BY Kyle Gann He Americanness of American Music Whether of Folk Songs, Negro Melodies, Is a Vexed Issue

How American Is It? Virgil Thomson said that American music was nothing more than “whatever is written by American composers.” This author argues there’s a lot more to Americanness than that. BY Kyle Gann he Americanness of American music whether of folk songs, negro melodies, is a vexed issue. It always has been. the tunes of the heathen Chinese or In 1892 Antonin Dvorˇák came to Digger Indians…. teach in America, and the next year, Charles Ives, who knew the New World uponT finishing his New World Symphony, Symphony and its alleged Negro sources paternalistically offered composers here his well, came up with his own complex and advice on how to write “American-sounding” idiosyncratic strategies for making music music: use Negro melodies. Everyone got sound American and spent the next thirty mad. Amy Beach replied, in print, that Negro years working them out. melodies were no part of her heritage and Some American composers see their then wrote her Gaelic Symphony based on music only in relation to European trends. the Irish tunes of her upbringing. The Others feel more or less left out depending eminent John Knowles Paine’s response— on what your criterion of Americanness is. quoted by the late musicologist Adrienne So everyone gets mad. Many have taken Fried Block—was that music was a universal refuge in Virgil Thomson’s libertarian pro- language and that there was no reason to nouncement: “American music is whatever strive for “Americanness”: is written by American composers.” That The time is past when composers are to defuses all the tensions, makes everyone be classed according to geographical feel included. And yet…. limits. It is not a question of nationality, Let’s look at it from the outside. I teach but individuality, and individuality of an annual 20th-century repertoire course style is not the result of imitation— for Bard College’s MFA conducting program. 40 September / October 2011 “Europeans are “Why does European music always sound back to back: one was merely notating an like Stockhausen?” “True,” she replied, approximation; the other really caught the more comfortable satisfied. That would be a gross over- nuances. Copland played through that with dissonance, simplification, but generally speaking, post- concerto for Roy Harris, who is said to have How 1920 American music is more diatonic, exclaimed, “Why Aaron, that’s whorehouse sophistication, and European music more chromatic. Europeans music!” We hit notes on the offbeats abstraction. Americans are more comfort able with dissonance, harder; we bend the time to make it swing sophistica tion, and abstrac tion; Americans a little. We’re more insistent on hearing with consonance, with consonance, simplicity, and clarity. It the beats against which the melodies are American simplicity, and clarity.” even affects expatriates. When Schoenberg playing. European music rolls along more and Stravinsky came to America, they evenly. started writing less dissonant, more tonal In fact, I have a secret theory that the Many, and in some years most, of our music (Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony most American technique of all is to conducting students are international, No. 2, Stravinsky’s Scènes de Ballet). When reiterate a limited number of harmonies in Is It? from Spain, Scotland, France, Brazil, Italy, Frederic Rzewski moved to Belgium, he gave rhythmically surprising patterns. You find China. I don’t stress the Americanness of up the populist style of The People United it in Appalachian Spring, in the Cage String American music, but when I play examples and entered the more abstract, pointillist Quartet, in much of John Adams’s and even by composers not known for their world of The Road. John Cage toured Europe Feldman’s music, even occasionally in folksong quotations—Rochberg, Schuman, in the 1950s and abandoned the simple Babbitt—in other words, across the entire Bernstein, Sessions, Piston, Persichetti— prepared piano music he’d written in New spectrum of American styles. Copland stole the foreign students always point it out. “It York for the “parametrical” density of Atlas it from The Rite of Spring, no doubt. But the sounds very American.” Eclipticalis. Individuality aside, when compos- technique is almost absent from well-known We try to analyze it. For one thing, there’s ers know who’s going to be in the audience, European music outside of Stravinsky, and the orchestration. European 20th- century they often inflect their style accordingly. remains common, generation after gener- music creates nuanced, subtle textures with the entire orchestra. Americans tend to work in choirs of instruments. Listen to With this issue, Chamber Music’s series of articles documenting the the Rochberg Second, or the Schuman NEA’s American Masterpieces: Chamber Music initiative comes to an end. Seventh, or the Sessions Third: the strings From the spring of 2008 through the summer of 2011, the Endowment supported are soaring along in one line, the winds are many hundreds of performances—in venues from Florida to Alaska—of ensemble playing a circuitous countermelody, the music by American composers. All of the articles in this magazine’s series, as well brass punctuate with chords. It doesn’t as calendars of the performances, remain available on www.chamber-music.org. sound like Schoenberg, Bartók, Hindemith, or Stockhausen. Even the American 12-toners don’t sound European. Twelve-tone music was “the universal style,” but Americans, Then there’s rhythm. To grow up in the ation, in America. We like sustaining tension with maybe a few exceptions, fell back into country that invented jazz imparts a certain with rhythmic surprises. American habits. Ever since Paine, there feel for syncopation. That’s where Dvorˇák’s And then there are the continual have always been American composers, advice about Negro sources caught hold, American innovations. It is certainly an especially in academic circles, who stress unconsciously. European performers don’t interesting coincidence that in the 1910s that there is no real difference. But the grasp our rhythms. I heard a French pianist three American pianist-composers— Henry foreign students’ perceptions disagree. play Ives’s First Sonata at a university. After- Cowell, Leo Ornstein, and George Antheil— I attended the Bang on a Can festival ward, several students went up and sang all made a public splash using tone clusters, once with German/Spanish composer the song “Bringing in the Sheaves” for her hitting the keyboards with their fists and Maria De Alvear. She came up to me and and told her how to accent it like jazz, forearms. A few years later they learned asked, “Why does American music always which she wasn’t doing. Listen to Stravinsky’s that Ives had been doing it all along. Ives sound like Philip Glass?” I countered with, Ragtime and Copland’s Piano Concerto was imitating, on the piano, the drums of 41 his father’s marching bands—a non-Negro “American composers feel more pressure American source tradition. Cage put bolts and screws in the piano strings. Cowell to make music ‘accessible’ than Europeans came up with a new theory of rhythm, do. Americans sell things. It is part of our based in what are now called “tuplets,” implied tempos of quintuplets, septuplets, political philosophy that we have to attract and the like; dozens of younger Americans, people to our music.” starting with Conlon Nancarrow, followed him into that brave new world. Harry Partch devised a 43-tone scale and invented new instruments to play it. Today, European composers of the “spectralist” camp have conservatories often play in garage bands originates. Our ancestors came here, from become interested in microtones, but they first, and our jazz departments exert a Europe or Africa or Asia, and were ripped use quarter-tones and eighth-tones, not the wider influence. Europeans make electronic away from the musical support systems on pure harmonies and unequal scales of music in huge, state-supported studios and those continents. A relative few of us Americans like Partch, Ben Johnston, Terry experimental centers like IRCAM. American manage to be supported by quasi-European Riley, and LaMonte Young. These weird electronic composers are more likely to institutions, orchestras and chamber music American composers all get called start by hard-wiring CD players, like Nic societies. Even some of these composers “mavericks,” but all that really means is Collins, or putting together simple radio are driven by some vague notion of national that they’re working outside European circuitry, like David Tudor, or generating identity. The rest have had to make our conventions. sounds in Garage Band on their laptops music with what was available, what we like thousands of today’s undergraduates. found in our backyards, in terms of materials, ’m being entirely anecdotal, suggestive Perhaps most important of all, American instruments, and environmental musical rather than categorical, because we all composers feel more pressure to make influences. Unwittingly, whether tenured know there’s no hard and fast line. music “accessible” than Europeans do. 12-tone composers, guitar bangers, or Sessions felt strongly that he was Americans sell things. It is part of our electronics geeks, we are products of our Icontinuing the Schoenbergian tradition. political philosophy that we have to attract culture. Willy-nilly, we write the music of a What I said above about simplicity, clarity, people to our music. Europeans often get freedom-loving, optimistic, overly comm- and orchestrating in instrumental choirs an impressive level of support, whether or ercial, too-often dumbed-down, but still certainly doesn’t apply to Elliott Carter. not general audiences like their music. I idealistic democracy. Americanness and Europeanness in classical attended a music conference in Warsaw, at music are qualities open for anyone to draw which no audience showed up.

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