Global Influence Versus Local Inspiration in Classical Music: An Instance from the Turn of the Twentieth Century
BY TOM C. OWENS
As the United States stood poised to take a more prominent political and cultural role as a world power at the turn of the twentieth century, debate raged over the formation and character of distinctively American artistic forms and traditions. Within the art or classical music tradition, this conversation was particularly intense in its ferocity. It is intriguing to look at the formation of these traditions in the context of a globalization of European, largely Germanic, ideas about musical style and aesthetics and a series of reactions to these principles by American composers, critics, and other significant musical figures.
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a group of composers centered in Boston became the first Americans to achieve wide-spread, international success in symphonic and chamber composition. Sometimes known as the Second New-England School, this group—John Knowles Paine, George Chadwick, Horatio Parker, and Amy Beach—were all born in the United States but had substantial European training. Paine, Chadwick, and Parker followed the expected career path for American musicians—study with well-known teachers at home, then finishing in Germany with prominent pedagogues such as Josef Rheinberger and Salmon Jadassohn. As a woman, and the wife of a prominent Boston physician, Beach could not pursue formal study in Europe, but she was accepted by the others as an equal, wrote in a similar style, and achieved considerable fame. Ensembles such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Kneisel [string] Quartet, and the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston all played and promoted the works of the School. Writing in traditional genres such as the symphony, concerto, and sacred music, these composers embodied the possibility of a distinctly American classical music, tradition, stemming from Germany, but becoming distinct from its roots. Thus, music was an expression of an ideal beauty in reference to a specific set of external circumstances. Chadwick wrote of adapting “certain materials at hand” in order to form a “unity of form and contents . . . the appropriate relation of its outside and inside” (Tick and Beaudoin 2008, 305). One can interpret this understanding of music as a direct outgrowth of German thought about music as a universal; yet, there is room in Chadwick’s formulation to allow for adaptation to different conditions, such as a new national context. Critics of his day and since have sometimes regarded Chadwick as the creator of a distinctively American symphonic style, albeit one that seemed to leave little overt impression on subsequent generations of composers.
Much discussion in the 1890s centered on just what musical material was germane to an American classical music, and to some extent over whether such a thing was even possible. Classical music was clearly a transplant and had been defined by prominent Boston critics such as John Sullivan Dwight in language that rang of German idealism. Music was a spiritually uplifting, almost holy experience, and composers such as Beethoven marked its highest realm. Yet, an Americanist drive for intellectual independence had been present in the arts at least since Emerson’s “American Scholar” (1837). The writer and literary critic Hamlin Garland had succinctly summed it up in 1894: “to imitate is fatal . . . localism is no ban to a national literature” (Garland 1894, 36). For those who wished to have a distinctly American classical music, the question was what local musical tradition could serve as a basis for a music that was at once national and yet also part of the classical tradition in terms of aesthetics and genre.
One influential and much debated answer came from a seemingly unlikely source, the Bohemian composer Antonin Dvořák, who had been hired in 1892 to direct the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Known for his use of Czech folk tunes in his own compositions, Dvořák suggested a similar basis for an autochthonous American music: “The future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies…. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American” (Tick and Beaudoin 2008, 309). This assertion of the necessity of a basis in folk music for classical composition traces itself back to the German Romanticism of figures such as Ludwig Tiek, and echoes strongly in the writings of Richard Wagner. Somewhat ironically, however, it stood in opposition to the equally German universalism of art trumpeted by the Boston establishment, whose viewpoint is clear in an unsigned article in the Boston Herald, of 28 May 1893: “If Dr. Dvořák has been correctly reported, he greatly overestimates the influence that national melodies and folk-songs have exercised on the higher formations of musical art” (Tick and Beaudoin 2008, 313). The article then continues in terms alternately universalist and racist: “During the present century musical art has overstepped all national limits; it is no longer a mere question of Italian, German, French, English, Slavonic, or American music but of world music….. Dr. Dvořák is probably unacquainted with what has already been accomplished in the higher forms of music by composers in America. In my estimation, it is a preposterous idea to say that in future American music will rest upon such an alien foundation as the melodies of a yet largely undeveloped race” (Tick and Beaudoin 2008, 313).
The controversy over Dvořák’s ideas percolated through the 1890s and beyond. Composers as varied as Aaron Copland and Duke Ellington felt and manifested the direct or indirect influence of his thought and teaching. One of the most interesting responses to Dvořák’s ideas, from a composer just coming into creative maturity in the 1890s, is that of Charles Ives, who entered Yale University in 1894, and who studied there with Horatio Parker. Ives’s training and outlook on composition could not have been much more different from that of Parker or Chadwick. The son of a Civil War bandmaster and musical jack-of-all-trades from Danbury, Connecticut, Ives saw no need to travel to Europe for further study. He benefitted enormously from his work with Parker, who gave him a firm grounding in the forms and materials of classical composition, but he resolutely forged his own synthesis of American and European styles, genres, and traditions. Ives’s most overt response to Dvořák’s ideas comes in his Essays Before a Sonata, a book detailing his philosophy of composition that Ives published as an accompaniment to his Second Piano Sonata in 1920. His language and metaphor are intentionally American in tone, but the content of his though partakes of both sides of the argument I have described. He begins with an autobiographical account of a composer who is attracted by the “vigor,” the “depth of feeling,” and the “natural soil rhythm” of the “simple but acute ‘Gospel Hymns of the New England camp meetin’,’ of a generation or so ago” (Ives 1970, 80-1). The language, particularly the reference to the “soil” recalls Hamlin Garland and many other Americanist writers of the nineteenth century, but the point seems to lean toward Dvořák’s localist view on inspiration. Ives then embodies the spirit he associates with Anglo-American gospel hymnody in an idealized character: “‘Aunt Sarah,’ who . . . after a fourteen hour workday on the farm, would hitch up and drive five miles through mud and rain to ‘prayer meetin’” (Ives 1970, 81). Concluding the argument, he turns obliquely to Dvořák and his followers. If a composer
can reflect the fervency of such a spirit, he may find there a local color that will do all the world good. If his music can but catch that ‘spirit’ by being a part with itself, it will come somewhere near his ideal—and it will be American, too, perhaps nearer so that that of the devotee of Indian or negro melody. 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 (Ives 1970, 81).
Ives is thus a localist who appeals to the universalist argument. He has created a synthesis of the strands of the previous generation’s argument, redefining its terms and speaking it in a slightly exaggerated Yankee drawl. Ives, however, wrote in relative obscurity at the dawn of the Jazz Age. His belated recognition as a composer came largely in the late 1930s and 40s: he won the Pulitzer for his third symphony, composed 1904-11, after its premiere performance in 1947. In the meantime, the precipitous rise in importance and influence of jazz and other African-American inspired genres in the music of composers such as Gershwin, Stravinsky, Weill, Ravel, and Milhaud reflect a new round of cultural globalization, this time originating in the United States and reshaping both popular and classical music in Germany, France, and eventually worldwide. The terms of the argument and the sound of the music changed drastically, but the underlying process of influence, both musical and philosophical, aided by the increased pace of communication and travel in the twentieth century and beyond, only accelerates.
Tom C. Owens (towens1@gmu.edu) is Professor at the Department of Music (http://music.gmu.edu/) at George Mason University. He teaches Music History in Society I, Advanced Topics in Music History (Program Music: 1880-1921), and Popular Music in America
REFERENCES
Garland, Hamlin. 1894. Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama. Chicago and Cambridge: Stone and Kimball.
Ives, Charles. 1970. Essays Before a Sonata The Majority, and Other Writings. Ed. Howard Boatwright. New York: W. W. Norton.
Tick, Judith and Paul Beaudoin. 2008. Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion. New York: Oxford University Press.
