The Maieutic Art of Paul Rosenfeld: Music Criticism and American Culture, 1916-1946
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THE MAIEUTIC ART OF PAUL ROSENFELD: MUSIC CRITICISM AND AMERICAN CULTURE, 1916-1946 by DOMINICANTHONYAQUILA submitted in accordance with t.~1e requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF LITERATURE AND PIDLOSOPHY in the subject IDSTORY at the UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH AFRICA PROMOTER: PROFESSOR G. C. CUTHBERTSON JOINT PROMOTER: DR C. BERRY JUNE2001 CURRICULUM VITAE Dominic Anthony Aquila was born in Brooklyn, New York on December 7, 1954. He earned the Bachelors Degree in Music from The Juilliard School in 1977, and the Masters in Business Administration Degree from New York University in 1980. Mr. Aquila continued his studies in musical composition in 1981 at The Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester with Samuel Adler and Gerald Plaine. Following a five-year career in the administration of the Performing Arts, Mr. Aquila entered the Ph.D. program in History at the University of Rochester where he studied with Christopher Lasch and Eugene D. Genovese from 1985 to 1991. He completed all the requirements for- the Ph.D. but the dissertation. Mr. Aquila has taught in colleges and universities in the states of Michigan, Ohio, and New York. He is currently at Ave Maria College in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Among the awards he has received are the 1998 Franciscan University Summer Grant Award, The 1999 Franciscan University Excellence in Teaching Award, The 1989 American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere, and the 1986 David Parker Memorial Prize in History, from the University of Rochester. lllllflllllllllll 0001782764 780.92 ROSE AQUI ABSTRACT THE MAIEUTIC ART OF PAUL ROSENFELD: MUSIC CRITICISM AND AMERICAN CULTURE, 1916-1946 by Dominic A. Aquila Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) almost single-handedly established the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two world wars. Although he built a reputation chiefly as a critic of music, he was a man of letters who ranged across all the arts with unrivaled competence and ease. Rosenfeld's contemporaries acknowledged him as a champion of that strain of modernism which celebrated the interrelatedness of the arts. His importance for the wider culture of early twentieth-century American modernism also lay in his seriousness about the arts. Rosenfeld carried forward the American democratic and romantic belief, epitomized by Walt Whitman and Alfred Stieglitz, in the capacity of art to articulate basic values that enrich and even ennoble the human person. Such an idealistic conception of the value of art was increasingly losing favor among the American literati during the 1920s, the period when Rosenfeld enjoyed his greatest influence and prestige. During this decade of ''terrible honesty," American intellectuals tended to dismiss the "ideals of men" in favor of a single-minded interest in a more bitter realism. Inasmuch as they denigrated the notion that art held any kind of privileged status as a conveyor of values, they were in effect nascent postmodernists. This study of Paul Rosenfeld's life and work examines the achievements of Paul Rosenfeld as a critic of the arts in their relation to the wider American culture of the interwar years, and as a purveyor of modernism against the background of the first strains of postmodernism. It will also treat at length Rosenfeld's efforts as a writer, editor, and minor philanthropist on behalf of establishing a distinctively American music, literature, and painting. This cultural nationalism, I argue, is best understood as part of Rosenfeld's modernist project. To a lesser degree this thesis also deals with the changing position of the man of letters in American life. Key Terms: Paul L. Rosenfeld; American music criticism; American cultural history; American music; Modernism; Cultural nationalism; American arts and letters; American literary criticism; Young Americans; American art criticism CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I: Introduction: The Significance of Paul Rosenfeld............................... I CHAPTER II: Kaddish: 1890-1908.......................................................................... 26 CHAPTER III: The Riverview Stories: Rosenfeld and Antimodemism........ ............... 62 CHAPTER IV: Prelude to the Grand Transformation Scene, 1908-1913..................... 95 CHAPTER V: The Grand Transformation: The Education of a Music Critic.............. 168 CHAPTER VI: Method and Judgment in Criticism: The Aura of The Seven Arts ......... 220 CHAPTER VII: Among the Young Americans: Friendship and Criticism ...................... 266 CHAPTER VIII: Chanting the Progress of the Arts in 1920s America ............................. 304 CHAPTER IX: Ranging Across the Arts: Rosenfeld's Mature Americanism ................. 354 CHAPTERX: Music and Culture in Depression America........................................... 3 77 CHAPTER XI:. Conclusion: The Legacy of Paul Rosenfeld .......................................... 432 BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................ 444 Chapter I Introduction: The Significance of Paul Rosenfeld Paul L. Rosenfeld ( 1890-1946) was, in the words of Elliott Carter, "the most intelligent and hospitable critic American music has had the good fortune to have." Other major American composers, among them Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and Edgard Varese, credited Rosenfeld with single-handedly establishing the music of living American composers on a solid critical foundation in the period between the two World Wars. His competence in music as well as the other artistic disciplines, all of which (in line with his Romanticism) he included in the term art, enabled him to provide a similar critical service for many modem American writers, poets, painters, and photographers. The Mexican-American composer Carlos Chavez spoke for many of his contemporaries in underscoring the importance ofRosenfeld's singular ability to write with authority and expertise across the arts. By way of a certain "multiple sensibility," wrote Chavez, Rosenfeld strengthened and advanced artistic modernism in America. He "could really, with deep insight and certainty of artistic perception, understand the new message in music, as in painting and in poetry." To Chavez, Rosenfeld was "the outstanding brilliant example of a critic -- alive, comprehensive, and informed." 1 1 Else Stone and Kurt Stone, eds., The Writings ofElliott Carter (Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1977), 339; Jerome Mellquist and Lucie Wiese, eds. Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the Arts (New York: Creative Age Press, 1948), 3, 36, 48, 95, 105-8, 157-9. 163-69, 237-8, 242-5. Hereafter references to Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the Arts are shortened to Voyager in the Arts. Between 1916 and his untimely death in 1946, Rosenfeld produced eight books: Musical Portraits (1920), Musical Chronicle (1923), Port ofNew York (1924), Men Seen (1925), Modern Tendencies in Music (1927), The Boy in the Sun (1928), By Way ofArt {1928), An Hour with American Music (1929), and Discoveries ofa Music Critic (1936); he translated two others into English, Joseph Bedier's The Romance a/Tristan and Jseult (1945) and Robert Schumann's On Music and Musicians (1946). In addition, he published over 400 articles and reviews on music and the visual and literary arts in such general reader magazines as the New Republic, the Nation, the Seven Arts, the Dial, Vanity Fair, and Scribner's, and in more specialized periodicals such as Modern Music, The American Music Lover, The Musical Quarterly, and Opera News. Rosenfeld was also the driving force behind the founding and publication of five volumes of The American Caravan, an annual dedicated to publishing the writings of untried American writers and poets. Among his other literary efforts were two "labors oflove" for his close friends Alfred Stieglitz and Sherwood Anderson: America and Alfred Stieglitz (1934) and The Sherwood Anderson Reader (1947). The period of Rosenfeld's greatest influence was the 1920s, when according to Edmund Wilson he "enjoyed a prestige of the same kind as [H. L.] Mencken's and [Van Wyck] Brooks's." Paul Horgan, a prolific American novelist, recalled that in the 1920s Rosenfeld "had a following amounting almost to a cult." Rosenfeld used his prestige and influence to interpret, advance, and define the meaning of contemporary American music, painting, photography, and literature at a time when the idea of an American art was still taking shape. The call for a 2 distinctively American art goes back to the nation's founding period, but it took on a new urgency with America's new status as a great power in the late 1910s and 1920s. With the nation's rise to global preeminence in the aftermath of the First World War, American intellectu- als took stock of the state of American culture. Some led by Harold Stearns complained bitterly about the inhospitable climate for artists in America, and accordingly fled to Europe as ex- patriots. Van Wyck Brooks, who had profoundly influenced Rosenfeld during the 1910s, was also unhappy with the condition of American culture in the 1920s, yet he fought the urge to expatriate. Although Rosenfeld was at times equally distressed about American culture, he refused to grant that an inhospitable environment hampered the production of great art. He not only refused to expatriate but his writing radiated a new confidence in the promise of America's culture; he saw in America many untapped sources of elite