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AMERICAN MUSIC (GENERAL SURVEY)

The most characteristic American music combines elements of the cultures of two or more national or ethnic groups that have come to the New World.*

The history of American music may be divided into two major periods, (1) music written before America achieved artistic and aesthetic parity with the rest of the West (c. 1607 - c. 1929), and (2) the internationally important music of the recent past (1929 to present). Two factors determined the development of American music: immigration within a relatively short time to a largely empty continent and the predominance of the English settlers in the new land. The virtually unopposed tenure of the English thoroughly defined America's politics, religion, and language during the first two centuries, so that all succeeding ethnic groups had to choose between assimilation with or isolation from the Anglo-Saxon mainstream. Unequivocal evidence of English influence is found in traditional religious and folk or popular music, but there are indications of other influences, less easily traced to their origins. Although the precise process is difficult to determine, it would seem that various melodic inflections and rhythms of later ethnic groups were grafted onto the Anglo-Saxon stock. Thus, though the immigrants' native languages were abandoned for English, those elements of language, accent, and inflection that are essentially musical were integrated into the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture as music.

Also important was the importation of European art music and of professional European musicians. For example, the English version of Weber's Der Freischutz* (Berlin, 1821), performed in London in 1824, was brought to New York in 1825. Performances by traveling companies could not help but influence musical taste. Just as significant was the influx of professional musicians, many of whom left Europe because of political upheavals ranging from the French Revolution to the present. They transmitted European standards of musical excellence and craftmanship, without them American music would have remained provincial.

The development of American music took place in four stages: 1607-1790, the period of English influence; 1790-1865, the period of European professional influence; 1865-1929, the period of the second school of New England* composers; 1929 to the present, the arrival of American music on the international scene.

1607-1790. Presumably many of the early colonists at Jamestown (1607), Plymouth (1620), and Massachusetts Bay (1629) brought with them their native English music, sacred and secular; but only in the case of the northern settlements is the record clear.

Until 1700, however, the smallness of the population, the hard pioneer life, and the Puritan attitude of disapproval toward the lively arts inhibited more active musical development. However, although there are references in contemporary records to a few musical

instruments and even indications of musical scholarship, the Puritan colonists seem to have viewed secular amusements and excessive pleasures with suspicion and distrust.



Concerts in American colonial cities began to be held in the 18th century and apparently followed closely the advent of professional musicians who played for church, chamber, and theater. Organs were used in Episcopal services from an early date (King's Chapel,

Boston, after 1713).

Such musical amateurs as Benjamin Franklin and Francis Hopkinson (1737-91), a signer of the Declaration of Independence* and the first native-born American composer, stand out, Hopkinson for his songs in the simple and tuneful style of the contemporary London stage and Franklin for his "armonica,"* a species of mechanically spun musical glasses.

1790-1865. The American Revolution* interrupted musical activities, but afterward they were resumed, this time more intensively. In the last decade of the 18th century, a large-scale immigration from Europe brought musicians from England and, after the French Revolution, from France. Attracted by opportunities arising from the growing urban culture of the East Coast, singing actors, instrumentalists, and dancing masters immigrated, many of them equally at home in choirloft and theater. They had a lasting effect on American music. They molded musical taste, and through their publishing firms and music shops they satisfied the demand for the new music, instruments, and instruction books. As teachers, they trained almost two generations of amateurs.

The impact of the professionals began to be felt after the War of 1812. Once exposed to the sophisticated sounds of Handel, Haydn, Grétry, and J.W.A. Stamitz, church music committees and musical societies began to publish and perform only the music they considered "scientifically" correct, which was an inevitable result of the quest for cultural parity with Europe. Whether or not motivated by intellectual and aesthetic needs or merely by fashion, the establishment of such organizations for the performance of European masterworks as the Handel and Haydn Society (Boston, 1815), the Musical Fund Society (Philadelphia, 1820), and the Philharmonic Society (New York, 1842) - all of which survive today - laid the foundation for serious American art music.

1865-1929. Between the end of the Civil War* and the Great Depression of the 1920's, a spectacular growth took place in American music, fostered by rapid industrialization and an almost fourfold increase in population. After 1848, the arrival of German musicians with technical skills and aesthetic concepts of music far superior to any known in America influenced the quality of the development. By the 1920's American music had achieved an

independence.

Many immigrant groups brought their music to the New World. Families and small communities of various European extractions

clung to their Old World* traditions, including music, in America, but this music was isolated from the mainstream of American life. In the end, Africans, rather than European-Americans, made the greatest contributions to a distinctive American style.

African slaves were first brought to the Colonies* in 1619, to Jamestown.* The growth of a plantation economy in the South increased the demand for slaves greatly: more than 300,000 blacks had been brought to America by the mid-18th century; and by the time the slave trade was abolished in the 19th century, as many as 15,000,000 Africans had come to the New World. They brought their own music with them, constructing drums and other instruments similar to ones they had known in Africa and continuing traditional rituals and ceremonies. But slave owners soon suppressed all obvious manifestations of African cultural heritage, and at the same time, slaves began assimilating some of the music of their European masters. Black fiddlers accompanied white social dancing and took some of this music to their own people; the 18th century brought . Christianity to many slaves and with it the psalms and hymns as set to music by British composers.

By the early 19th century, black Americans had developed their own dialect of Christian song, with fragments of European times sung in call-and-response* patterns accompanied by hand-clapping or simple percussion instruments and with voices interacting in African-style polyphony. These shouts (or spirituals)* came to the attention of white main-stream culture in the years following the Civil War, through printed descriptions and transcriptions and through public performances of triadic, tonal arrangements of black melodies by the Fisk Jubilee Singers* and other black choirs.

Elements from Afro-American music began infiltrating several popular genres. Songwriters of the generation after Stephen Foster* produced verse-chorus songs* supposedly reflecting the life of Southern blacks in their texts and drawing on the style and mood of arranged spirituals in their choruses. By century's end, these pieces were drawing on rhythms associated with the cake-walk,* ragtime,* and other black syncopated dances. Military and community bands were popular throughout the 19th century, playing a repertory of European marches, dances, and arrangements of classical pieces. But by the 1890s, the band organized and led by John Philip Sousa* (1854-1932) had inspired a growing indigenous literature, much of it using rhythms of American syncopated dances. The popular piano repertory contained similar pieces also, culminating with the first published ragtime pieces by white composers (William Krell, Mississippi Rag, 1897) and black (Scott Joplin* Maple Leaf Rag, 1899).

In contrast, classical music remained firmly rooted in European practice and style. American orchestras were dominated by Germanic conductors, players, and repertory.

Around the turn of the century, many American composers did

begin to address the problem of making their music reflect the unique culture of their own country. At first this took the form of a belated imitation of the wave of nationalism that had swept various European countries earlier. Tunes taken from traditional music were incorporated into classical forms clinging to the harmonic, instrumental, and expressive practice of the late Romantic era. Indian melodies were drawn upon, as in Suite No. 2 ("Indian") by Edward MacDowell (1860-1908). Tunes taken from Negro spirituals and folk songs were used in the same way in The Dance in Place Congo by Henry F. Gilbert (1868-1918). Still other writers drew on elements of ragtime and early jazz, on the assumption that this was the most characteristic American "folk" music. A remarkable series of symphonies, songs, chamber and piano pieces, and choral works by Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) were the most successful compositions of the period, making use of indigenous melodic material and also developing compositional techniques unlike those of European Music. But the Ives pieces remained virtually unknown until later, when American composers were concerned with other

aesthetic matters.

The second quarter of the 20th century brought a new generation of highly talented composers, who created a succession of distinctive large-scale pieces refining the notion of musical nationalism so well that, for the first time, performers and audiences responded with enthusiasm to classical works by American writers. Typical of this period are the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland* (b. 1900); Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin (1898-1937); the film score for The River and the opera Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson* (b. 1896); and Symphony No. 3 by Roy Harris* (1898-1979). But following a pattern that had become firmly established in American music, even these pieces were seen in Europe as less distinctive and less representative of American culture than were various genres of popular and vernacular music of the day.

Several generations of popular songwriters, based mostly in New York City and led by Irvin Berlin* (b. 1888), Jerome Kern* (1885-1945), George Gershwin, Cole Porter* (1891-1964), and Richard Rodgers* (1902-79), blended elements of European melody and harmony with the syncopated rhythms of American dance music. Texts were brash and sentimental. The best of these Tin Pan Alley* songs were disseminated throughout the Western world. At the same time, black Americans were producing a unique series of interlocking musical genres - jazz, blues, gospel music, popular songs - each of which used Western instruments and harmony, overlaid with African-derived performance styles, rhythmic vitality and complexity, and intensity of expression. Traditional Anglo-American styles developed into hillbilly,* country and western,* and bluegrass music,* genres that likewise had no precedent elsewhere in the world.

Two opposing trends dominated the composition of classical

music in the United States in the decades surrounding World War II. Many composers, most of them connected with academic institutions, turned away from musical nationalism and toward contemporary European music, which was dominated by neoclassicism and serialism. Walter Piston* (1894-1976), Wallingford Riegger* (1885-1961), and Roger Sessions* (1896-1985) were among the many talented Americans producing symphonies, chamber music, and pieces of keyboard music and voice in an abstract, international style that is fully comparable in technique and expression with the best compositions of this sort written elsewhere. This trend reached a climax with a succession of highly complex serialized works by Milton Babbitt* (b. 1916), George Rochberg* (b. 1918), and many of their peers, pieces expanding the concept of totally organized music pioneered by Webern and a generation of postwar Europeans including Messiaen, Stockhausen, and Boulez. Other American composers chose to follow paths laid out most effectively by the French-born Edgard Varèse, who sought both aesthetic guidance and sound sources from the contemporary world and the products of the European avant-garde. John Cage (b. 1912) created experimental works of an unmistakably American character. He had the greatest impact, with both his compositions and writings, on any American composer of the 20th century - with the possible exception of Ives. Henry Cowell* (1897-1965) drew in part on non-Western music in creating idiosyncratic styles, and some of the most original and successful products of recent decades have been based to some extent on the sounds, techniques, and aesthetic of Asian and African music.

Although these two schools of composition - the academic and the avant-garde - proceeded from quite different premises their products resembled one another from the perspective of most performers and audiences in their inaccessibility and their increasing remoteness from common-practice harmonic and melodic materials. A younger generation of composers had managed to integrate elements from both streams while making use of electronic technology in both studio composition and live performance - often in ways suggesting a common ground with the more experimental rock music of the era.

Meanwhile, the United States has reaffirmed its leadership in popular music, with the emergence of rock'n'roll in the 1950s and a variety of rock styles in the following decades.

For more than a century and a half, popular music in the United States has absorbed elements of the cultures of many of the immigrant groups coming to the New World in large numbers and has blended these into a succession of styles unlike those found elsewhere. This music has been regarded abroad as the most distinctive and influential artistic product created by the unique culture of this country.

From: The New Harvard Dictionary of Music

CHARLES IVES, THE FIRST TRULY AMERICAN COMPOSER (1874-1954)

Charles Ives (1874-1954) is one of the most extraordinary and individual figures in the history of Western music. American music owes its existence as a separate phenomenon to his work.

In his music, many of innovatory and radical procedures adopted by younger avant-garde composers are anticipated or foreshadowed in

some degree.

Ives was born in Danbury, Connecticut, in 1874. Throughout his life he cleaved to* New England: its countryside colours his music, and its characteristic philosophy (that of Emerson* and Thoreau*) seems to have influenced his technique. His father, a town bandmaster, experimented with tone clusters, polytonality, quartertones, and acoustics, inspiring similar interests in his son. George Ives, the father, exerted an important musical influence on his son. Naturally experimental himself, he constantly encouraged Charles to tinker with unfamiliar sounds, to investigate, as it were, what music could do rather than what it merely had done. He would make Charles sing in a key different from the accompaniment "to stretch our ears".

Ives later maintained that many of the more startling effects in his music were aural memories from his childhood: memories of hymn-tunes wrongly harmonized, or of accidental coincidences of sound in a small-town environment. Ives's earliest musical training was almost entirely unconventional. When he entered Yale University, in 1894, he tried hard to absorb an academic training, but failed. In 1898 he graduated and moved to New York as a clerk in an ensurance company, taking up several organist posts.

Ives's First Symphony, a student work, and his Second Symphony (1901) mix European influences (notably Beethoven and Dvorak). Ives divided his time between business and music knowing that his music had no hope of commercial success, or even performance. While working daily in an insurance office, Ives was composing some of the most extraordinary music ever written. From this period (1901-28) date the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the Concord Sonata for piano, Three Places in New England, the Holidays Symphony, the four violin sonatas, the Tone Roads for small orchestra, and various smaller orchestral works. In 1928 Ives was forced by illness to give up composition, and in 1930 he retired from insurance and thereafter spent all his time at his farm in Connecticut. He died in 1954.

Even after his retirement his music made its way very slowly. The earliest publications were at his own expense: of the Concord Sonata in 1919 and of the 114 Songs in 1922. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s a few scattered performances were put on. But the major works remained practically known until the 1950s. The Third Symphony won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, but the Fourth Symphony

was not played at all until 1965 (when Stokowski conducted it), the Second Symphony not until 1951.

The modernisms in Ives's style are impressive precisely because they arise from philosophy rather than aesthetic theory. His potentiality and polyrhythms* gave a genuine and infectious exuberance which springs from a real contact with life.

Ives's true importance lies in having given American music self-respect. In this he represents young America as against old Europe to whom the United States were still a cultural province. And this has been the source of his strength and powers of renewal since his death.

Based on: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music; The Dictionary of Composers


Date: 2015-12-11; view: 1708


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