The Ghost of William Billings
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THE GHOST OF WILLIAM BILLINGS: HIS MUSICAL LEGACY IN WORKS BY TWENTIETH CENTURY COMPOSERS BY DANIEL RUSSELL JEROME POTTER BRADLEY WELLS, FACULTY ADVISOR A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS WITH HONORS IN MUSIC WILLIAMS COLLEGE WILLIAMSTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS MAY 20, 2016 Abstract This paper compares pieces by three different twentieth-century composers that are influenced by the music of William Billings. Billings, a late eighteenth-century New England composer who wrote in the Anglo-American parish-church tradition, has been called the most important early American composer, though his works were viewed as inferior by nineteenth-century scholars because of their rustic style and disregard for European compositional rules. During the twentieth century, composers rediscovered Billings and the shape-note tradition that he influenced and subsequently wrote music based on works by him and his successors. William Schuman’s New England Triptych (1956), along with its various derivations for concert band, and John Cage’s Apartment House 1776 (1976) and Hymns and Variations (1979) use several of Billings’ hymns as source material while William Duckworth’s Southern Harmony (1980-81) adapts hymns from William Walker’s 1835 shape-note tunebook of the same name. Each of these composers adapts their source material in a different way: Schuman’s pieces are fantasias on Billings’ music; Cage’s are musical palimpsests of the original hymns; and Duckworth’s are reincarnations of the original shape-note tunes, preserving aspects of the original pieces but often not their melodies and texts. The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4 Prelude: Searching for American Music ............................................................................. 5 William Billings and the Rise and Fall of Early American Hymnody ............................. 12 William Schuman.............................................................................................................. 24 John Cage .......................................................................................................................... 32 William Duckworth .......................................................................................................... 37 Postlude: Billings’ Legacy Today ..................................................................................... 49 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 53 3 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter Acknowledgements I would like first to express my deepest thanks to Brad Wells, director of the Williams College Concert and Chamber Choirs, for trusting in me that a performance thesis in choral conducting, something never done before, was possible and subsequently allowing me to take up half of his rehearsal time working on the music for my conducting recital. Brad’s course in choral conducting during the fall of my sophomore year started this whole process, and I deeply appreciate the mentorship he has given me these last four years. I would like to thank Professors Tony Sheppard and Marjorie Hirsch, former and current chairs of the music department, for trusting that I had the ability and experience to pursue a thesis in choral conducting and for the constant support in the planning of my recital, for which I must also thank concert manager Jonathan Myers, who helped pull together all of the logistics. I would like to thank Professor Jennifer Bloxam for reading my paper when she was not required to and for giving helpful feedback that better shaped its structure and helped its flow. I would like to thank my parents for their constant support, both emotionally and financially, as I explored my passions in choral conducting. The experiences I gained at summer conducting workshops these past two summers have helped immensely in making this project a success. Finally, I would like to thank the tireless singers of the Concert and Chamber Choirs, who were willing to embrace the music I programmed for my recital despite its difficulty, and the members of the Billings Ensemble, who committed to another choir despite their own busy semesters. You are all wonderful people, and I quite literally could not have done this without you. 4 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter Prelude: Searching for American Music Since European colonists started writing music in the territories that would one day become the United States of America, composers and scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have struggled to articulate what defines “American music,” to identify those qualities that make American music distinct. Other regional musical styles have been easier to identify, such as the distinctly British adaptations of the Italian madrigal, the different dance forms that were popularized across Europe and then imitated in pieces like J.S. Bach’s French and English Suites, and the distinctions seen between Italian, French, and German opera that developed from the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. Working in the shadow of these incredibly long-lived musical traditions, a natural insecurity developed in American composers about their own national style, engendering a “myth of American musical inferiority.”1 As composer and music critic Kyle Gann writes, “America is so distrustful of its own musical creativity that it continues to project musical achievement on the rest of the world, preserving its own cultural inferiority complex.”2 This distrust diminished the value of the tradition of classical music that developed in America since Europeans first landed on its shores. However, despite public perception that rock and jazz are the only truly American musical traditions, from seventeenth century New England church music through twentieth century minimalism and beyond, American classical music has in fact carved its own place in the rock of musical history. 1 Garry E. Clarke, Essays on American Music (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), 3. 2 Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997), xiv. 5 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European classical music was seen as the musical ideal, and many American composers believed that they had to follow the European styles if they wanted their work to be respected. Indeed, “From the beginning the American composer labored under an assumption that crippled his or her creativity: any innovation, any departure from European precedent, would be interpreted as a technical deficiency.”3 In the words of Henry Cowell, “Transplanted to the United States, the rules of harmony and composition took on a doctrinaire authority that was the more dogmatic for being second hand.”4 In contrast to European composers, who were more often willing to bend the rules for the sake of art, most early American composers felt an obligation to adhere to compositional precedent, lest their music be viewed as barbaric and untamed as the land from which it was written. In order to learn to compose, American music students traveled overseas to study with their venerated counterparts, producing “the first generation of American composers for whom European experiences shaped a collective stylistic identity.”5 John Knowles Paine, George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker, William Mason, Dudley Buck, Frederick Gleason, and many others all studied in Germany after the American Civil War and adopted styles similar to the Germanic masters.6 While studying in Europe was greatly beneficial to these American composers in terms of the development of their technical abilities, it limited their 3 Ibid., 1. 4 Henry Cowell and Sidney Robertson Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 8. 5 Alan Howard Levy, Musical Nationalism : American Composers' Search for Identity, Contributions in American Studies, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 4. 6 Ibid. 6 The Ghost of William Billings Daniel Potter innovation, resulting in pieces that imitated the European styles more than they fostered an American tradition. For many, the practices they learned in Germany “became something for the mind to memorize, not for the spirit to absorb.”7 Imitation limited these composers’ ability to find their own original voice, let alone establish a distinctly American compositional style. American composers continued to make musical pilgrimages to Europe in the early twentieth century. However, the emergence of French impressionism shifted the focus away from the Germanic tradition, and soon more Americans chose to study in Paris than Germany.8 Edward MacDowell (1861-1908) was perhaps the first American composer to study in Paris, where, along with his classmate Claude Debussy, he resisted the more academic and regulated approach to composition, instead choosing to experiment in new ways with ninth and seventh chords.9 American composers John Alden Carpenter, Charles Thomlinson Griffes, Amy Beach, and others all began to write in this new French style after the turn of the twentieth century. 10 While some American composers sought to imitate Europeans, others strove