Book Review and Commentary
What is American?Seeking the Elusive
By Paul M. SomersClassical Music in America: a History of Its Rise and Fall, by Joseph Horowitz. (W. W. Norton and Co. New York. $39.95)
Joseph Horowitz is the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra Festival Consultant and Humanities Coordinator
As with most books worth reading, Classical Music in America: a History of Its Rise and Fall by Joseph Horowitz effectively reaches far beyond its stated borders. Any social historian will find it at least informative and quite possibly revelatory. Mr. Horowitz traces the history of American music by relating the social conditions which spawned its various manifestations. By focusing on individual persons - often those tangential to the actual music: Henry Higginson, the businessman who was the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Henry Krehhbiel, the New York Tribune critic and supporter of Anton Seidl, Dvorák, and Jeannette Thurber, among others - Horowitz traces the rise of American music.
The differences between Boston and New York, so disparate in attitudes as to have caused them to be political enemies had they been neighboring nations, are shown to have instead, quite unwittingly contributed substantially to the American musical mosaic. The views on what would make music American and the means to supply it to audiences even today stand in a tension which Horowitz presents in his elegantly readable prose as functions of individual entrepreneurship, sense of educational duty, and degree of acceptance of racial and social diversity. He pays great attention to the important place of women in the support and nurture of classical music organizations in America.
It is Horowitz's contention, well backed up by his marshalling of evidence, that the culture 150 years ago was more about the music than the performer or conductor. "What makes OAmerican music'" was an important ongoing conversation, as it was in the worlds of arts and letters. He mentions various mid-19th-century composers, most prominently Louis Moreau Gottschalk and William Henry Fry. In ottschalk he touches upon the expected Creole/African maverick and exotic themes in Americana. With Fry, while he understandably describes the composer's frustration at criticism of the Santa Claus Symphony, and even talks about his Macbeth Overture. Yet Horowitz ignores the composer's greatest stab at true Americana, the amazingly pictorial Niagara Symphony. It is in the same tradition of the naturalist painters of the era and is surely the most vivid picture of turbulent water since Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture and Wagner's Overture to The Flying Dutchman. The piece even bolsters the maverick
aspect of Fry by concluding with an unresolved *diminished triad, something even Wagner never dared in his much revered "Music of the Future."The importance of Jeannette Thurber through her bringing of Dvorák to America, as well as through her opera company, is carefully, even lovingly limned. Horowitz clearly admires her, and well he and we should. He also admires and frequently quotes Krehbiel in discussing not only Dvorák, Thurber, and Seidl, but he also is appreciative of the critic's socially conscious and perceptive writing about where true American music would find its voice. Perhaps Horowitz found it too far from the subject, but it is worth noting that the editorial mix of Dvorák and Krehbiel in the New York Tribune fell on fertile soil when the young W. E. B. DuBois found early inspiration in their writings. Not only is Dvorák (with assistanace from Krehbiel) a stepfather, as it were, of American music but a stepfather of the American civil-rights movement.
It is in the person of Seidl that Horowitz finds the focus for his discussion of the "sacralization of music":
"... America's musical high culture has at all times (alas) been less about music composed by Americans than about American concerts of music composed by Europeans. Preponderantly, peculiarly, it is a culture of performance. And here the theme of sacralization - of the pious content and moral power of art - has rung vividly. More than Europeans, Americans have worshipped
musical masterpieces and deified their exponents."This deification or sacralization, of course, calcified the repertoire by placing the performers on the altar next to the composers and compositions themselves. Horowitz also suggests that American opera, which showed so much promise in the 1880s and 90s never got off the ground because we do not sing foreign operas in English and so have no habit of hearing that language attached to viable works.
The remainder of the book is a description, piece by piece and person by person, of what Horowitz considers to be the fall of American music. While the elevation of the conductor (in the person of Toscaninni) to god-like status is described in such detail that one can now constantly see the result, the book develops some holes in the "Decline" section. As Horowitz describes twentieth century composers and performers he makes clear that he admires to a certain extent mavericks (a group now becoming belatedly accepted in today's programming). He finds fault with some more mainstream composers while also suggesting their strengths. His is an account which, while seeming to be a balanced view of the pros and cons of American music, is actually a comparison with the likes of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and others who came to our shores as refugees. For Horowitz, it seems the elusive "American voice" remains elusive. No matter who he describes (and he leaves out some important voices, most notably Norman Dello Joio), they seem to pale next to the strong voices from Europe which he describes immediately before the Americans.
Even Roy Harris's virile Americanism in his Symphony no. 3 he feels fails at its conclusion to measure up. Piston, described immediately after glowing remarks about Stravinsky, is dismissed as being too Boston elitist and watered down in comparison, forgetting that he composed a *trio section redolent with barn dance music just as Schubert used *Ländler, and even ignoring the ineffable Americanism of the "Circus March" from The Incredible Flutist.
The largest hole, and it is vast, in Horowitz's consideration is that it barely mentions chamber music, emntioning it on only seven pages of the volume. While he mentions Barber's over-famous Adagio for Strings, he misses a chance to segue into the obvious discussion of the place of chamber music, since the Adagio is the slow movement from a string quartet.
Where is the consideration of Amy Beach's Piano Trio? Where is the comparison between the effects of Copland's original Applachian Spring and the later orchestrated version? The earlier version's spareness and less brassy sensibility speaks more deeply to a rural, more earthy sound and is therefore, to my ear, far more "American."
I would not be without Horowitz's book. It is a must read. But its theme, like the search for the "great American novel," remains unresolved and unsatisfied. Horowitz, like J. R. R. Tolkien, feels that mythology lies at the heart of a national music. He puts forth Longfellow's Hiawatha as a candidacy which failed. This writer finds Walt Whitman's expansive Americanism more compelling over the long haul, and finds the many American (and European) musical works using his words to be moving.
We Americans cannot have a mythology, for we are too polyglot and too new. We contain all mythologies and therefore have none of our own. Perhaps the American experiment itself and our conscious celebration of it is our substitute for a national mythology. What makes American music American is its multiplicity of faces. It is a country where Milton Babbit can not need an audience, where Ives can renew his world of memory, and whyere bassist Edgar Meyer can write a violin concerto influenced by Appalachian folk music. It is found in the first celebration of the Fourth of July, a solemn service of religious music sung by the German Moravians of Salem, North Carolina, and revealed in their determination that they would sing as much as possible in English, but any German sung was just as American as any English.
We have no mythology; we have instead the pre-existing native myths, our founding documents, our horrible stain of slavery, and our tales of pioneers and of the railroad. We have our own conflicts and their resolutions or lack thereof. They are rooted in Europe, and to ignore that part of our history and culture would be self-destructive.
But American music is non-restrictive, stretching from rap to Rouse, from Lenape chant to American Idol.
Let me suggest that we do have a need for art music, but that if history teaches us anything it is that what that sounds like changes enormously. To listen to Machaut or *isorhythmic motets is like listening to music from another world. Today there are young, as yet unknown composers raised with the enormous variety and vitality of American music who will continue the traditions which have always lain at the root of art music: complex structure, emotional shape - intellect and heart in combination and in balance. It is just that their music is quite possibly going to be like "music from another world" to our ears. We will be - perhaps already are - living in an ars nova world with our ars antiqua sensibilities.
And I shall personally be surprised if this ars nova world includes orchestras as they are presently constituted, and I'm not to sure about the future of the standard concert instruments. And whatever happens, it will be American music. That is certain.
So Horowitz's book is fascinating as a history, but its dependency on Europe as a gauge of what is American or not does not ring true for this reader, nor does its dependence on cities for taking the temperature of high culture in modern America.
Pre-Columbian native culture was anything but monolithic; several European cultures placed their marks on America and its music in varied ways; and we have led the way in the worship of the star (for it is the same impulse as the admiration of the lone white-hat-gunman like Shane), even though that impulse was present in depths of human pre-history.
(See accompanying review of Raritan River Music Festival.)