pieces as Central Park in the Dark and the First Piano Sonata,
through to the development of symphonic jazz by George Gershwin and Duke Ellington. Less
obvious, however, is the employment of jazz idioms during the 1920s by supposedly
modernist American composers, including George Antheil and Aaron Copland. Antheil is
best known nowadays for his avant-garde, and highly motoric, Ballet mécanique; but jazz was
an ever-present element in his music at this time, whether clearly announced via the titles of
the Jazz Sonata and Jazz Symphony, or concealed behind the less revealing names of such
works as the “Zingareska” Symphony, or the opera Transatlantic. The twenty-something
Copland, meanwhile, was “preoccupied with the idea of adding to the great history of serious
16
17
Ibid., 79.
Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber, 1934).
7
music something with an American accent, and jazz seemed to be a comparatively simple
way of introducing the American note in an authentic way. I simply wanted to use it with
more sophistication and in a longer form. It was an easy way to be American—quickly
American—in a way that the world would recognize as American.”
18
Accordingly, jazz
rhythms and other stylistic fingerprints are found in several Copland works of the 1920s,
including the Piano Concerto and—rather less plausibly—the Organ Symphony written for
Nadia Boulanger to perform in New York and Boston.
It is with a work like the Organ Symphony that the absurdities resulting from a
Dvořákian conception of American music come fully to the fore: in order to create a work
with an internationally recognizable American accent, a white Jewish-American arranges for
a white Frenchwoman and two all-white orchestras—conducted respectively by a German and
a Russian—to play on instruments intimately associated with the European art and sacred
music traditions melodies, harmonies, and especially rhythms derived from African American
popular music. That said, the Organ Symphony is in this sense no more absurd than the Indian
Suite of Edward MacDowell, the Alaskan Inuit melodies of Amy Beach’s String Quartet, the
Latin-American influences on the Danzas de Panama by African American composer
William Grant Still, or the setting by Charles Ives of the African American spiritual “In the
Mornin’.” If the Dvořákian conception of American music has any relevance at all, it can only
be in the most particular of circumstances, such as the African American-derived pieces of
Still—including his two symphonies—or the regionally based compositions of Charles Ives.
Any other use of “folk songs” strikes me as disingenuous and appropriative—as is the case,
for instance, in Copland’s “American” pieces of the 1930s and 1940s such as the ballets Billy
the Kid and Appalachian Spring, in which he uses traditional materials because (and these
words may sound familiar) “it was a very easy way of sounding American.” 19
By the 1930s, then, a veritable smorgasbord of apparently incompatible musics sought
approbation as the authentic voice of America. The Second New England School—though
effectively moribund by this time—had created a substantial body of Eurocentric but oftencharacterful and appealing music; the School’s descendants included Howard Hanson and
Randall Thompson. Arthur Farwell and the other Indianists had taken Dvořák at his word in
exploring the rich traditions of Native American music; and a smaller number of composers—
both black and white—had similarly approached the African American heritage. Copland,
18
Copland, quoted in Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral
History of American Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 309.
19
Ibid., 319.
8
like Gershwin, had initially been drawn to a synthesis of jazz and art music; but by 1930 he
had moved toward a hard-edged version of the neoclassical internationalism also espoused by
a legion of Nadia Boulanger’s other American students. (As Virgil Thomson once quipped,
“Every town in America has two things—a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil.”
20
) And
then there were others still, not even discussed so far, such as the self-styled ultra-modernists,
with Henry Cowell as high priest, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles and Ruth Crawford among
the communicants, and Charles Ives as recalcitrant patron saint.
Perhaps the greatest myth of American music—one certainly perpetuated, if not
created, by Dvořák’s comments in the 1890s—is the idea that a particular musical sound can
somehow encapsulate the aspirations and fundamental character of the American nation. Yet
for many commentators—then and now, both within and without the world of art music—that
sound existed and it was Copland’s. Indeed, it is no accident that Wilfrid Mellers, in his
pioneering monograph Music in a New Found Land, should have titled his Copland chapter
by employing two of the most clichéd images of America and its music: skyscraper and
prairie. Nor is it an accident that the Copland sound has been widely imitated by the
composers of film and television music. But is Copland’s music intrinsically “American”? Or
does it achieve its “Americanness” only retrospectively, through pictorial, topical, or titular
association? Is it, in fact, any more (or less) “American” than the music of Duke Ellington,
George Gershwin, Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, or even Antonín Dvořák? Given the
bewildering profusion of possibilities, the reality is rather of the pointlessness of attempting to
justify a preeminent position for any single composer or genre. Indeed, to a considerable
extent, the search for art music with an American accent perhaps resembles most the Christian
quests for the Holy Grail—worthy, yet ultimately futile.
It is worth reminding ourselves at this point that the official motto of the United States
of America is E pluribus unum—from many, one. This motto is direct in its meaning, and
inspiring in its vision: that out of disparateness—of peoples, beliefs, values, ambitions—
should come an overreaching unity of aim and purpose. Yet most American art music until at
least 1950 emphasizes disparity rather than unity, many rather than one, multiplicity rather
than uniformity. Ultimately, it asks whether there can indeed be a truly American sound that
emerges from among the many, an unum e pluribus, as it were. One key to unlocking this
puzzle may be found in the 1930s writings of Henry Cowell, as for him it was this very
multiplicity that was the fundamental issue. Unlike Dvořák and his countless successors,
20
Thomson, quoted in ibid., 254.
9
who—in attempting to define American music—sought to privilege one genre, approach,
ethnic group, or regional accent above the others, Cowell adopted the all-embracing, anticanonical, egalitarian approach more customary in contemporary culture. Cowell’s 1933 book
American Composers on American Music is designated as a symposium; its tone is inevitably
subjective rather than objective, and its overt aim is the promotion of ultra-modern art
music. 21 But the book is remarkable for two reasons: first, it includes not only a series of
chapters in which composers as different as Howard Hanson and Edgard Varèse are
considered by their peers, but also a second group of chapters in which general tendencies are
examined. Among these we find sensitive and at times provocative statements concerning
Latin-American musics (contributed by Carlos Chávez and Alejandro García Caturla),
African American composers (William Grant Still), oriental influence (Dane Rudhyar), and
jazz (George Gershwin).
American Composers on American Music is also remarkable for Cowell’s own views
concerning nationalism in music—expressed in his introductory chapter, and fundamentally
different from Dvořák’s—which appear to develop those ideas of Charles Ives’s discussed
earlier. Ives’s quasi-transcendentalist conception of nationalism, as you may have gathered, is
by no means easy to grasp; for most musicians—let alone music-lovers—it requires a
considerable imaginative leap into the bounds of metaphysics. But Cowell is more direct,
stating that
Nationalism in music has no purpose as an aim in itself. Music happily transcends
political and racial boundaries and is good or bad irrespective of the nation in which it is
composed. Independence, however, is stronger than imitation. In the hands of great men
independence may result in products of permanent value. Imitation cannot be expected
to produce such significant achievements.
American composition up to now has been tied to the apron-strings of European
tradition. To attain musical independence, more national consciousness is a present
necessity for American composers. [But] The result of such an awakening should be the
creation of works capable of being accorded international standing. When this has been
accomplished, self-conscious nationalism will no longer be necessary. 22
21
Henry Cowell, ed., American Composers on American Music: A Symposium (New York: Frederick Ungar
Publishing Co., 1961 [1933]).
22
Henry Cowell, “Trends in American Music,” in American Composers on American Music, 13.
10
In other words, a truly American music had to develop in accordance with its own terms,
rather than those borrowed from Europe: America therefore needed, 150 years after its
Declaration of [political] Independence, finally to declare its musical independence too.
Here as elsewhere, Cowell was the first to take his own advice, though one wonders
whether he entirely foresaw the results of doing so. Later in 1933, in the journal Modern
Music, he argued that composers should “draw on those materials common to the music of all
the peoples of the world, to build a new music particularly related to our own century.” 23 The
implication is obvious: a truly American music, an unum e pluribus, could only emerge if it
drew on the materials common to all of its peoples; and for the remaining thirty years of his
life, Cowell pursued that elusive quarry, albeit inconsistently. He also passed on to his
students, including John Cage and Lou Harrison, his vision of a genuinely pluralistic—and
therefore American—music. The most immediate results in Cowell’s oeuvre can be found in a
group of 1930s works that are so radical as to appear almost reactionary. Ostinato Pianissimo,
the United Quartet, Pulse, and Return make extensive use of ostinato patterns; the apparent
simplicity of their rhythmic material conceals a surprising degree of sophistication, not least
in the relation between surface detail and overall structure. Three of the four pieces are
written for percussion and utilize a plethora of unusual instruments, both invented and
imported. Pitched material, where it occurs, tends to be consonant but nondiatonic, and
includes artificial modes constructed along Asian and African lines. Drone accompaniments
are the norm. Cowell’s remarks concerning the United Quartet apply to all four pieces:
“[their] simplicity is drawn from the whole world, instead of from the European tradition or
any other single tradition.” 24
That Cowell is an American composer is unquestionable; but is his music American?
Certainly he does not achieve Americanness through the superficial use of American ethnic
material, by conforming to American generic stereotypes, or through association—
retrospective or otherwise—with American subject matter. To my mind, though, his music—
and that of many other so-called American experimentalists—is profoundly American, for it
possesses at a compositional and aesthetic level the same qualities that were identified earlier
in discussion of the nationalist views of Ives and Cowell: qualities of inclusivity, openmindedness, egalitarianism, and (in more technical terms) the hybridic synthesis of disparate
elements into a cohesive and coherent whole. Moreover, this music genuinely meets the
23
Henry Cowell, “Towards Neo-Primitivism,” in Modern Music, 10/3 (1933), 149–53.
Henry Cowell, [introductory remarks], United Quartet [String Quartet No. 4] (San Francisco: New Music
Edition, 1937), [1].
24
11
aspirations of America’s official motto in being truly e pluribus unum; but I doubt very much
whether the American State Department, or the present American President, would wish to
acknowledge that fact. The problem, I believe, is that American music and its institutions
continue, over a century after Dvořák’s sojourn in the United States, to be dominated by
outdated Eurocentric attitudes and values, which still equate nationalism with folk music of
one sort or another. (And it is worth noting here that Gershwin once asserted that “Jazz I
regard as an American folk-music; not the only one, but a very powerful one.” 25 ) Composers
such as Cowell failed—literally and metaphorically—to wave the American folk music flag,
either at home, or on territory appropriated from others. As a consequence, and like some
weird cult, the profound Americanism of those composers has in effect moved them beyond
nationalism into conflict with the nation. In conclusion then, it is clearly evident that by the
mid-twentieth century a sizeable tradition of art music had been created in America, and that a
convincing view of what a truly American music might be had emerged in the writings of Ives
and Cowell. But between their vision and the output of most of their contemporaries, there
was little or no point of contact.
© David Nicholls
25
George Gershwin, “The Relation of Jazz to American Music,” in Cowell, ed., American Composers on
American Music, 187.
12