Forefathers
“From the beginning the American composer labored under an assumption that crippled his or her creativity: any innovation, any departure from European precedent, would be interpreted as a technical deficiency” writes Kyle Gann in the first chapter of American Music in the Twentieth Century. He argues that a characteristic “inferiority complex” inflicted American composers, causing them to emulate traditional harmony and musical precedent even more strictly than the more liberal European composers like Wagner, Berlioz, Franck, and Liszt did themselves. It is fascinating to contemplate how our puritanical roots have played a hand in the canonization of the Classical genre in this country; Gann argues that the American preference for conservative (and seemingly more pious) composers like Mendelssohn, Bach, Dvorak, and Brahms can be related to our historical penance and adherence to religious dogmatism. From their earliest generations on this continent, European Americans have been conditioned to distrust, even scorn, the aesthetics, lifestyle, and freer sexual practices of the bohemian artist. (If you think about it, the first “great” American novel revolves around the ostracism of a woman shunned for her affair with a Puritan minister). Thus, we can observe the stale, polite rise of political correctness in the compositions of George Whitefield Chadwick, Amy Beach, Horatio Parker, and the forgotten works of Edward MacDowell.
Gann seems to be arguing that Americans have an obsession with conforming to the rules and a reverence for European culture. This is a very interesting argument, but I am very suspicious that it overlooks one of the most distinctive American traits: protest. Rebellion is as intrinsic to the American character as legalism; these two opposing dualities can account for most of the drama of our nation’s history. Is it possible that early American music seems devoid of allegedly “serious music” because this was not in keeping with aesthetics that accompanied the social upheaval and restructuring that resulted in the American Revolution? Colonial America may not have had much use for the music closely associated with the patronage of European monarchies.
Considering the much-touted Yankee ingenuity and prudence, it seems logical that the music favored by these early WASP-y Americans would serve a specific social function or industrious purpose. For example, William Billings’ revolutionary war song “Chester” bears some of the criteria of avant-garde works that we established in our discussion last week, particularly its blatantly political message and ultimate goal of protesting the status quo:
Let tyrants shake their iron rods
And slavery clank its galling chains
We fear them not, we trust in God.
New England’s God forever reigns.
We see in this form that the American patriotic song seeks to be self-referential, anecdotal, and galvanizing in a single pursuit: the quest to define our own Americanness.
Additionally, I find it strange that Gann largely restricts his discussion of the transfusion of a distinctly American music to the New England region (though he does discuss New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk and allude to African, Creole, Native American, and Scotch-Irish musical heritages). Since we see New Englanders like Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles, etc., take center stage in continuing the tradition of European symphonists, it seems that the American South and Old West are subtly cast as backward: slave plantations, an infinite treeless plain, hostile mountainous and desert regions, that cultural vacuum that celebrities must cross by airplane to reach Los Angeles from New York City. Yet, if we want to trace the emergence of an American musical vernacular, the Monroe Doctrine teaches us that we can discover it by following the Erie Canal, Transcontinental Railroad, Trail of Tears, Underground Railroad, and Oregon Trail. Perhaps American experimentalism has never lain dormant at all; rather, in its early form, we can see this adventurous, nonconformist, tradition nose-thumbing know-how applied externally in the quest for survival and Westward expansion. What I am suggesting is the alteration between the introspective, spiritually-charged reflections of the idealist with rationalism and survivalism.
Even if musical examples of formal composition are lacking [or more likely, I am not aware of them], there is ample material American literature to document this phenomena, most iconically probably in Mark Twain’s writing. But what happened to an avant-garde American composer/artist in the frontier? The first option is idealism (or flat-out denial?) as described by Wilfrid Mellers when describing the New England symphonists:
A dream-evocation of the Old World as it never was or could have been … Most nineteenth century American music ... manifested a passive veneration for the Teutonic, which represented Art; and was usually well written, cheerful, and agreeable: a pretence that the wilderness did not exist, that the heart was not a “lonely hunter” (Gann 2).
Up until the end of the nineteenth century, I would argue that the alternative for a composer consisted in either transforming oneself into a farmer (evolving for the unique demands of a new environment), or to put it bleakly, not surviving. Willa Cather’s example of the Czechoslovakian violinist Mr. Shimerda in My Ántonia comes to mind. This sensitive, old-world musician shoots his head off during his first winter of isolation on the expansive, forlorn Nebraska prairie. (This is, after all, virtually the same landscape as Dvorak’s sojourn to Spillville, Iowa). I could refer to this as a “symbolic death” of Old World culture: a pitfall of Americans’ freedom to do “whatever we want” can also signify the ability of the society to ignore, bury, and fail to support its innovative artists.
Is it possible that urbanization and modernization are both necessary to usher in the individuality expressed in the music of Ives, Ruggles, and Griffes?
Thankfully, Charles Ives was fortunate enough to be safely insulated from the pressures of surviving on the frontier, had access to sound formal training in composition at Harvard, gained an inquisitiveness about polytonalities, quotation techniques, dissonant sonorities, and experimentalism from his father, and the possessed the foresight to compose in near isolation. What we see here is a man enshrined in a Connecticut whitewashed, prim, and cultivated chapel of singular genius. Does it help sometimes to be cloistered this way when embarking in an unknown territory?
