Chapter 1. A General Survey

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_ CHAPTER I. A GENERAL SURVEY

Coddling is no longer the chief need of the American composer. While he still wants encouragement in his good tendencies,--much more encouragement than he gets, too,--he is now strong enough to profit by the discouragement of his evil tendencies.

In other words, the American composer is ready for criticism.

The first and most vital flaw of which his work will be accused is the lack of nationalism. This I should like to combat after the sophistic fashion of Zeno,--showing, first, why we lack that desideratum, a strictly national school; secondly, that a strictly national school is not desirable; and thirdly, that we most assuredly have a national school.

In building a national individuality, as in building a personal individuality, there is always a period of discipleship under some older power. When the rudiments and the essentials are once thoroughly mastered, the shackles of discipleship are thrown off, and personal expression in an original way begins. This is the story of every master in every art: The younger Raphael was only Perugino junior. Beethoven's first sonatas were more completely Haydn's than the word "gewidmet" would declare. The youthful Canova was swept off his feet by the unearthing of old Greek masterpieces. Stevenson confesses frankly his early efforts to copy the mannerisms of Scott and others. Nations are only clusters of individuals, and subject to the same rules. Italy borrowed its beginnings from Byzantium; Germany and France took theirs from Italy; we, ours, from them.

It was inconceivable that America should produce an autocthonous art. The race is one great mixture of more or less digested foreign elements; and it is not possible to draw a declaration of artistic, as of political, independence, and thenceforward be truly free.

Centuries of differentiated environment (in all the senses of the word environment) are needed to produce a new language or a new art; and it was inevitable that American music should for long be only a more or less successful employment of European methods. And there was little possibility, according to all precedents in art history, that any striking individuality should rise suddenly to found a school based upon his own mannerism.

Especially was this improbable, since we are in a large sense of English lineage. As the co-heirs, with those who remain in the British Isles, of the magnificent prose and poetry of England, it was possible for us to produce early in our own history a Hawthorne and a Poe and an Emerson and a Whitman. But we have had more hindrance than help from our heritage of English music, in which there has never been a master of the first rank, Purcell and the rest being, after all, brilliants of the lesser magnitude (with the permission of that electric Englishman, Mr. John F. Runciman).

A further hindrance was the creed of the Puritan fathers of our civilization; they had a granite heart, and a suspicious eye for music. Here is a cheerful example of congregational lyricism, and a lofty inspiration for musical treatment (the hymn refers to the fate of unbaptized infants):

"A crime it is! Therefore in Bliss
You may not hope to dwell;
But unto you I shall allow
The easiest room in Hell."

It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that singing by note began to supplant the "lining-out" barbarism, and to provoke such fierce opposition as this:

"First, it is a new way--an unknown tongue; 2d, it is not so melodious as the old way; 3d, there are so many tunes that nobody can learn them; 4th, the new way makes a disturbance in churches, grieves good men, exasperates them, and causes them to behave disorderly; 5th, it is popish; 6th, it will introduce instruments; 7th, the names of the notes are blasphemous; 8th, it is needless, the old way being good enough; 9th, it requires too much time to learn it; 10th, it makes the young disorderly."

At the time when such puerility was disturbing this cradle of freedom and cacophony, Bach and Haendel were at work in their contrapuntal webs, the Scarlattis, Corelli and Tartini and Porpora were alive. Peri, Josquin and Willaert and Lassus were dead, and the church had had its last mass from the most famous citizen of the town of Palestrina. Monteverde was no longer inventing like an Edison; Lulli had gone to France and died; and Rameau and Couperin were alive.

At this time in the world's art, the Americans were squabbling over the blasphemy of instruments and of notation! This is not the place to treat the history of our music. The curious can find enlightenment at such sources as Mr. Louis C. Elson's "National Music of America." It must be enough for me to say that the throttling hands of Puritanism are only now fully loosened. Some of our living composers recall the parental opposition that met their first inclinations to a musical career, opposition based upon the disgracefulness, the heathenishness, of music as a profession.

The youthfulness of our school of music can be emphasized further by a simple statement that, with the exception of a few names like Lowell Mason, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen A. Emery (a graceful writer as well as a theorist), and George F. Bristow, practically every American composer of even the faintest importance is now living.

The influences that finally made American music are chiefly German. Almost all of our composers have studied in Germany, or from teachers trained there; very few of them turning aside to Paris, and almost none to Italy. The prominent teachers, too, that have come from abroad have been trained in the German school, whatever their nationality. The growth of a national school has been necessarily slow, therefore, for its necessary and complete submission to German influences.

It has been further delayed by the meagre native encouragement to effort of the better sort. The populace has been largely indifferent,--the inertia of all large bodies would explain that. A national, a constructive, and collaborative criticism has been conspicuously absent.

The leaders of orchestras have also offered an almost insurmountable obstacle to the production of any work from an American hand until very recently. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has been a noble exception to this rule, and has given about the only opening possible to the native writer. The Chicago Orchestra, in eight seasons under Theodore Thomas, devoted, out of a total of 925 numbers, only eighteen, or something less than two per cent., to native music. Yet time shows a gradual improvement, and in 1899, out of twenty-seven orchestral numbers performed, three were by Americans, which makes a liberal tithe. The Boston Symphony has played the compositions of John Knowles Paine alone more than eighteen times, and those of George W. Chadwick the same number, while E.A. MacDowell and Arthur Foote each appeared on the programs fourteen times. The Kaltenborn Orchestra has made an active effort at the promulgation of our music, and especial honor is due to Frank Van der Stucken, himself a composer of marked abilities; he was among the first to give orchestral production to American works, and he was, perhaps, the very first to introduce American orchestral work abroad. Like his offices, in spirit and effect, have been the invaluable services of our most eminent pianist, Wm. H. Sherwood, who was for many years the only prominent performer of American piano compositions.

Public singers also have been most unpatriotic in preferring endless repetition of dry foreign arias to fresh compositions from home. The little encore song, which generally appeared anonymously, was the opening wedge for the American lyrist.

Upon the horizon of this gloom, however, there is a tremor of a dawning interest in national music. Large vocal societies are giving an increasing number of native part songs and cantatas; prizes are being awarded in various places, and composers find some financial encouragement for appearing in concerts of their own work. Manuscript societies are organized in many of the larger cities, and these clubs offer hearing to novelty. There have latterly appeared, from various publishers, special catalogues vaunting the large number of American composers represented on their lists.

Another, and a most important sign of the growing influence of music upon American life, is seen in the place it is gaining in the college curriculum; new chairs have been established, and prominent composers called to fill them, or old professorships that held merely nominal places in the catalogue have been enlarged in scope. In this way music is reestablishing itself in something like its ancient glory; for the Greeks not only grouped all culture under the general term of "Music," but gave voice and instrument a vital place in education. Three of our most prominent composers fill the chairs at three of the most important universities. In all these cases, however, music is an elective study, while the rudiments of the art should, I am convinced, be a required study in every college curriculum, and in the common schools as well.

Assuming then, for the nonce, the birth--we are too new a country to speak of a Renascence--of a large interest in national music, there is large disappointment in many quarters, because our American music is not more American. I have argued above that a race transplanted from other soils must still retain most of the old modes of expression, or, varying them, change slowly. But many who excuse us for the present lack of a natural nationalism, are so eager for such a differentiation that they would have us borrow what we cannot breed.

The folk-music of the negro slaves is most frequently mentioned as the right foundation for a strictly American school. A somewhat misunderstood statement advanced by Dr. Antonin Dvorak, brought this idea into general prominence, though it had been discussed by American composers, and made use of in compositions of all grades long before he came here.

The vital objection, however, to the general adoption of negro music as a base for an American school of composition is that it is in no sense a national expression. It is not even a sectional expression, for the white Southerners among whose slaves this music grew, as well as the people of the North, have always looked upon negro music as an exotic and curious thing. Familiar as it is to us, it is yet as foreign a music as any Tyrolean jodel or Hungarian czardas.

The music of the American Indian, often strangely beautiful and impressive, would be as reasonably chosen as that of these imported Africs. E.A. MacDowell had, indeed, written a picturesque and impressive Indian suite, some time before the Dvorakian invasion. He asserts that the Indian music is preferable to the Ethiopian, because its sturdiness and force are more congenial with the national mood.

But the true hope for a national spirit in American music surely lies, not in the arbitrary seizure of some musical dialect, but in the development of just such a quality as gives us an individuality among the nations of the world in respect to our character as a people; and that is a Cosmopolitanism made up of elements from all the world, and yet, in its unified qualities, unlike any one element. Thus our music should, and undoubtedly will, be the gathering into the spirit of the voices of all the nations, and the use of all their expressions in an assimilated, a personal, a spontaneous manner. This need not, by any means, be a dry, academic eclecticism. The Yankee, a composite of all peoples, yet differs from them all, and owns a sturdy individuality. His music must follow the same fate.

As our governmental theories are the outgrowth of the experiments and experiences of all previous history, why should not our music, voicing as it must the passions of a cosmopolitan people, use cosmopolitan expressions? The main thing is the individuality of each artist. To be a citizen of the world, provided one is yet spontaneous and sincere and original, is the best thing. The whole is greater than any of its parts.

Along just these lines of individualized cosmopolitanism the American school is working out its identity. Some of our composers have shown themselves the heirs of European lore by work of true excellence in the larger classic and romantic forms.

The complaint might be made, indeed, that the empty, incorrect period of previous American music has given place to too much correctness and too close formation on the old models. This is undoubtedly the result of the long and faithful discipleship under German methods, and need not be made much of in view of the tendency among a few masters toward original expression. For, after all, even in the heyday of the greatest art periods, only a handful of artists have ever stood out as strongly individual; the rest have done good work as faithful imitators and past masters in technic. It is, then, fortunate that there is any tendency at all among any of our composers to forsake academic content with classical forms and text-book development of ideas.

Two things, however, are matters for very serious disappointment: the surprising paucity of musical composition displaying the national sense of humor, and the surprising abundance of purest namby-pamby. The presence of the latter class might be explained by the absence of the former, for namby-pamby cannot exist along with a healthy sense of the ludicrous. There has been a persistent craze among native song-writers for little flower-dramas and bird-tragedies, which, aiming at exquisiteness, fall far short of that dangerous goal and land in flagrant silliness. This weakness, however, will surely disappear in time, or at least diminish, until it holds no more prominent place than it does in all the foreign schools, where it exists to a certain extent.

The scherzo, however, must grow in favor. It is impossible that the most jocose of races, a nation that has given the world an original school of humor, should not carry this spirit over into its music. And yet almost none of the comparatively few scherzos that have been written here have had any sense of the hilarious jollity that makes Beethoven's wit side-shaking. They have been rather of the Chopinesque sort, mere fantasy. To the composers deserving this generalization I recall only two important exceptions, Edgar S. Kelley and Harvey Worthington Loomis.

The opportunities before the American composer are enormous, and only half appreciated. Whereas, in other arts, the text-book claims only to be a chronicle of what has been done before, in music the text-book is set up as the very gospel and decalogue of the art. The theorists have so thoroughly mapped out the legitimate resources of the composer, and have so prescribed his course in nearly every possible position, that music is made almost more of a mathematical problem than the free expression of emotions and aesthetics. "Correct" music has now hardly more liberty than Egyptian sculpture or Byzantine painting once had. Certain dissonances are permitted, and certain others, no more dissonant, forbidden, quite arbitrarily, or on hair-splitting theories. It is as if one should write down in a book a number of charts, giving every scheme of color and every juxtaposition of values permissible to a painter. The music of certain Oriental nations, in which the religious orders are the art censors, has stuck fast in its rut because of the observance of rules purely arbitrary. Many of the conventions of modern European music are no more scientific or original or consistent; most of them are based upon the principle that the whim of a great dead composer is worthy to be the law of any living composer. These Blue Laws of music are constantly assailed surreptitiously and in detail; and yet they are too little attacked as a whole. But music should be a democracy and not an aristocracy, or, still less, a hierarchy.

There is a great opportunity for America to carry its political principles into this youngest of the arts. It is a gratifying sign that one of the most prominent theorists of the time, an American scholar, A.J. Goodrich, is adopting some such attitude toward music. He carries dogma to the minimum, and accepts success in the individual instance as sufficient authority for overstepping any general principle. He refers to a contemporary American composer for authority and example of some successful unconventionality with the same respect with which he would quote a European's disregard of convention. His pioneering is watched with interest abroad as well as here.

Worthy of mention along with Mr. Goodrich' original work is the effort of Homer A. Norris to instil French ideas of musical theory. As a counterweight to the German monopoly of our attention, his influence is to be cordially welcomed.

Now that Americanism is rife in the land, some of the glowing interest in things national might well be turned toward an art that has been too much and too long neglected among us.

The time has come to take American music seriously. The day for boasting is not yet here,--if indeed it ever comes; but the day of penitent humility is surely past.

A student of the times, Mr. E.S. Martin, shortly before the Spanish War, commented on the radical change that had come over the spirit of American self-regard. We were notorious in the earlier half of the century for boasting, not only of the virtues we indubitably had, but of qualities that existed solely in our own imagination. We sounded our barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. A century of almost unanimous European disapproval, particularly of our artistic estate, finally converted us from this attitude to one of deprecation almost abject. Having learned the habit of modesty, it has clung to us even now, when some of the foremost artists in the world are Americans.

Modesty, is, of course, one of the most beautiful of the virtues, but excess is possible and dangerous. As Shakespeare's Florio's Montaigne has it: "We may so seize on vertue, that if we embrace it with an over-greedy and violent desire, it may become vitious." In the case of the American composer it is certainly true that we "excessively demeane ourselves in a good action." If, then, the glory of our late successes in the field of battle shall bring about a recrudescence of our old vanity, it will at least have its compensations.

Meanwhile, the American artist, having long ago ceased to credit himself with all the virtues, has been for years earnestly working out his own salvation in that spirit of solemn determination which makes it proverbial for the American to get anything he sets his heart on. He has submitted himself to a devout study of the Old Masters and the New; he has made pilgrimage after pilgrimage to the ancient temples of art, and has brought home influences that cannot but work for good. The American painter has won more European acceptance than any of our other artists, though this is partly due to his persistence in knocking at the doors of the Paris salons, and gaining the universal prestige of admission there. There is, unfortunately, no such place to focus the attention of the world on a musician. Yet, through the success of American musical students among their rivals abroad; through the concerts they are giving more and more frequently in foreign countries; through the fact that a number of European music houses are publishing increasing quantities of American compositions, he is making his way to foreign esteem almost more rapidly than at home.

A prominent German critic, indeed, has recently put himself on record as accepting the founding of an American school of music as a fait accompli. And no student of the times, who will take the trouble to seek the sources of our art, and observe its actual vitality, need be ashamed of looking at the present state of music in America with a substantial pride and a greater hope for the future. _

Read next: Chapter 2. The Innovators

Read previous: Foreword

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