The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps Settings [2002]

chapter 10 Like Falling Leaves: The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps Settings [2002]

1 Walt Whitman and Modern Music

Walt Whitman’s poetic response to nineteenth-century music was both ardent and well-informed, but his impact on it was negligible. There is no tradition of nineteenth-century Whitman settings, despite the steady development of an international readership for his poetry. The reasons, I suspect, were less esthet- ic than sociocultural. In Europe, the composition of art songs was a nationalist project; the leading centers of song, Germany and France, were focused in- tently, even aggressively, on their own languages and artistic ideologies. Whit- man might be read or translated there, but he would not be set. The United States was a more eclectic venue, always being drawn to nativize the tradition of high-art music that it otherwise prized for European cultivation. The Ameri- can art-music culture of the era, however, was far too genteel to accommodate poetry as uncouth, as egocentric, and as highly sexed as Whitman’s. Even the more moderate, more “public” later poetry seemed too outrageous. Charles Ives characteristically made a point of attacking this high-minded gentility in his song “Walt Whitman,” which begins by setting a provocative line from Song of Myself: “Who goes there? Hankering, gross, mystical, nude?” (389. There is even a pungent bad-boy fortissimo on “nude.”) But Whitman was too much even for the ostensibly iconoclastic Ives, who wrote no other Whitman songs. The musical reception of Whitman in the twentieth century was another story; it more than made amends for past neglect. Many modernist composers, representing many different types of modernism, turned to Whitman at important points in their careers. The modernisms involved, moreover, were strikingly international. Perhaps the first important Whitman settings came from British composers, notably Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughn Williams. American composers such as Marc Blitzstein, Howard Hansen, Roger Sessions, and Ned Rorem followed in due course, but so, too, did such Germans as Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Karl Amadeus Hartmann, and Hans-Werner Henze. (The French, it is true, seem not to have taken the bait.) And although no single concept can organize the diverse responses of modernist music to Whitman without oversimplifying, there does seem to be a red thread running through the diversity.

The Erotics of Mourning in Four Drum-Taps Settings 249

The starting point is Whitman himself. Like most of his contemporaries, Whitman identified musical style with national origin:

All songs of current lands come sounding round me, The German airs of friendship, wine and love, Irish ballads, merry jigs and dances, English warbles, Chansons of France, Scotch tunes, and o’er the rest, Italia’s peerless compositions. “Proud Music of the Storm,” 71–75

At the same time, however, Whitman heard European music as the expression of a universal identity. Influenced in part by Hegel’s philosophy of history, he understood this universality as the still-pending outcome of a great historical process, which in his case meant that it was supposed to be the outcome of democracy in the United States. In Whitman’s poetry, all musical nationalisms funnel into the transcendental melting pot of American nationalism. “Foreign” music buoys up the American spirit and blends into the material vitality of the North American continent. The world-transforming mission of America finds its anthem when the new world receives the music of the old. “Italian Music in Dakota” (1881) shows this process at work where two kinds of border coalesce: a geographical one between “whites” and “Indians,” and a musical one between Italian opera arias and their arrangement for regimental band:

Through the soft evening air enwinding all, Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds, In dulcet streams, in flutes’ and cornets’ notes, Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial, (Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related here, Not the city’s fresco’d rooms, not to the audience of the opera house, Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as here really at home, Somnambula’s innocent love, trios with Norma’s anguish, And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto;) Ray’d in the limpid yellow slanting sundown, Music, Italian music in Dakota. (1–12)

Without ever ceasing to be “Italian,” the music described here undergoes a kind of multiple emigration to the American frontier. It is removed from its usual venues in the opera house and “the city’s fresco’d rooms”; it is pried away