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Chapter 33: Music and Politics in America and Allied Europe
I. In the United States
A. Introduction
1. Between World War I and World War II, American composers also experimented with
“ultramodern” styles, even though the political situation was somewhat more stable than in
Europe.
a. Ives financed several endeavors in ultramodern music.
b. Many of these composers appeared in the pages of New Music Quarterly, a
journal made possible by Ives and Henry Cowell.
c. They may be seen as transcendental maximalists: employing radical means
toward spiritual means.
2. Cowell’s early music used extended piano techniques, such as tone clusters.
a. He was a theosophist, beginning in 1916.
b. His music was in line with Italian composers known as the futurists, who called
for the “Art of Noises.” Cowell’s response was Dynamic Motion (1916), which evoked the
sounds of the subway.
B. Edgard Varèse
1. Varèse, an innovative composer in the United States in the 1920s, worked toward the
“liberation of sound.”
2. He studied the music of the Italian Futurists before moving to New York in 1915.
3. His first American work, Amériques, was on the scale of the Rite of Spring. He
attempted (unsuccessfully) to blend neoprimitivsm and futurism.
a. More successful compositions were Hyperprism (1923) and Intégrales (1925).
4. His Ionisation (1931) uses thirteen percussion players. It uses recognizable gestures in
traditional ways, but its nontraditional techniques move it far from contemporary experiments.
a. Varèse temporarily dropped out of view during the 1940s. He could not find the
sounds that he desired. Technology had to catch up.
C. Microtones: Splitting the Semitone
1. One of the new sounds composers toyed with was microtones. The most common was
to split half-steps into quarter tones.
2. Julian Carrillo, a Mexican composer, tried out new tunings (and new instruments and
notation).
3. Ives claimed that his father experimented with quarter tones.
a. He described microtones as sounds we hear in nature, therefore, in a
Transcendentalist view, more natural.
b. Ives composed a work for two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart. It was not
favorably received.
D. New Sounds, New Instruments, New Tunings
1. Harry Partch invented a forty-three-interval scale and the ensemble to perform it.
2. Partch, itinerant during the Depression, sought alternatives in many aspects of music.
a. He translated social alienation into an artistic program.
3. Lou Harrison also built new instruments, as did several others.
4. These new directions lost steam in the 1940s.
E. Ferment on the American Left
1. During the Great Depression, American arts moved toward a new image that reflected
populist patriotism.
2. At the same time, Communist parties around the world united, and the American
Communist Party participated in a policy known as the Populist Front.
3. In the United States, music of the folk (folk lore), or the “proletariat,” became an
instrument for progressive political action.
a. Charles Seeger, musicologist and husband of Ruth Crawford Seeger, wrote
leftist songs; his son Peter was a famous folk singer.
4. Others collected American music from different groups, such as Cowboy songs
(Lomax), Southern Baptist hymns (Sacred Harp), and others.
II. Copland and Others in the American Mid-Century
A. Copland and Politics
1. One of the composers who absorbed elements of the folk revivals was Copland.
a. We noted his experimental early efforts and even touch with jazz previously. In
the 1930s he turned toward the populist music.
b. His interest in populism peaked in the late 1940s.
c. Works associated with this style are Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian
Spring.
d. These are ballets that appealed to the listener (and were thus populist).
Copland’s style was individual and technically competent—both Modernist values.
1) Individual style elements include his voicings and orchestration.
Copland also wrote music that reflected a larger “Americas” landscape.
e. He met with other artists, including Rivera, Kahlo, and others.
2. Silvestre Revueltas, a Mexican composer who worked in both Mexico and the United
States, also combined European Modernism, neoprimitivism, and neoclassicism with indigenous
elements.
B. American Patriotic Works
1. In response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Copland received a commission
that resulted in his Lincoln Portrait.
a. He incorporates familiar songs with his own music, heightened by extracts from
speeches Lincoln made.
b. It was a deliberate attempt to bring leftist ideals into the forefront.
1)Part of its purpose was to show affinities between Communist USSR
and the United States, who were now allies in World War II.
2. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man dates from the same period and was
commissioned by the conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to open concerts during
the war period.
a. The piece exemplifies Copland’s “wide” sound.
b. It is diatonic and homorhythmic, and the main theme soars over two octaves.
3. Aspects of Copland’s folk song style—their novelty and originality—and not literal
authenticity mark them as national emblems.
4. Because of connections with Communist ideology, Copland was forced to make a
political stand that separated from him from his earlier affiliations and moved him to broader
nationalist aims.
C. The Great American Symphony
1. Along with the “Great American Novel,” World War II prompted an interest in the
“Great American Symphony.”
2. A distinctive American school of composition began to flourish during the Depression
years, and it was supported with Roosevelt’s WPA financing of orchestras.
3. The first composer in this regard was Roy Harris.
a. He studied with Boulanger.
b. Harris was associated with his native state of Kansas, which seems to be the
backdrop of his popular Third Symphony.
4. Howard Hanson, of Nebraska, looked to Sibelius as a model. (Hanson was of
Scandinavian descent.)
5. William Schuman became president of Juilliard in 1945, an influential position.
a. He too studied with Boulanger.
b. Along with the others, they produced a number of symphonies.
6. Other notable American symphonists were Virgil Thomson, William Grant Still, and
Samuel Barber.
7. Copland’s Third Symphony is often paired with the Fanfare. Together they may be
compared to Shostakovich’s Fifth and Seventh symphonies in their relation to national spirit and
World War II.
D. Accessible Alternatives
1. American symphonic style featured these elements: Melodic breadth, diatonicism,
jazzy or syncopated rhythms (often asymmetrical), and a full sound (due to large brass and
percussion sections).
2. Barber’s music exemplifies this style, too, especially in his concertos and Adagio for
Strings.
a. This work is essentially diatonic and expressive, moving from calm to
passionate climax.
3. The works of Rachmaninoff also merged nineteenth- and twentieth-century styles in a
manner that the public found accessible.
III. Opera
A. Opera in Mid-Century
1. American and English opera remained somewhat traditional in the mid-twentieth
century.
2. The most prolific opera composer in the United States was the Italian-born Menotti.
a. His style resembles that of Puccini.
b. His Amahl and the Night Visitors was shown on NBC for a number of years,
and four other operas played on Broadway.
3. In Europe, some notable operas include Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress (1951) and
Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites (1956).
B. Benjamin Britten
1. After Strauss composed his operas, the next main composer of opera in Europe was
Britten.
2. He publicly stated that his duty to opera was a public service.
a. Music for educational purposes or for children’s performance figured among
his oeuvre.
3. Britten composed seventeen works for the lyric stage.
a. After World War II, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, and Gloriana figured early.
b. Among other later pieces, The Turn of the Screw, A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and Death in Venice have entered the international repertory.
C. A Modern Anti-Hero: Britten’s Peter Grimes
1. Britten’s opera Peter Grimes can be read as relating to his own experiences.
2. He and Peter Pears, his lifelong companion and the tenor who premiered several of his
roles, were conscientious objectors at the beginning of World War II and moved to the United
States.
3. They returned to the United Kingdom in 1942. Grimes was written during this period.
4. Britten alters the original story to portray Grimes more sympathetically.
a. He is an outsider, condemned by social convention (by those who previously
had allowed what they now criticize).
b. Grimes is banished and talked into committing suicide—reflecting the
predicament that modern artists (such as Pears and Britten) face.
c. That Britten saw such attitudes toward homosexuals in British society has often
been described.
5. Britten uses interludes as a form of authorial commentary.
D. “The Composer’s Duty”
1. Britten wished to be “used” by society in a way that would allow his talent to advance
the humanities.
2. The tangible outcome of this desire was the War Requiem (1962).
3. This was Britten’s “sermon” to artists on their responsibilities to the larger community.
a. His warnings on pressures from the left and right resonate today.
IV. Messiaen
A. Olivier Messiaen: “The Charm of Impossibilities”
1. The most important figure in France at this time was Messiaen.
2. Whereas Copland, Shostakovich, and Britten composed for society; and Schoenberg,
Webern, and others composed for history; Messiaen composed for truth, “timeless truth.”
3. Messiaen was Catholic and an active church musician.
a. He was the most preeminent organist-composer of the twentieth century.
b. He was an influential teacher.
4. Messiaen published an account of his techniques and the theory behind his music.
B. The Quartet for the End of Time
1. Messiaen’s most famous work, Quartet for the End of Time, was composed while he
was in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940.
a. The unusual instrumentation was dictated by what was at hand.
2. The title can refer to the Apocalypse—the end of time and the end of conventional
ideas of rhythm and meter.
3. Messiaen also sought new conventions for melody and harmony.
a. He invented “modes of limited transposition.”
1) These depend on invariance by means of symmetry. (See, for example,
the whole-tone scale.)
b. Looking at musical ideas from India, he developed “nonretrogradable
rhythms.”
c. Putting these two together, one arrives at the time-transcending “truth” that
Messiaen espouses.
4. Messiaen drew upon Medieval ideas associated with the isorhythm and complicated
fourteenth-century mensural notation.
a. He saw music history as evolutions in melody (Middle Ages) through harmony
to the twentieth-century’s concern for rhythm.
b. He incorporated rhythmic aspects of Greek and Hindu music, even with older
techniques (like isorhythm).
c. He used these in Quartet for the End of Time.
5. The Quartet for the End of Time demonstrates several facets of Messiaen’s music.
a. There is bird song.
b. The piano part is isorhythmic; the rhythmic cycle derives from a thirteenthcentury Sanskrit treatise. (It consists of seventeen durations.)
c. The pitch cycle is twenty-nine chords.
d. The surrounding parts are also organized according to Messiaen’s interpretation
of music and religion.
e. The individual movements are explored in the text.
C. Rhythm, Color, and Bird Song
1. Most of Messiaen’s music has Christian titles and themes, although some intertwine
faith and secular passion.
2. One example is his Turangalîla-symphonie, which premiered in 1949.
a. It requires a huge orchestra and lasts seventy-five minutes.
1) This includes fifteen percussion instruments for eight performers and a
virtuoso piano part (among the six keyboard instruments).
b. The title consists of two Sanskrit words meaning measurement of time by
movement + the play of the divine will of the cosmos. (Also the force of love.)
c. The music seemingly represents many things: love, joy, time, movement,
rhythm, life and death.
3. Bird song was a major part of Messiaen’s compositional inspiration.
a. He collected bird songs.
b. He wrote a treatise on bird song that is over 4,000 pages in length.
4. Messiaen’s music is complicated and difficult, but it has been relatively popular and
has a devoted following.
5. He saw himself presented with four dilemmas for which he sought understanding:
a. To preach to atheists.
b. To bring the sounds of birds to people who lived in cities.
c. To help those who cannot see color in music.
d. To enlighten people as to the variety available in rhythm.