Contemporary American Composers

CHAPTER I.. A General Survey.

A GENERAL SURVEY.

Coddling is no longer the chief need of the American composer. While he still wants encouragement in his good tendencies,--much more encouragement than he gets, too,--he is now strong enough to profit by the discouragement of his evil tendencies.

In other words, the American composer is ready for criticism.

The first and most vital flaw of which his work will be accused is the lack of nationalism. This I should like to combat after the sophistic fashion of Zeno,--showing, first, why we lack that desideratum, a strictly national school; secondly, that a strictly national school is not desirable; and thirdly, that we most assuredly have a national school.

In building a national individuality, as in building a personal individuality, there is always a period of discipleship under some older power. When the rudiments and the essentials are once thoroughly mastered, the shackles of discipleship are thrown off, and personal expression in an original way begins. This is the story of every master in every art: The younger Raphael was only Perugino junior. Beethoven's first sonatas were more completely Haydn's than the word "gewidmet" would declare. The youthful Canova was swept off his feet by the unearthing of old Greek masterpieces. Stevenson confesses frankly his early efforts to copy the mannerisms of Scott and others. Nations are only clusters of individuals, and subject to the same rules. Italy borrowed its beginnings from Byzantium; Germany and France took theirs from Italy; we, ours, from them.

It was inconceivable that America should produce an autocthonous art. The race is one great mixture of more or less digested foreign elements; and it is not possible to draw a declaration of artistic, as of political, independence, and thenceforward be truly free.

Centuries of differentiated environment (in all the senses of the word environment) are needed to produce a new language or a new art; and it was inevitable that American music should for long be only a more or less successful employment of European methods. And there was little possibility, according to all precedents in art history, that any striking individuality should rise suddenly to found a school based upon his own mannerism.

Especially was this improbable, since we are in a large sense of English lineage. As the co-heirs, with those who remain in the British Isles, of the magnificent prose and poetry of England, it was possible for us to produce early in our own history a Hawthorne and a Poe and an Emerson and a Whitman. But we have had more hindrance than help from our heritage of English music, in which there has never been a master of the first rank, Purcell and the rest being, after all, brilliants of the lesser magnitude (with the permission of that electric Englishman, Mr. John F. Runciman).

A further hindrance was the creed of the Puritan fathers of our civilization; they had a granite heart, and a suspicious eye for music. Here is a cheerful example of congregational lyricism, and a lofty inspiration for musical treatment (the hymn refers to the fate of unbaptized infants):

"A crime it is! Therefore in Bliss You may not hope to dwell; But unto you I shall allow The easiest room in Hell."

It was only at the end of the seventeenth century that singing by note began to supplant the "lining-out" barbarism, and to provoke such fierce opposition as this:

"First, it is a new way--an unknown tongue; 2d, it is not so melodious as the old way; 3d, there are so many tunes that nobody can learn them; 4th, the new way makes a disturbance in churches, grieves good men, exasperates them, and causes them to behave disorderly; 5th, it is popish; 6th, it will introduce instruments; 7th, the names of the notes are blasphemous; 8th, it is needless, the old way being good enough; 9th, it requires too much time to learn it; 10th, it makes the young disorderly."

At the time when such puerility was disturbing this cradle of freedom and cacophony, Bach and Haendel were at work in their contrapuntal webs, the Scarlattis, Corelli and Tartini and Porpora were alive. Peri, Josquin and Willaert and Lassus were dead, and the church had had its last mass from the most famous citizen of the town of Palestrina. Monteverde was no longer inventing like an Edison; Lulli had gone to France and died; and Rameau and Couperin were alive.

At this time in the world's art, the Americans were squabbling over the blasphemy of instruments and of notation! This is not the place to treat the history of our music. The curious can find enlightenment at such sources as Mr. Louis C. Elson's "National Music of America." It must be enough for me to say that the throttling hands of Puritanism are only now fully loosened. Some of our living composers recall the parental opposition that met their first inclinations to a musical career, opposition based upon the disgracefulness, the heathenishness, of music as a profession.

The youthfulness of our school of music can be emphasized further by a simple statement that, with the exception of a few names like Lowell Mason, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen A. Emery (a graceful writer as well as a theorist), and George F. Bristow, practically every American composer of even the faintest importance is now living.

The influences that finally made American music are chiefly German. Almost all of our composers have studied in Germany, or from teachers trained there; very few of them turning aside to Paris, and almost none to Italy. The prominent teachers, too, that have come from abroad have been trained in the German school, whatever their nationality. The growth of a national school has been necessarily slow, therefore, for its necessary and complete submission to German influences.

It has been further delayed by the meagre native encouragement to effort of the better sort. The populace has been largely indifferent,--the inertia of all large bodies would explain that. A national, a constructive, and collaborative criticism has been conspicuously absent.

The leaders of orchestras have also offered an almost insurmountable obstacle to the production of any work from an American hand until very recently. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has been a noble exception to this rule, and has given about the only opening possible to the native writer. The Chicago Orchestra, in eight seasons under Theodore Thomas, devoted, out of a total of 925 numbers, only eighteen, or something less than two per cent., to native music. Yet time shows a gradual improvement, and in 1899, out of twenty-seven orchestral numbers performed, three were by Americans, which makes a liberal tithe. The Boston Symphony has played the compositions of John Knowles Paine alone more than eighteen times, and those of George W. Chadwick the same number, while E.A. MacDowell and Arthur Foote each appeared on the programs fourteen times. The Kaltenborn Orchestra has made an active effort at the promulgation of our music, and especial honor is due to Frank Van der Stucken, himself a composer of marked abilities; he was among the first to give orchestral production to American works, and he was, perhaps, the very first to introduce American orchestral work abroad. Like his offices, in spirit and effect, have been the invaluable services of our most eminent pianist, Wm. H. Sherwood, who was for many years the only prominent performer of American piano compositions.

Public singers also have been most unpatriotic in preferring endless repetition of dry foreign arias to fresh compositions from home. The little encore song, which generally appeared anonymously, was the opening wedge for the American lyrist.

Upon the horizon of this gloom, however, there is a tremor of a dawning interest in national music. Large vocal societies are giving an increasing number of native part songs and cantatas; prizes are being awarded in various places, and composers find some financial encouragement for appearing in concerts of their own work. Manuscript societies are organized in many of the larger cities, and these clubs offer hearing to novelty. There have latterly appeared, from various publishers, special catalogues vaunting the large number of American composers represented on their lists.

Another, and a most important sign of the growing influence of music upon American life, is seen in the place it is gaining in the college curriculum; new chairs have been established, and prominent composers called to fill them, or old professorships that held merely nominal places in the catalogue have been enlarged in scope. In this way music is reestablishing itself in something like its ancient glory; for the Greeks not only grouped all culture under the general term of "Music," but gave voice and instrument a vital place in education. Three of our most prominent composers fill the chairs at three of the most important universities. In all these cases, however, music is an elective study, while the rudiments of the art should, I am convinced, be a required study in every college curriculum, and in the common schools as well.

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