Ultramodernists: Henry Cowell, Edgard Varése, Ruth Crawford Seeger, the American “Five”

A salient feature of the self-proclaimed “Ultramodernists” is the razor-sharp freshness of musical thought that upon its centennial seems as pungent and seemingly unprecedented as the experimentalism of Machaut’s 14th-century isorhythmic motets or Gesualdo’s intensely chromatic Renaissance madrigals.  Ultramodernists like Henry Cowell and George Antheil coined this term for themselves in the decade following World War I as a deliberate way to insert themselves into the American musical scene in a more adventurous vein than so-called “modernists” of the time like Richard Strauss and Gustave Mahler.  Even within this progressive group, the American composers of the Roaring Twenties fall into two camps: the more liberal and progressive Pan American (1927) composers and the French-influenced neoclassicists of the League of Composers (1923).  The aim of the Pan American Association, promoting composers living in the Western Hemisphere like Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Charles Ruggles, Carlos Chavez, Edgard Varése, and Roy Harris, may be viewed as a branch of late eighteenth-century Romantic Nationalism due to its focus on composers originating from a like geographic region, even though the aesthetic goals of the Pan American composers were staunchly anti-Romantic  and pro-serialist, free dissonance, and rhythmic complexity.

I would argue that the socio-economic climate of the 1920s and 1930s gave rise to three groups of American musicians as typified by prominent conductors.  The Pan American group, largely kept afloat through the financial backing of Charles Ives, became personified by the avant-garde and brilliant conductor Nicholas Slonimsky.  First known for his ambidextrous ability to conduct Ives’ music in two simultaneous tempi, Slonimsky gradually fell out of favor with the mainstream due to his avant-garde ties.  Nonetheless, his musicological contributions such as the Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Music Since 1900, and The Lexicon of Musical Invective show an interesting development: the alignment of the emerging field of American musicology with the avant-garde.  This scholarly bias undoubtedly provides the support that propels many Pan American composers into posterity, even though these same composers led artistic lives marked largely by financial hardship and a relegation to the “fringe” of musical society.  Take for example the tragic situation of Henry Cowell, who was not only ostracized but imprisoned for his bisexuality and false allegations of an inappropriate homosexual relationship with a minor. 

Our second group of conductors/new music promoters consists of the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Serge Koussevitsky and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Leopold Stokowski.  These iconic conductors endorsed American composers belonging to the League of Composers, and the works that they commissioned reflect the influence of Stravinsky, Les Six, and a generally French-leaning, anti-Germanic trend of early 20th-century composition.  Aaron Copland serves as a prime example due to his compositional studies with Nadia Boulanger, support from the New Deal, and mass appeal to the American public through his evocative portraits of a sensationalized and nostalgically-colored American idiom.  

 (To be continued)