Difference in the Imaginations of Colin Mcphee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison
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COMPOSERS AS ETHNOGRAPHERS: DIFFERENCE IN THE IMAGINATIONS OF COLIN MCPHEE, HENRY COWELL, AND LOU HARRISON Ethan Lechner A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Music. Chapel Hill 2008 Approved by: Severine Neff (chair) Annegret Fauser David García Sarah Weiss (advisor) Philip Vandermeer © 2008 Ethan Lechner ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ETHAN LECHNER: Composers as Ethnographers: Difference in the Imaginations of Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison (Under the Direction of Sarah Weiss) This is a study of the ideas of musical difference held by three twentieth-century composers—Colin McPhee, Henry Cowell, and Lou Harrison. Each wrote about culture, and was thus in a broad sense an ethnographer, and each was influenced by non-Western musics in the development of innovative compositional techniques. I discuss how their very different views on non-Western musics were inextricable from other aspects of their professional work. I compare their ideas to those of his closest colleagues and contrast them with dominant anthropological understandings of culture difference in the twentieth century, particularly the attitude of cultural relativism dominant in Ethnomusicology. In the introduction I discuss the importance of formulations of differences to American modernist composers generally, in particular the lines of differentiation they drew among their own music, “conventional” Western music, European music, Romantic music, “Oriental music,” and “primitive music.” I argue that modernists very often formulated their representations of non-Western musics through the same process of negation of conventional ideals and styles by which they developed their own aesthetic programs. iii To my Parents, Judith and Norbert Lechner iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my committee members, Annegret Fauser, David García, Severine Neff, and Philip Vandermeer, who have all provided tremendous intellectual and personal guidance. In particular I must thank Sarah Weiss, who has been a treasured mentor and a source of inspiration. Thanks to Fulbright-Hays and the UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate School for financial assistance. Thanks to Carol Oja, Leta Miller, and David Harnish, who shared insights. There were many librarians and archivists who offered assistance in this study. In particular I would like to thank the archivists at the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archives, the New York Public Library Performing Arts Division, the Library of Congress, and the North Carolina State Archives. Also, special thanks must go to Charles Hanson at the University of California at Santa Cruz Special Collections, who dug through the as-yet uncatalogued materials in the Lou Harrison Archive to find items useful to this study. The music librarians at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have provided tremendous support and guidance for years. I am especially grateful for the courtesy and humor of Philip Vandermeer, Diane Steinhouse, and Eva Boyce. I would not have been able to start on this dissertation, let alone complete it, without the support of family and friends, colleagues and mentors. In particular I would like to thank my parents, Judith and Norbert, whose love, encouragement and wisdom have been v unceasing. Thanks to my Mother and brother Walden who proofread exactingly and offered many useful suggestions. There are many more who have shared in this effort. They are too many to name, though they should be anyway. vi PREFACE My original goal for this dissertation was to come to an understanding of cultural difference that could account for hybridity in the compositions of a variety of composers. In the end, I do not claim to have come to such an understanding, or to have arrived at an analytical approach that can account for music that subsumes difference in the manners of works as varied as Colin McPhee’s Tabuh-tabuhan , Henry Cowell’s United Quartet , and Lou Harrison’s Double Concerto. My subjects have not cooperated with that aim. Each approached the issue of cultural difference uniquely—though certainly not in isolation from others grappling with the same issues—so that I have been drawn away from my original goal of explicating a single method by which to analyze them all, and have been forced to delve more deeply into their particularities. The analyses that I have done, then, have necessarily become specific to the terms by which each of these composers dealt with the same concerns that were originally my own: namely, the bafflement of cultural difference, and how, in the context of music, differences sometimes dissolve into sameness. I had originally planned to develop a theory of intentional hybridization in composition. Through the development of the study, I have been forced to come to terms with the insight that meaning (defined broadly to encompass all aspects of musical experience) is not inherent to music but is something that arises in the moment, imputed vii by the listener willingly or unwillingly. This implies that hybridity is also not something that can be considered immanent to music and analyzed as such, but is something that must be considered in the terms by which it is ascribed. Thus, the central question of the project has been transformed from How can the hybrid qualities of the musics of various composers be understood? to How did various composers understand their musics as hybrid, on what terms did they stake their claims to hybridity, and how did they articulate their claims to others? The result is that the word hybrid , which was the central concept of the dissertation at its conception, is now practically absent from my discussion. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES………………………………………………………………………..xi LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES………………………………………………………xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS…………………………………………………………..xiii Chapter I. Introduction…………………………………………………………………….14 Similitude as a Key to Hybrid Composition…………………………………..31 Contemporary Paradigms of Constructing Difference………………………..34 Issues in this Project’s Assemblage…………………………………………...42 II. Colin McPhee and “The Absolute Music of Bali”……………………………. 49 Omission and Metaphor in A House in Bali………………………………………. 53 American Modernist Views of “the Primitive” in the 1920s and ‘30s…………………………………………………………. 64 A 1935-36 Return Visit: Textual Issues of Ethnography in “The ‘Absolute’ Music of Bali” and Tabuh-tabuhan………………………… 75 Conclusions: McPhee in Retrospect………………………………………….. 103 III. Henry Cowell and the “Whole World of Music”……………………………... 110 An Outline of Cowell’s Views on Music, Experiment, and Culture…………………………………………………….. 115 ix New Musical Resources …………………………………………………….. 119 Mr. Ch and Chinese Meter…………………………………………………...131 Neo-Primitivism and the Proletariat………………………………………… 139 “Primitives,” Dance, and Percussion………………………………………... 144 "The Nature of Melody”……………………………………………………. 148 Joseph Yasser………………………………………………………………...155 The United Quartet…………………………………………………………………. 161 The Schillinger System……………………………………………………… 167 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………...173 IV. Lou Harrison and the “Whole Round World of Music”……………………..177 Prelude: The Question of the Double Concerto……………………………... 177 Introduction…………………………………………………………………..179 The Dawning of a New Reality: Black Mountain College and the influence of Harry Partch…………………………………………… 181 Harrison’s “Reality” Part 1: Similitudes through Dualism…………………..190 The “Reality” Part 2: The Construction of Similitudes through the Hierarchical Ordering of Trans-National Musical Concepts……………. 210 Rational Eccentricity………………………………………………………... 219 Another “Reality” from Cultural Relativism………………………………... 222 Conclusions…………………………………………………………………..234 V. Conclusions: Reflections upon Modernism as a Peculiar Style of Concern with Difference……………………………... 237 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………… 246 x LIST OF TABLES Table 1. McPhee’s Metaphors Between Balinese Gamelan and Modernist Composition……………………………………………………...64 2. Lou Harrison’s Chains of Antitheses………………………………………179 xi LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES Example 1. “Shifting accents…that sound as though composed of units of five notes” ( AMB , 168).………………………………………….79 2. Syncopations of the 3 + 3 + 2 variety (movement 1 “Ostinatos,” mm. 49-52, piano I)……………………………………………82 3. “The melodic outline is generally restricted to some form or other of a pentatonic scale. .” ( AMB , 169)………………………...84 4. Flute and Piano I figuration at the opening of Tabuh-tabuhan (mvt. 1 “Ostinatos,” mm. 1-6)……………………………...85 5. Movement 2, mm. 93-96. “A barbaric splendor of clashing tonalities”………………………………………………………86 6. Two juxtaposed textural blocks ( Tabuh-tabuhan , movement 1, mm. 7-11)…………………………………………………....88 7. The Overtone Series ( NMR )……………………………………………….108 8. Examples of Polymeter ( NMR )……………………………………………114 9. Quartet Euphometric (or Romantic) ..................... ...... ... .... ..........................117 10. 2nd Movement, United Quartet …………………………………………….153 11. Excerpt from Gending Hephaestus , Violin Staff Notation………………..191 12. The same excerpt, Kepatihan Notation………………………………........191 13. Chart from Music Primer (MP )……………………………………………198 xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Frequently cited works are identified with full reference in the first citation, and subsequently with the following abbreviations: AMB Colin McPhee, “The Absolute Music of Bali” HIB Colin McPhee, A House in Bali CTW Carol Oja, Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds McPhee Coll.