Brooks Music in America, an Overview (CHAM)

THE CAMBRIDGE H I S T O RY O F AMERICAN MUSIC * edited by DA V I D N I C H O L L S published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cb2 1rp, United Kingdom cambridge university press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011–4211, USA http://www.cup.org 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia ´ 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Ruiz de Alarcon Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1998 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1998 First paperback edition 2004 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeset in Renard (The Enschedé Font Foundry) 9.5/13 pt, in QuarkXPress® [se] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library isbn 0 521 45429 8 hardback isbn 0 521 54554 4 paperback Contents Notes on contributors ix Editor’s preface xiii PA RT O N E 1 . American Indian musics, past and present 3 victoria lindsay levine 2 . Music in America: an overview (part 1) 30 william brooks 3 . Secular music to 1800 49 kate van winkle keller, with john koegel 4 . Sacred music to 1800 78 nym cooke 5 . African American music to 1900 103 jacqueline cogdell djedje 6 . Immigrant, folk, and regional musics in the nineteenth century 135 michael broyles 7 . Nineteenth-century popular music 158 dale cockrell 8 . Art music from 1800 to 1860 186 katherine k. preston 9 . Art music from 1860 to 1920 214 michael broyles viii Contents PA RT T W O 10 . Music in America: an overview (part 2) 257 william brooks 11 . Immigrant, folk, and regional musics in the twentieth century 276 philip v. bohlman 12 . Popular song and popular music on stage and film 309 stephen banfield 13 . The rock and roll era 345 robert walser 14 . Ragtime and early jazz 388 jeffrey magee 15 . Jazz from 1930 to 1960 418 david joyner 16 . Jazz since 1960 448 ronald radano 17 . Tonal traditions in art music from 1920 to 1960 471 larry starr 18 . Serialism and complexity 496 stephen peles 19 . Avant-garde and experimental music 517 david nicholls 20 . Tonal traditions in art music since 1960 535 jonathan w. bernard Bibliography and references 567 Index 610 .2. Music in America: an overview (part 1) william brooks Introduction Deep in America’s dreams, locked in a complex embrace, stand two mythic figures: the Pioneer (inventor, frontiersman, outlaw, tycoon) – naked, selfmade, indebted to no-one, whose accomplishments dwarf his compatriots; and the Citizen – anonymous, unremarkable, but with the strength of thousands, shielded by the absolute equality of the polling booth. In their entanglements – sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive – these figures act out the profound tension between two fundamental ideologies which drive America’s politics and culture: individualism and egalitarianism. On one hand America declares itself a land of freedom and opportunity, a country which guarantees each person’s right to be di◊erent, to rise above the crowd, to become uncommon. On the other it declares all its citizens equal: no-one is privileged, no-one special; each is but a member of the common weal. The two declarations meet in America’s most hackneyed phrases: “e pluribus unum” [“from many, one”]; “liberty [for each] and justice [for all].” They each claim a share of America’s most fundamental laws, the egalitarian Constitution and the individualist Bill of Rights. And they confound each other in America’s comic archetypes, from Brer Rabbit to Huck Finn to The Little Tramp. The mythic reconciliation of these two ideologies has been situated physically on the frontier: there (the story goes) any Citizen can become a Pioneer, and in its wake Pioneers rediscover Citizenship. It has been economically situated in capitalism (rags to riches), and politically situated in democracy (my son, the president). Ideological reconciliation in cultural domains, however, has been more problematic; and the domain of art has been the most problematic of all. Great Artists (the story goes) have “genius”; in their presence the average Citizen is – in both senses – struck “dumb.” Only a talented few become artists; it follows that (another story [30] Music in America: an overview (part 1) 31 goes) all art is fundamentally “un-American,” inconsistent with American values. This chapter is an overview; it is my duty to simplify. I wish to claim that the most striking features of American art result from attempts to create an aesthetic domain in which American and artistic mythologies can be reconciled. Moreover, I would claim, music is the art most perfectly suited to this task. Music is at once personal and collective; it depends equally on invention and tradition; its performers range from acclaimed virtuosos to nameless choristers. It both levels and uplifts; to some it o◊ers the comfort of anonymous hymns, to others the challenge of new-made experiments. Musicians produce not tangible products but ephemeral, profoundly useless experiences; and the social or aesthetic value of these, though generally acknowledged, cannot be easily quantified by markets, polls, or other egalitarian means. Rather, their values involve criteria which range from originality and inventiveness on one hand to universality and accessibility on the other. Music, then, entails both individualist and egalitarian perspectives, and the problems faced by America’s musicians parallel those faced by her body politic. Is the dichotomy between these two perspectives to be resolved? If so, how? What conceptual framework might make possible their constructive coexistence? What, after all, is music for (or by) the Pioneer? For (by) the Citizen? Can there be music for both? How can aesthetics be reconciled with capitalism? How can music be both original and popular? How can the elitism inherent in art be reconciled with egalitarianism? I propose that there have been essentially six approaches to such questions. Three will be discussed below; the others are discussed in chapter 10. Though all are interconnected, and though each generates its own set of contradictions, these six approaches appear to me to be as useful as any in attempting to traverse the tangled terrain of American music; they can serve, in any case, to sketch a crude map which the remaining chapters of this book can elaborate and correct – or perhaps obliterate. The first three approaches are linked by their relation to two other deeply problematic constituents of American culture: elitism and intellectualism. In theory, both individualism and egalitarianism preclude the creation of social classes: the former declares each person a class unto himself while the latter creates a single class to which all belong. In practice, however, where there are Pioneers there are followers; and where there are Citizens there are alliances. In both cases associations between individuals serve to distinguish segments of society from each other; and 32 william brooks when one such segment is assigned an elevated status – economic or cultural, perceived or actual – an elite is created. Associations of intellectuals are especially problematic. Many intellectuals seek to be associated with Pioneer thinking; that is, to form a vanguard (an elite). Others seek to champion Citizens; but their work sets them apart from the people for whom they would speak (again creating an elite). Either way, intellectuals constitute a class which claims a superior ability to understand, or at least to articulate; that they are a class is incompatible with individualism, and that they are superior is incompatible with egalitarianism. It would seem that only acts of self-e◊acement – isolation or anonymity – free an intellectual from this dilemma; all other stances appear to entail a√rming one ideology at the expense of the other. Not all musicians are intellectuals; but persons who write and speak about music are. The history of American music is in part the history of assertions about it, and many of these have indeed clustered around one of the poles of the American dialectic. One cluster asserts that music is indeed fundamentally elitist, that it can never be universal. Proponents of this position often argue that great music is necessarily created by great genius, and that it can only be apprehended fully by an elite cultural subgroup with special abilities and training. This position is (understandably) asserted almost exclusively by persons who believe (or wish to demonstrate) that they belong to this subgroup – that is, by intellectual conservatives. They choose to call their music art music, thus situating its value in a domain removed from commerce or utility; and I shall use this term also, despite the obvious dangers. A second cluster asserts that music of real value must spring from or be embraced by common people – that is, it must be collectively owned, part of daily life. This assertion is made, but only implicitly, by the users of such music, the common people themselves; it is articulated by persons who have taken on a di◊erent role, becoming populists (if the discourse is polemical) or intellectual liberals (if it is scholarly). It is the latter who have chosen to call such music folk music, implying egalitarian anonymity even when the music’s creator is known; again I shall use this term, though again there are considerable dangers. Intellectuals in each camp recognize the existence of the other. They are, in fact, united in their desire to keep the two poles unentangled, to preserve the integrity of certain musical traditions; they di◊er in the traditions to which they are devoted. In this sense they are more like each other Music in America: an overview (part 1) 33 than like a third group which seeks to mediate the di◊erences between the poles by promoting musical and social transformations. For this third group – intellectual reformers – the American vision requires that the two ideologies be reconciled, not that one emerge victorious; and the essential mechanism for this reconciliation has been education. Historically, Americans have trusted to public education to mediate the tensions between intellectual elitism and social equality. Until relatively recently the mediation usually entailed attempts to convey to the general public the values and works cherished by intellectual conservatives. Thus music education, and musical reformers, sought primarily to increase the general understanding of art music: though (the argument went) the creation of great music was limited to gifted individuals (Pioneers), appreciation of and participation in such music could be made equally available to all (Citizens). In a more recent counter-reform, however, educators have attempted the reverse: to convey to intellectual conservatives the values and works treasured by Citizens. In music, the sources of this e◊ort go back at least to individuals like John Lomax and George Pullen Jackson; but the watershed occurred with Gilbert Chase, who asserted flatly that “[our folkpopular music] has been the most important phase of America’s music” (Chase 1966a, p. xviii). Thereafter a wide range of scholars have sought, like Charles Hamm, to engage intellectuals in the practice and appreciation of non-art musics; or at the very least they have sought with Wiley Hitchcock to balance their accounts equally between “cultivated” and “vernacular” traditions. As educators, then – and from a variety of perspectives – reformers and counter-reformers have sought to enlighten persons oriented to one type of music about the merits of another. In their writing and teaching, they have testified on behalf of art, folk, or some other music; but their testimony has been motivated not merely by enthusiasm, but by a desire to address America’s ideological dilemma, to mediate between Pioneers and Citizens. They have served, in e◊ect, as missionaries, using music as a tool for inducing a transformation, a change of mind by means of which (they hope) the tensions in their society can be understood and perhaps transcended. In their endeavors religion, art, and politics mingle in a distinctively American fashion which both derives from and acts upon the poles implicit in American culture. At the boundaries, then, there stand art music and folk music; and between them, a rich and complex field of mediation, education, and 34 william brooks reform. It is to a survey of this terrain, and the journeys across it, that the remainder of this chapter is dedicated. Form and reform Music in America, of course, long predates the colonies. Indian musics and cultures, however, were initially far removed from the ideological tangle described above; that did not take root until the newly discovered hemisphere was invaded by a motley collection of European misfits ranging from daredevils to utopians to gentleman farmers. And the earliest responses to it were shaped by the earliest immigrants: the Tidewater colonists and the Puritan settlers. The gentry who colonized Virginia brought what they could of the culture they left in England. In the New World, indeed, they rendered even more extreme the stratification fundamental to that culture: holdings became plantations, servants became slaves. Preserving class distinctions, as they did, these colonists likewise preserved the distinction between folk and art musics. On one hand were ballads, dance tunes, and work songs; on the other were keyboard music, ensemble music, and parlor songs. The former were primarily transmitted orally and were especially the purview of small farmers, indentured servants, and laborers of various kinds; the latter were notated and were heard almost exclusively in wealthy plantation households. The two did interact; colonists brought with them such published hybrids as Playford’s enormously popular collections of dance tunes, and songs by composers like Arne and Shield entered (or returned to) the oral tradition. But these interactions did not manifest any fundamental dissatisfaction with the social structure or with music’s place in it. These colonists sought to conserve English culture, not to change it. In contrast, to the north was founded a New England: though the surname remained, the child would be di◊erent. Nurtured by a New World, delivered from a tyrannical fatherland, America’s Puritans were settlers on a mission – not merely to convert the heathen but to demonstrate to the Old World the power of the faith practiced in the New. They were America’s first reformers. For the Puritans, music was a tool for social and spiritual change; and its character, its place, its very existence had to be constantly tested against this purpose. The Puritan mission was by no means hostile to secular music; indeed, much of the music found in the southern colonies could be Music in America: an overview (part 1) 35 found in New England as well. The di◊erence lay in the extent to which the place and purpose of this music was debated. Even more revealing were the debates about sacred music, which began as soon as the settlements were secure. The first volume published in the New World was the “Bay Psalm Book,” the work of reformers seeking a collection of psalm texts which more closely suited Puritan views. The tunes for these texts were transmitted orally, in large part, since very few settlers could read music; and as time passed this repertory was transformed by common use, so that di◊erent congregations sang the same tune di◊erently and individuals within congregations embellished each tune idiosyncratically. These developments were noted with distress by musically literate clerics and by the preceptors who were attempting to maintain the notated versions of the tunes by “lining them out” for congregations. In e◊ect, a conservative intellectual elite found itself struggling to preserve the melodies published by pioneer compilers (Ainsworth, Ravenscroft, Playford), while an egalitarian citizenry treated these melodies as communal property to be collectively used and transformed. By the 1720s intellectuals found the situation intolerable, and a loose alliance of reformers proposed a solution: establish schools to teach congregations to read music. The reasoning was paradigmatic: education would reunite the culture by conveying to citizens a body of knowledge formerly limited to an elite. The knowledge in this case (music notation) was drawn from art music; it was used to literally re-form what had become a folk-singing tradition. The outcome was also paradigmatic. On one hand, the reform was successful; the newly literate congregations returned to singing psalm tunes as notated, and the breach between the art and folk traditions was for the moment healed. On the other hand, the reform made it possible for the traditions to separate afresh, in a new domain. For citizens who could read music could also write music; and within a few decades a pioneering generation of “Yankee tunesmiths” had emerged, composing, compiling, and publishing their own psalm tunes and anthems. Most of these tunesmiths were unschooled in composition (though excellently trained in music notation), and they devised their own solutions to problems of form, technique, and syntax. Once again an inherited practice was transformed by common use; composers of the new repertory diverged both from their English forebears and each other. In e◊ect, a folk composing tradition evolved; and as before, the results 36 william brooks distressed an intellectual elite which was well schooled in art music’s theory and technique. Again a reform movement arose, and again it funneled its energies into education. New pedagogical collections appeared in which the indigenous composers were largely supplanted by “approved” European “masters” such as Handel and Haydn. Works by the latter, however, were not presented in their original forms but rather arranged and simplified to suit the reformers’ view of the public’s abilities. They were supplemented by exercises, hymns, and secular pieces composed by the reformers themselves in an idiom designed to be both “correct” and easily comprehended. The result was a new body of music which was neither art nor folk, a music which both revered greatness and a√rmed the importance of average citizens. Individuals like Thomas Hastings introduced this new repertory first in singing schools and churches. Then, under the guidance of Lowell Mason, it became the basis for music education in Boston’s public schools. The missionary character of reform e◊orts remained, though the emphasis shifted away from religious values and toward social ones: music was to be a tool for refining the taste and judgment of the body politic, for advancing civilized values in moral and aesthetic domains. And the reforms continued to mediate between elitism and egalitarianism; the public school music curriculum was intended, in e◊ect, to elevate all the citizenry to a level of understanding formerly restricted to those with exceptional talent or means. Mason’s work was emulated throughout the nineteenth century in countless cities and towns. Moreover, the vocal repertory assembled by reformers was paralleled, less systematically, in instrumental tutors, method books, and collections. By 1850 the reformers had largely succeeded: in churches, schools, and informal institutions like village bands, Americans everywhere were learning to read, sing, play, and appreciate a repertory which was derived from art music but intended for all citizens equally. The repercussions were felt for over a century, as reform objectives continued to resonate in a wide range of America’s musical activities. Public music education continued to expand with the introduction first of instrumental instruction in public schools and later of music curricula in universities and colleges. The latter was given additional impetus by the development of large land-grant public universities after the Civil War; the egalitarian idealism of their charters was a happy match for the universal education desired by musical reformers. This expansion peaked as late as Music in America: an overview (part 1) 37 the 1950s, when advanced degrees in various specializations (composition, conducting, individual instruments) were established in many such institutions. Music was also important to most nineteenth-century progressives. In labor unions, farm associations, settlement houses, and similar venues music was deemed vital to building community and advancing the collective good. Many progressive organizations were directed at immigrant populations, and progressive music thus overlapped and intermingled with transplanted European institutions like German Männerchöre; as time passed the whole was gradually transformed into such characteristic midtwentieth-century institutions as community choruses and neighborhood music schools. If (as reformers believed) music was a tool for social betterment, and if (as they hoped) the public could be made musically literate, then songs would be very useful tools for furthering specific political objectives. The extraordinary body of political music in nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury America is thus another extension of the reform movement. The Civil War produced the most lasting political repertory, but songs promoting the interlinked causes of temperance and su◊rage more consistently adopt the moral tone of earlier musical reformers. Indeed, virtually every cause or platform of the nineteenth century – from the Greenback Party to Graham crackers – used music to rally its followers; and even after radio and television radically transformed the nature of campaigning, music remained a vital force in the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the extension of musical literacy to a large segment of the public helped transform the economic basis of music in America. Music publishing evolved in tandem with musical reform; indeed, among the first publishing magnates was Lowell Mason himself. In the second half of the nineteenth century printing became the primary medium for music’s dissemination, and more music was bought for the home than was heard on the stage. This music formed a new genre – popular music – and though much of it was irrelevant (or even contrary) to the reformers’ social purposes, a substantial part continued to maintain the link between cultured morality and ensemble singing. In any event, the industrialization of music by means of publishing was only made possible by the reformers’ successes. Recording technology would eventually undo these successes and transform the musical economy again; but by then the very nature of reform would itself have changed. 38 william brooks Art music Mason’s work would have been impossible had there not been by 1820 a lively community of Americans already devoted to art music. Its precursors reach back to colonial amateurs, but America’s concert life did not begin until the 1730s, when an economic upper class had begun to form in urban centers like Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston. The programs, ticket prices, and venues of these early concerts all served to limit the audience to educated, wealthy persons; informal, exclusive clubs of subscribers led to the founding of private St. Cecilia and Philharmonic societies, which evolved in turn into the associations of wealthy patrons who financed the first professional orchestras in the 1830s. The performers associated with all these early activities were primarily immigrant professionals who were largely untroubled by the elitist implications of their work. For the patrons, elitism was welcome; by associating with master musicians they could stand apart from (and in their view, above) the majority of citizens, who could neither a◊ord nor (presumably) appreciate great music. If they su◊ered qualms, they soothed their democratic conscience in two ways: by sponsoring concerts intended to benefit the poor or other unfortunates; and by indirectly reducing the price of concert tickets for the general public, thus presumably contributing to reform objectives. For citizens thereby enabled to purchase a ticket, concert-going also served elitist ends, linking them by implication not only to musical greatness but also to the wealthy patrons in the dress circle. The interlinking of art music, patronage, and elitism has continued unaltered to the present day; though its repertory di◊ers (somewhat), the New York Philharmonic serves the same social function in 1997 as it did in 1847. The confusion of aesthetics with patronage has been constantly satirized, most notably in minstrelsy and its twentieth-century progeny; but it has had a profound e◊ect on the course of art music. For the system only works when patrons have complete confidence in the greatness of the art they are supporting; the most unthinkable embarrassment (as the Marx Brothers knew well) is to patronize a fraud. Art music patrons, then, required a canon, a list of works and composers of unassailable status, together with a means for assessing the qualifications of new works. A similar canon had already been established in Europe, not only by intellectuals but also by publishers and promoters; but the e◊ects were heightened in America for two reasons. First, since Music in America: an overview (part 1) 39 patronage was at odds with important parts of America’s ideology, patrons had to be especially cautious; their only defense against egalitarian attacks was to assert that artistic greatness was an absolute value which had been historically proven. Second, since art music in the New World served to separate its patrons from ordinary Americans, a canon that was literally alien (from the Old) was an advantage; European provenance became virtually a prerequisite for acceptance. America’s art music repertory was thus from the outset extraordinarily conservative. Almost without exception, new works were admitted only if they had been approved in Europe and were clearly distinguishable from popular or reform repertories. American arbiters of taste – initially European immigrants, later European-trained musicians and patrician critics – revised the canon only in ways which helped ensure its continuing alienation from the citizenry. An early example can be found in the history of musical theatre. Until the 1820s America’s theatres, unlike her concert halls, sought to o◊er entertainment for everyone, supplying boxes for the elite and a pit for the citizenry. When Italian opera was introduced, its European provenance was emphasized in appeals to the elite, but it was presented in English adaptations to attract the general public. In the 1830s, however, opera began to be presented in Italian in newly built opera houses funded in part by upper-class patrons. What had been a meeting-ground became a battlefield; a decade later opera had become an elite art, and a new musical theatre – minstrelsy – had been created for inhabitants of the pit. Among the mainstays of minstrel productions were operatic parodies. As this process unfolded, important features of the Italian style were being absorbed into American popular song. This phenomenon peaked in the 1840s; precisely at that time, the American art music repertory began to shift toward Germany. Certainly a surge in German immigrants contributed to this, but clearly also Italian music had become too familiar to the citizenry to be useful in defining a social elite. A similar shift occurred in the early twentieth century, after Tin Pan Alley had largely replaced Italian elements with German ones: the art music canon was enlarged to encompass various national schools (French, Russian, middle European), and Italian opera was reestablished as an elite art. The place and function of art music changed fundamentally – in Europe as in America – with the introduction of electronic broadcasting and recording in the 1920s. The reproducibility of music changed ways of thinking and hearing; it also meant that access to art music (in recorded 40 william brooks form) was now available to virtually anyone. Technology accomplished instantaneously much of what reformers had sought for a century, and it thereby rendered obsolete the need for an intermediate reform repertory. For patrons of art music, the reach of the new technology meant that the art music canon, by itself, was no longer su√cient to mark a cultural elite. Only recordings were widely available, however; live performances remained a useful indicator of class distinctions. But to maximize their e◊ectiveness, the repertory at live concerts had to mirror the most widely distributed recorded repertory; the result, on both sides of the Atlantic, was to freeze the art music canon even further. Art music composers, in America as in Europe, thus came to confront a di√cult paradox. With the canon now in the hands of the citizenry, and with alienation from the citizenry a socially imposed condition for art music, it became necessary for art music composers to alienate themselves from the canon itself. There resulted a bevy of new names for twentiethcentury compositions (“modern,” “avant-garde,” “new”) and a multitude of composer-driven associations (notably in New York in the 1920s) which served not merely to promote members’ works but also to distinguish them from the standard repertory. Modern music’s paradoxical relationship to the canon required a new set of arbiters for determining value. In America, especially, these were found among intellectuals, whose ideological position was similarly paradoxical; as the twentieth century unfolded composers were increasingly associated with universities, and their work was evaluated primarily by academic theorists and historians. Thus a composer like Roger Sessions has been validated as a central figure in American music primarily by virtue of his own position as a university teacher and by the status assigned him by collegial intellectuals. Throughout its history, art music in the United States has been attacked by egalitarians, populists, and demagogues; in recent years, amplified by anti-intellectualism, the drumbeat has become especially deafening. Indeed, it is almost impossible to discuss art music’s social position without appearing to invite (or even participate in) such attacks; the paradoxes of twentieth-century art music seem especially absurd. But all such attacks, and most social accounts, ignore the sizable and important collection of individuals – present throughout America’s history – whose personal interest in and a◊ection for art music has had little to do with elitism or social standing. These devotees have been ba◊led and sometimes enraged by the reduction of their devotion to a sociological footnote, and Music in America: an overview (part 1) 41 they have been enormously frustrated by the di√culty of articulating ideological alternatives. A significant number of American performers have sought to decouple art music from patronage. For decades after opera passed out of popular culture, e◊orts were made to reintroduce English-language performances which would be more generally comprehensible. These e◊orts peaked toward the end of the nineteenth century in the touring companies of Emma Abbott, Clara Louise Kellogg, and others; but the controversy continued until quite recently, when a technological innovation (“surtitles”) rendered it somewhat moot. Many (though certainly not all) touring virtuosos also sought to reach beyond the dress circle; Jenny Lind leavened her art music repertory with popular airs and acoustic stunts, and Ole Bull’s appeal was so wide-ranging that his name entered American folklore as a metaphor for fiddling virtuosity. Some orchestras were similarly motivated, at least in part, and made outreach a central part of their artistic missions. The quintessential American conductors, in this sense, are Theodore Thomas and Leonard Bernstein, both of whom were devoted and creative educators. Even John Philip Sousa described his purpose to be “to lift the unmusical mind to a still higher form of musical art” (quoted in Hamm 1983, p. 296). Sousa’s programs, coupling popular novelties with transcriptions from the art music canon, make him close kin to Jenny Lind; and both are second cousins to many nineteenth-century reformers. Outreach and reform have been consistent allies, and the continuing importance of both is reflected in the recent history of public arts funding, with spending on education gradually displacing the funding of commissions, festivals, and the like. America’s art music composers have been less easily able to shape their work to egalitarian ends, though in their prose many have been either ideologically neutral or explicitly anti-elitist. They have responded to their dilemma with a variety of tactics. In the nineteenth century, composers like Fry and Bristow sought simply to place American and European art on a fair and equal footing. These advocates, however, never fully realized the extent to which European provenance was necessary to art music’s social function; for America to possess an equal musical voice would be a danger, not a virtue, for upper-class patrons. Accepting this necessity, other American composers attempted to become surrogate Europeans, turning to Europe for their education and writing music that left them stylistically indistinguishable from their colleagues overseas. The most notable group of such musicians formed the 42 william brooks Second New England School, but the practice extends back at least to William Mason and forward to the post-1945 international avant garde. Occupying a special position were Americanized Europeans like Varèse, Bloch, Weill, even Hindemith and Stravinsky; their importance to the canon was directly proportional to the extent to which America’s elite continued to view them as foreigners. Still other musicians assumed an extremist position within a European aesthetic, a√rming by implication what many Europeans believed: that grandiosity and single-mindedness were central features of the American character. William Henry Fry’s music employs the gestures of Italian opera with a relentless consistency that no Italian could have contemplated; Milton Babbitt takes to unequaled extremes the mannerism implicit in Webern’s systematic serialism. After the Civil War, the monster concerts organized by Patrick Gilmore and others served in part to demonstrate the unchallengeable might of America’s musical armies – bigger, broader, and (presumably) louder than any heretofore heard. The reiterative insistence of some minimalist music (especially the amplified works of Philip Glass) manifests a related extremism. One other tactic could only evolve in the twentieth century, after composition had become fully alienated from the European canon. A small number of composers, working largely in isolation, accepted key principles of art music – especially a belief in composerly genius – but rejected the techniques and trappings which had become associated with it. Harry Partch is the best representative of these: undeniably an art music composer, he depended on benefactors throughout his life; but in aesthetic and technique his music rejected both the European tradition and the conventions of the concert hall. There were also pioneers who situated themselves within the social and technical framework of art music, idiosyncratically reworking a European musical language to suit their own aesthetic or social visions. Among these are iconoclasts like Carl Ruggles and technicians like Wallingford Riegger; but also included are composers more directly concerned with the contradictions at the heart of American life. A nineteenth-century paradigm is Anthony Philip Heinrich; a twentieth-century paradigm, Elliott Carter. Both embellished received idioms – Classical harmony and modernist atonality – to produce musics of “strange ideal somersets and capriccios” (Heinrich’s phrase, quoted in Hamm 1983, p. 213). In Heinrich’s case the elaboration is diachronic: his music wanders freely through America’s collectively held landscapes en route to a destina- Music in America: an overview (part 1) 43 tion that may little resemble the starting point. Using a fragmented syntax to express the unregulated, egalitarian opportunity of the frontier, Heinrich perfectly captured the interplay between culture and wilderness, Pioneer and Citizen characteristic of ante-bellum America. Elliott Carter’s orientation, in contrast, is fundamentally synchronic; in Carter’s work musical individuation persists in even the densest textures. Carter’s rigorous structures mirror the intricacies of twentieth-century urban life; his pieces propose a future America in which an invisible order regulates the coexistence of individualism and equality. Between Heinrich and Carter is situated the quintessential American Pioneer, Charles Ives. Ives is the central figure in America’s art music not because he is unique but because so many threads cross in the warp and woof of his work. Ives, like Heinrich, composed landscape-narratives whose unpredictable paths are peopled with unexpected acquaintances; in their anarchic energy can be recognized rural America’s nineteenthcentury faith that on the frontier Pioneers and Citizens find common ground. But in Ives all this is retrospective. In his real life as a New Yorker, Ives was deeply concerned with creating unity in an increasingly scattered urban society – but without imposing a stifling conformity. Infused with the residue of the previous century’s optimism, Ives built his musical models of a future America less systematically, less defensively, than Carter; but the complex layers of his music likewise propose a transcendental culture in which individuals are free to go their own way or to join hands, to insist or to accommodate. Folk music Among the shades who people Ives’s landscapes is Lowell Mason, often embodied in the hymn Bethany. Ives quoted Bethany, however, in homage not to its author but to the millions of Americans who gave it voice, the citizens who through it found musical expression. Created not by a composer but by a community, this Bethany – the hymn Ives loved – was no longer art nor even reform music; it had become folk music. Bethany’s transformation is representative. American culture is constructed, often self-consciously, and much that it calls “folk” music has actually been appropriated from sources ranging from European dances to reform hymns to popular song. Such appropriations interact with more conventional folk repertories found in immigrant communities, with each subculture establishing a distinctive mix. Indeed, just as every American is 44 william brooks situated somewhere between Pioneer and Citizen, so each subculture situates itself between isolation and integration. On one hand, each seeks to preserve its own music without change, to protect the purity of its inheritance. On the other, each seeks to enrich its tradition by absorbing alien material whenever it appears useful. Most subcultures, of course, move to and fro along this spectrum, working though the dialectic between individualism (preservation) and egalitarianism (appropriation) characteristic of American culture as a whole. But all American folk musics occupy both poles in a certain sense. All are necessarily removed – isolated – from art music and reform traditions: perhaps not ignorant of them (the literacy of some folk traditions is, for example, a by-product of reform), but free of the reverence for genius that both exhibit. And, lacking that reverence, all folk traditions are fundamentally egalitarian: all the music outside their tradition stands before them on an equal footing. A fine instance of all these workings can be found in the shape-note traditions of the rural South. When the reform repertory supplanted the music of the New England tunesmiths, the latter moved west and south together with the singing-school tradition and the newly invented, pedagogically motivated shape-notes. The whole came to rest in the rural South, where it became a constructed folk music built upon a repertory originally assembled by compilers like B. F. White and William Walker. The first components of this repertory were threefold: New England hymns and anthems which had survived the displacement; folk tunes already known to the singers, harmonized in a distinctive polymelodic style; and pieces resembling either of the preceding but newly composed by the compiler or his associates. Thus shape-note music’s early history entailed both isolation (from reform) and appropriation (of repertory). As time passed, shape-note music became more defensively and self-consciously isolated; concurrently the repertory continued to expand, eventually incorporating even reform works like Bethany. Shape-note music came to be defined by a performance practice more than by notated stylistic features; shape-note singers sing Bethany without regard for its source, and it is this egalitarian treatment which makes the diverse shape-note repertory a single “folk” tradition. The performance practice is itself a paradigm. The singers sit in a hollow square, facing inward, with the leader in the center; persons not singing may sit elsewhere to listen, but the music is in no way directed toward Music in America: an overview (part 1) 45 them. Anyone may lead, and all the leaders take turns; thus although each song is supervised by a single individual, that individual is simply one among equals. Only the leader is positioned to hear all the parts in perfect balance, so that the leader’s privilege is essentially that of an audience. Thus the usual fixed hierarchy (leader, performer, listener) becomes a floating one in which roles are conflated and opportunities exchanged. The vocal production is generally extremely loud and nasal; notes are connected with strong portamentos so that each is attended to individually but all are stressed equally. Shape-note singing thus balances leader with ensemble, individual with community, element with totality. It models a utopian America; it also models its own subculture’s attempt to balance self-protection with openness. In this regard it is typical of most American ethnic and sectarian musics; a few additional examples may suggest the range of possibilities. Appalachian folk music both paralleled and interacted with the shapenote tradition. By the 1840s the Appalachian repertory, like shape-note music, had come to include works from three broad categories: traditional music brought from the British Isles; music from eighteenth- and earlynineteenth-century anthologies; and newly composed music which resembled the preceding. After the Civil War, Appalachia’s cultural isolation both preserved and distorted this repertory, to which were added bits of mainstream America’s musical jetsam – minstrel tunes, sentimental ballads, and topical novelties. By the 1920s, when Appalachian music suddenly acquired commercial importance, it was a jumble of widely disparate items unified essentially by consistencies in performance practice. The repertory of the Carter Family perfectly exemplifies both this egalitarian diversity and the defining importance of a distinct performance style. More isolated still were non-English-speaking subcultures, but even these interacted distinctively with the larger culture. Cajun music evolved much like Appalachian, supplementing the settlers’ repertory with songs appropriated from other traditions. But the appropriation was almost entirely in one direction; whereas Anglo-American folk music exerted a continuing influence on popular genres, Cajun music was essentially unknown until its discovery by recording companies and folk enthusiasts. The ensuing radical acculturation nearly destroyed the tradition; its distinctiveness became valued only in the 1960s, when authenticity itself became a commercial asset. Secular Jewish-American music had quite a di◊erent history. Jewish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries settled in 46 william brooks East Coast cities, and many quickly assumed leading roles in America’s popular music industry. Thus a rich tradition of Yiddish music and theatre became immediately linked to American culture as a whole. More than most immigrants, urban Jews consciously chose the extent to which they would be assimilated or remain autonomous. Defining a relationship to the mainstream was a necessary undertaking for entertainers like Al Jolson and Irving Berlin; indeed, this was explicitly the subject of The Jazz Singer, to which both contributed. Jewish-American identity was religious as well as cultural; throughout America’s history religious groups, like subcultures, have positioned themselves somewhere between isolation and assimilation. The Shakers took their music in part from folksong and Pentecostal hymnody, but they created much of it themselves, recorded in notation largely incomprehensible to outsiders. Their self-conscious isolation helped to focus individual Shakers on direct revelations from God, which included both “gifts” of new songs and notational innovations. Shaker doctrine, indeed, asserted that revelation superseded tradition: a gift was more to be treasured than a learned melody. Individualism, then, characterized the relationship not only between Shaker communities and their secular environs but also between each believer and the community. The Shakers, therefore, are situated very near an individualist extreme; other subgroups, often secular, created their music largely by appropriation. The folk music associated with labor unions, political parties, and social activism is replete with parodies of popular or traditional songs. In some cases, the act of appropriation was itself political; when Joe Hill made In the Sweet Bye and Bye into The Preacher and the Slave he sought to liberate not only workers but the song itself. In these traditions, even newly composed music was treated as if appropriated; Woody Guthrie’s songs were to be used, not bought and sold. Even the mainstream culture has created “folk” songs out of appropriated (but usually apolitical) material; unattributed performances of Happy Birthday to You, for example, occur thousands of times daily. All the subcultures mentioned above had at least some autonomy in defining their relationship to America as a whole; but two ethnicities – Indians and Africans – were given little choice. Indians were sometimes excluded, sometimes exterminated; Africans were included against their will. America’s views about the extent to which members of these groups would be assimilated – that is, whether integration or separatism would prevail – have been a barometer for America’s political climate. In pro- Music in America: an overview (part 1) 47 gressive eras, such as the 1900s and 1960s, egalitarian opportunity has been viewed as more important than racial or ethnic identity. In conservative periods, such as the present, pluralism (currently “cultural diversity”) has served to excuse economic and political exploitation as necessary to the preservation of distinct racial or ethnic identities. Politically, African and Native Americans have both mirrored and resisted the swings between these poles; musically they have adopted somewhat di◊erent strategies. American Indians have been largely separated, by both prejudice and law, from the culture which now occupies their lands. Their influence on and adaptations of music by non-Indians have been subtle and restrained; and although forced displacements have produced some intra-tribal musical interactions, they have placed a high value on the maintenance of tradition. African Americans, on the other hand, created from the outset a hybridized music by adapting imposed and appropriated elements from the mainstream to their own ends. Some elements of African music (the banjo, for instance) came with the slaves to colonial America; but most of their heritage was stripped away by owners who could not allow slaves to be regarded as humans. Nevertheless, by the Civil War African Americans had remade their music with a resourcefulness which owed as much to adaptive resistance to slavery as to their African roots. Slaves encountered a wide variety of white musics, from Appalachian dances to reform hymnody to marches to sentimental songs. Some was imposed on them by well-meaning missionaries, some taught them by exploitative owners; but in all cases the received music was acted upon – sifted for items of particular value, transformed by African residues, intermingled with other materials. African Americans were never passive recipients of white culture; rather, they actively reworked it to suit their own lives. For over two hundred years they struggled not merely for equality but for individuality; they sought to be not invisible compatriots but distinct persons. They mirror with particular intensity the ideological tension at the heart of American culture; they are, in their situation if not their status, the quintessential Americans. African American culture is profoundly utilitarian; materials at hand are redisposed to suit immediate purposes. For this reason it is especially di√cult to separate the threads in African American traditions: a verse appropriated from a Protestant hymn might be transformed into a freedom refrain sung in call-and-response to a melody which derives from a field holler, with the whole reappearing later in a blues. Not uncommonly, 48 william brooks appropriations from white culture served political ends: plantation spirituals and hollers fused African idioms with scriptural texts to create a code for underground communication; the music in black churches, partly appropriated from white culture and therefore acceptable to it, became a means for resisting oppression from that very culture. Problems of lineage and appropriation are especially acute in secular music, since African American creativity has repeatedly been looted by the popular music industry, as a slave’s handiwork might be taken and sold by an owner. When this happens, African Americans have often turned away from that which has been taken in order to create another new music. After the banjo was popularized in minstrelsy, for example, it fell out of favor among African Americans. The rhythms it had played were reassigned to other instruments and merged with harmonies and forms appropriated from Europe; ragtime and (arguably) jazz resulted. In the twentieth century this process has become more self-conscious. Bebop was, among other things, a critique of the white-dominated, monolithic jazz of the 1940s; part of that critique entailed composing new melodies to harmonies appropriated from popular music standards. More recently African Americans have pioneered the use of sampling in hip hop and rap; the appropriation of tracks from earlier recordings is in part a critique of the exploitation intrinsic to the mainstream economy. Bebop and rap were made both necessary and possible by the development of recording technology. The impact of this technology on all of America’s folk musics is incalculable: as soon as a folk music is made commercially available it becomes not only an economic commodity but also an historical artifact. Externally imposed values grounded in profit, ownership, or authenticity begin to supplant the aesthetic and social values intrinsic to the tradition. This process gathered enormous force in the twentieth century, so that to most Americans “folk music” now describes either a marketing or a scholarly niche. It was anticipated, however, by a sea change in the reform tradition which occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. That change, the relationship of popular music to American ideology, and two interlinked a√rmations of individualist invention will be the subjects of chapter 10. 570 Bibliography and references Newcomb, Franc Johnson 1956 A Study of Navajo Symbolism (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Ortega, Paul 1974 Three Worlds (Canyon apo-3–c) Plains: Comanche, Cheyenne, Kiowa, Caddo, Wichita, Pawnee undated (Library of Congress afs l39) Powers, William K. 1990 War Dance: Plains Indian Musical Performance (Tucson, Arizona) Rafinesque, Constantine S. 1954 [1833] Walam Olum or Red Score: The Migration Legend of the Lenni Lenape or Delaware Indians (Indianapolis) Red Earth Singers 1978 (Indian House ih 4502) Rhodes, Willard 1963 “North American Indian Music in Transition” in Journal of the International Folk Music Council vol. 15, pp. 9–14 Roberts, Helen 1936 Musical Areas in Aboriginal North America (New Haven) Seton, Ernest Thompson 1917 The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore (Garden City, New York) Songs from the Iroquois Longhouse undated (Library of Congress afs l6) Sousa, John Philip 1977 [1890] National, Patriotic and Typical Airs of All Lands (New York) Stevenson, Robert 1973a “Written Sources for Indian Music Until 1882” in Ethnomusicology vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 1–40 1973b “English Sources for Indian Music Until 1882” in Ethnomusicology vol. 17, no. 3, pp. 399–442 1982 “The First Published Native American (American Indian) Composer” in InterAmerican Music Review vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 79–84 Toledo, Charlie 1973 Navajo Music Class (Chinle, Arizona) Vander, Judith 1988 Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women (Urbana) Vennum, Thomas, Jr. 1982 The Ojibway Dance Drum: Its History and Construction (Smithsonian Folklife Studies, 2) (Washington, D.C.) Vetromile, Eugene 1866 The Abnakis and Their History or Historical Notices on the Aborigines of Acadia (New York) Washo-Peyote Songs 1972 (Ethnic Folkways fe 4384) Wovoka 1973 (Epic Records) 2 Music in America: an overview (part 1) Ancelet, Barry Jean 1984 The Makers of Cajun Music (Austin) Benjamin, Walter 1969 Illuminations ed. Hannah Arendt (New York) Broyles, Michael 1992 “Music of the Highest Class”: Elitism and Populism in Antebellum Boston (New Haven) Burkholder, J. Peter 1995 All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven) Burton, Humphrey 1994 Leonard Bernstein (New York) Chase, Gilbert 1966a America’s Music 2nd edn. (New York) 1966b (ed.) The American Composer Speaks (Baton Rouge) Crawford, Richard 1968 Andrew Law, American Psalmodist (Evanston) Daniel, Ralph T. 1966 The Anthem in New England Before 1800 (Evanston) Epstein, Dena J. 1977 Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana) Bibliography and references 571 Foner, Philip 1975 American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century (Urbana) Hamm, Charles 1983 Music in the New World (New York) Hofstadter, Richard 1969 Anti-intellectualism in American Life (New York) Jackson, George Pullen 1933 White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands (Chapel Hill) Lomax, John, and Lomax, Alan 1934 American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York) Lott, Eric 1995 Love and Theft (New York) McKay, David P., and Crawford, Richard 1975 William Billings of Boston: EighteenthCentury Composer (Princeton) Miller, Perry 1956 Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Mueller, John H. 1951 The American Symphony Orchestra (Bloomington) Nathan, Hans 1962 Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, Oklahoma) Patterson, Daniel W. 1979 The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton) Pemberton, Carol A. 1985 Lowell Mason (Ann Arbor) Preston, Katherine K. 1993 Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60 (Urbana) Rodnitzky, Jerome 1976 Minstrels of the Dawn (Chicago) Schabas, Ezra 1989 Theodore Thomas, America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905 (Urbana) Schi◊, David 1983 The Music of Elliott Carter (New York) Scholes, Percy A. 1934 The Puritans and Music in England and New England (London) Sessions, Roger 1979 Roger Sessions on Music (Princeton) Shanet, Howard 1975 Philharmonic (Garden City, New York) Slobin, Mark 1982 Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants (Urbana) Smith, M. B. 1943 The Life of Ole Bull (Princeton) Sonneck, Oscar 1907 Early Concert-Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig; repr. 1978, New York) 1915 Early Opera in America (repr. 1963, New York) Stevenson, Robert 1966 Protestant Church Music in America (New York) Upton, William Treat 1939 Anthony Philip Heinrich (New York) 1954 William Henry Fry. American Journalist and Composer-Critic (New York) 3 Secular music to 1800 American Revolutionary War Songs to Cultivate the Sensations of Freedom 1976 (Folkways nh 5279) Anderson, Gillian B. 1978 America Independent, or, The Temple of Minerva (Washington, D.C.) 1987 Music in New York during the American Revolution (Boston) Bailyn, Bernard 1986 The Peopling of British North America (New York) Benson, Norman Arthur 1963 “The Itinerant Dancing and Music Masters of Eighteenth-Century America” (unpubl. diss.; University of Minnesota) Bourassa-Trépanier, Juliette, and Poirier, Lucien 1990 Répertoire des données musicales de la presse québécoise (Québec) Bridenbaugh, Carl 1938 Cities in the Wilderness (London) . 10 . Music in America: an overview (part 2) william brooks In chapter 2, I discussed three aspects of the interaction between individualism and egalitarianism which characterizes American music as well as her politics and society: elitist art and egalitarian folk musics, which in some respects mark the poles of a spectrum, and the mediational role of musical reformers. The present chapter explores three other aspects: a counter-reform, the popular music industry, and the interlinked techniques of improvisation and experiment. I begin by returning to the reformers. Counter-reform The reformers sought to elevate America’s tastes by presenting artistic values in a musical language suited to ordinary citizens. They were most successful in cities, where their ideas both supported and rested on a rich concert life. The links between art music, reform, and patronage thereby grew steadily stronger, so that by the 1870s many reformers had e◊ectively become upper-class conservatives. By that time, however, America was becoming more self-critical about its social and economic polarities. The aesthetics of working-class citizens seemed less important than their economic position, and values derived from European art music seemed far removed from the a◊ection citizens granted their folk and popular musics. Though reform methods still served to promote musical literacy and performance, they became increasingly irrelevant to the reformers’ original, broader objectives: mediation, reconciliation, acculturation. A counter-reform was needed. This, like its predecessor, was grounded in religion – in particular, the unending succession of religious revivals that swept across nineteenthcentury rural America. The music sung at these ranged from traditional psalms to remnants of the New England repertory to, eventually, reform hymns by Mason and his brethren. But regardless of the music’s source, [257] 258 william brooks the performances were anarchic and ecstatic; each of thousands of celebrants could inflect any phrase individually, moved by a personal epiphany. As in New England a century before, a notated repertory was transformed into a folk performance tradition; and as before, a new repertory by a new generation of composers eventually resulted. These composers, however, built upon the reformers’ successes. They could assume that revival congregations would generally be musically literate; hence they could disseminate their work in notated form without necessarily linking it to singing schools. They also knew that literacy had made possible a sheet music industry which shaped its products for maximum popularity, and they hoped to redirect toward ecstatic salvation the a◊ection and pleasure these products evoked. The result was a new missionary music: the gospel hymn. The reforming urge remained, but its focus was reversed: the staid artfulness of the inherited repertory was to be transformed by an infusion of energy from folk and popular musical traditions. Like previous reforms, revivalism and the music it engendered sought to mediate America’s ideological polarities both socially and technically. Egalitarian masses flocked to hear charismatic individuals preach; a single authority (the Bible) was given a multitude of sectarian readings. Tubthumping rhythms ensured ensemble, while simple harmonies invited extemporization; call-and-response patterns modeled a balance between leaders and followers. In important ways, however, the counter-reform was the converse of its predecessor. Its crusades were focused not on artless villagers but sin-laden urbanites. Its message was disseminated not through schools and churches but through popular media: journalism, publishing, and eventually broadcasting. And its music sought not to propagate the values of high culture but to sweep them aside, to overpower intellectual elitism with the sheer energy and abundance of a redirected popular culture. Education and scholarship underwent a similar counter-reform somewhat later; but unlike a century before, this depended less on religion than on a new technology. In the early twentieth century, broadcasting and recording began to make music universally available in an acoustic, rather than notated, form. Suddenly musical literacy was no longer a precondition for music’s reproduction; and with the introduction of long-playing discs, transistor-based sound equipment, and cassette tapes, the cultural shift was completed. By the 1960s virtually all young Americans were learning nearly all their music – popular, folk, or art – from recordings, not scores. All music thereby became part of a new aural tradition, and the focus of Music in America: an overview (part 2) 259 music education shifted toward listening and away from theory and performance. In e◊ect, values previously associated with folk music or the music industry – familiarity, utility, popularity – began to be applied universally. Both nineteenth- and twentieth-century educators sought to mediate between citizens and an elite; but whereas the former taught music notation so that popular taste could be shaped to approach high art, the latter taught by means of recordings so that art music could be approached as if it were popular. Recordings also made possible a new kind of scholarship. Notation had enabled a particular piece to be replicated at will, so that analysis, criticism, and theory could be brought to bear. Recordings enabled the replication of non-notated performances; suddenly the scholarly study of folk and popular musics became practical – so practical that by the 1950s a new discipline, ethnomusicology, had been formed to encompass much such work. But ethnomusicology entailed important departures from nineteenth-century art music scholarship; in particular, it generally rejected both the analysis of individual works in themselves and respect for composerly genius. It was a small step to another counter-reform, in which ethnomusicological methods were applied to other domains. The “new musicology” of the 1980s and 1990s o◊ers one example; a more pointed instance, in the present context, is the increasing legitimacy granted scholarly studies of American music. Art music itself underwent a related reorientation. By the end of the nineteenth century, a significant number of composers had begun incorporating folk and popular musics into their works. Earlier aesthetic assumptions were inverted: rather than improving a people’s music by imposing elitist values and techniques, the counter-reform composers hoped to revitalize an elitist art by injecting national or populist values and materials. Although this reorientation occurred throughout the West (it was a European, Antonín Dvořák, who famously argued the point in the United States), its application was especially problematic in America. European nationalists worked in relatively homogeneous cultures with long-standing indigenous folk traditions; but America was a salmagundi of uncounted immigrant groups. Moreover, many American folk traditions were being continuously transformed by appropriations from others; worse, most had become inextricably entangled with America’s popular music industry. On what tradition could a composer base a truly American music? Or were all traditions equally serviceable? 260 william brooks In their replies, American composers distributed themselves along a spectrum much like that occupied by folk traditions (see chapter 2): from individualism (regionalism) to egalitarianism (eclecticism), linked by appropriation. One large group, reaching back at least to Louis Moreau Gottschalk, focused on the musics through which their own sensitivities were formed. Some, like Virgil Thomson, embraced a variety of sources from a particular geographic region; others, like William Grant Still, drew on ethnic traditions which had evolved nationwide. An important subgroup turned to jazz and popular music. Composers from John Alden Carpenter to Gunther Schuller sought to invigorate art music with vernacular rhythms and gestures; others, from George Gershwin to Anthony Braxton, applied forms or techniques from art music to essentially vernacular idioms. Still others, like Leonard Bernstein, drew on both vernacular and ethnic streams, sometimes in the same work. Yet another subgroup, in America as Europe, grounded art music’s reform in art music itself. As the twentieth century unfolded, art music composers became so alienated from the received canon that historical art music was as removed from their own work as were popular or folk traditions. Composers like Lucas Foss and George Rochberg began to represent in their own work the historical art music on which they had been raised. By the 1990s, in works of John Adams and others, music had joined other post-modern arts in taking its own history for its subject matter. All these composers, though drawing on very di◊erent sources, sought to re-form their art around a music which was part of their personal heritage. In this sense their music parallels that of folk traditions which tend toward isolation and preservation. But appropriation (acculturation) had its analogue too, in composers who drew on musics which were largely foreign to them. Dozens of European Americans, led initially by Arthur Farwell, rebuilt their art around materials taken from Native American or African American folk traditions. For other composers, the Anglo-American mainstream was equally distant; Aaron Copland’s scores from the 1930s and 1940s – probably the best known of all “Americanist” compositions – generally utilize idioms and references which had little or no bearing on Copland’s formative years. Other composers reached even further afield, and in so doing allied themselves with the emerging discipline of ethnomusicology. Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison turned to Indonesia; La Monte Young and Terry Riley, to the Indian subcontinent. Mixed-repertory performers like Jenny Lind and John Philip Sousa, who sought to educate vernacular Music in America: an overview (part 2) 261 audiences about art music values, gradually gave way to ensembles like the Kronos Quartet, who sought to educate art music audiences about a variety of ethnic traditions. Intuitive polyglots like George Crumb combined ethnic, vernacular, and historical sources into a highly idiosyncratic personal idiom. Like many American folk musicians, ethno-composers enlarged their own art music tradition by acts of appropriation. But few shared the radical egalitarianism that lay at the heart of folk appropriations. Many, in fact, were essentially elitist, attempting both to reform their own alienated tradition and to demonstrate that the music of a di◊erent culture possessed analogous high-art values. Others, entranced by the “simplicity” or “purity” of folk traditions, implicitly rea√rmed the distinction – and the relative positions – of “high” and “low” art. Some, however, were more profoundly eclectic, arguing for a non-hierarchic field of possibilities which would include art music itself. For individuals like Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, and Charles Ives, the friction between an elitist art and an egalitarian ideology would be substantially reduced if art music were recognized as simply one musical path among many. Composerly greatness – pioneering accomplishments in art music – could be reconciled with democratic citizenship if a composer grounded his work in the musicality inherent in everyone: “eclecticism,” Ives wrote, “is part of [a composer’s] duty” (Ives 1961, p. 79). The precise source was irrelevant (it could even be art music itself ); Ives required only that “local color, national color, any color, [be] a true pigment of the universal color” (p. 81). Such unprejudiced eclecticism collapses the polarity between art and the vernacular into a universal, non-hierarchical domain. In this sense it runs counter not only to previous reforms but to the missionary qualities of reform itself. Since all musics stand on an equal footing, none can be used to “improve” another; what is reformed, rather, is the presumption that improvement is needed. The American eclectics propose a transcendent alternative in which individual genius and egalitarianism are mutually supportive; the conflict between Pioneer and Citizen is transformed into cooperation. Popular music Even the eclectics, however (possibly excepting Ives), found equality easier to accept for folk and art traditions than for popular music. In the 262 william brooks former, at least, values like beauty or utility were deemed independent of economic worth; in the latter, musical and market values were thoroughly entangled. For popular music, as I shall use the term, is by definition evaluated primarily by its economic success – in America, by its success in what is described as a free market. In American ideology, free markets mediate economically between Pioneer and Citizen: the value of each Pioneer creation is established by the price assigned it by Citizen purchasers. In theory, every creation has an equal chance at collective approval, and the collective judgment is made without prejudice; individualism and egalitarianism achieve a symbiotic balance. In practice, “free” markets are never unregulated: at times equality is enforced at the risk of damping initiative; at other times individualism is encouraged at the risk of monopoly. Music both fits and resists this model. In all but wholly participatory traditions, music performed by individuals is heard (purchased) by a body of listeners; in this sense, theatres and concert halls mimic markets. Strictly speaking, however, a live performance never recurs; it cannot be resold, and approval of it is expressed only in the purchase of another, di◊erent performance. Marketers (whether of orchestras, Broadway shows, or rock stars) exploit this contradiction, implying paradoxically that successive performances of the same production are both identical and unique. Only when music can be widely disseminated in reproducible form does it become fully compatible with free-market ideology. In America this occurred when musical literacy became su√ciently widespread to make the mass production of sheet music economically viable. Thus, although early reformers initially promoted literacy to mediate between folk and art music traditions, they indirectly fathered an altogether di◊erent music, one which bypassed entirely the values associated with either tradition. With the advent of recording, the new genre, with its monovalent measure of success, became the most universally accepted mechanism for reconciling art with America’s ideology. Rather than attempting to mediate concepts like aesthetics, elitism, and community, the popular music industry acts as a broker between musicmakers and music-users. It addresses the American dilemma by asserting, on the one hand, that each piece of music is created (owned) by a gifted individual or team of individuals, and by requiring, on the other, that each piece be approved (purchased) by a significant number of ordinary citizens. Both these conditions are vital to its function. The industry cannot be radically egalitarian; it must insist that good music is produced only by extraordinary people, for if it granted musical creativity to all citizens Music in America: an overview (part 2) 263 equally it could o◊er no rationale for the purchase of its products. Nor can it, as a whole, be explicitly elitist; to declare that only certain citizens are aesthetically qualified to be consumers would violate both the ideology and the practice of a free market. The industry has never been, however, a monolith; like other musics in America, its components have situated themselves in a field defined by the same sort of spectra that characterize America’s social and political domains. For producers of popular music, these spectra are translated into what are, in e◊ect, marketing strategies. At one extreme producers seek to draw into a single audience individuals from a variety of subcultures – an egalitarian strategy which appeals to the citizenry’s desire for shared, fundamental values. At the other, producers create products intended for a specific subculture, or even to create a subculture – an individualist strategy which appeals to each citizen’s desire to be di◊erent. In practice most popular music occupies an intermediary position, aimed at a distinct market but receptive to crossover success. In times when America’s integrationist impulse is ascendant – between, say, 1955 and 1963 – the number of crossover hits increases and the boundaries between markets are blurred; in pluralist eras, such as the 1980s, marketing categories proliferate and products are narrowly targeted. At all times, however, both strategies are viable; their persistence is perhaps best exemplified by the di◊erent stances adopted by top-forty and country music producers toward the subcultures defined by purchasers’ ages. The former, especially since 1955, have promoted music as a cultural marker by which each new generation can distinguish itself from its elders; new topforty music is therefore constantly di◊erentiated from the old, with a major change declared every few years, as a new generation defines itself. Country music, on the other hand, is essentially conservative; because it aims to integrate old and young into a single audience it changes gradually, avoiding disjunctions that might create a generational split in its market. These di◊erent strategies are illustrative of an even broader dichotomy – that between synchronic and diachronic popularity, between “hits” and “standards.” Much popular music aspires to be both immediately successful and long-lasting, of course, but a significant portion is marketed with either obsolescence or endurance primarily in mind. Songs associated with dance crazes (Do the Bird), for example, are intended to lose favor quickly so that new ones can be marketed in their stead. Successful show tunes (Old Man River), on the other hand, are usually meant to persist in a variety of performances and revivals over many years. 264 william brooks Music which is popular over an extremely long span of time often comes to occupy an intermediate position between commercial music and art or folk traditions. Certain art music works have come to function much like very long-lived commercial products, either because of inherent qualities like compactness and adaptability (“Air on the G String”) or because of unique cultural associations (the William Tell Overture). There has resulted a distinct “pops” repertory – a peculiar mix of classical music, show tunes, film scores, and popular song – which claims both aesthetic and economic virtue. Conversely, some long-lived commercial products have become situated somewhere between popular and folk music. When copyright expires, incentives to promote a work are greatly diminished; its continuing popularity thereafter (which often depends on oral transmission rather than commercial transactions) signals the kind of egalitarian, non-commercial approval which is usually reserved for music from a folk tradition. Many nineteenth-century songs (Little Brown Jug, for instance) have acquired this patina; but the best illustration is provided by Stephen Foster, who is taken to be, simultaneously, the voice of the folk (“America’s Troubadour” [Howard 1953]), a canny writer of commercially successful songs, and a creative artist of great genius. That none of these descriptions alone su√ces is precisely the point; Foster’s ambiguous position is both a justification and a consequence of America’s musical and ideological dialectic. Diachronic popularity requires creators of popular music always to position themselves with respect to the received “standards” or “classics” of their time. These change constantly, to a far greater degree than for art music; thus alienation is less pervasive in twentieth-century commercial music than in art music. But it remains a potent force whenever a group of citizens or artists believes the received repertory reinforces the status of a cultural or economic elite. The creation of a new, notably di◊erent music provides the disenfranchised group with an emblem marking a rejection of the status quo; the music both reflects and shapes the individualist impulse which underlies social change. This phenomenon has occurred irregularly among European- and Anglo-Americans, from the minstrelsy of Jacksonian democracy to the folk-rock of the 1960s; among black Americans, forcibly alienated from mainstream culture, it has recurred generation after generation, from blues to bebop, jive to rap. Such striking disjunctions have attracted much commentary; but most popular music continues, rather than rejects, the received repertory. Every new song, of course, di◊ers in some way from those which are already Music in America: an overview (part 2) 265 popular; commonly, however, the di◊erences are slight, so that an identified market is retained, with one or more of the previously popular items replaced by the new one. When the di◊erences are more substantial, they usually signal the presence of one of the two strategies described earlier: splitting an existing market to create subgroups whose identity depends on the purchasing of new products; or combining portions of di◊erent audiences to create a new, potentially larger market. These two approaches have engendered two tactics which typically mediate between change and continuity in popular music: the promotion of individual artists and the transformation of style by means of appropriation. The former long predates the modern music industry; sheet music from the 1700s already proclaimed on its covers “as sung by —,” and early American impresarios associated their seasons with star performers. When sheet music became a product in its own right, rather than a mere echo of the theatre, the focus of promotion shifted to composers; Stephen Foster is again an early paradigm, with composer-performer Henry Russell a noteworthy, hybrid precursor. By the Civil War sheet music companies had begun to cultivate distinct stables of songwriters, a process which culminated in turn-of-the-century Tin Pan Alley. Thereafter performers became increasingly important. Popular music was increasingly disseminated by means of recordings, rather than sheet music, and promoters consequently focused on the acoustic event (the performance) rather than on a notated abstraction (the score). By the 1950s the marketing focus was so concentrated that most purchasers were wholly unaware of the composers of the hits sung by their favorite performers. Intermediate between these two eras were the big bands of the 1930s and 1940s, whose leaders were composers of (at least) idiosyncratic arrangements but were also performers whose primary products were recordings. Since the 1960s the distinction has increasingly been lost; except in country music, most performers are now their own composers and vice versa. The focus of popular music promotion thus shifted gradually from performers in the early nineteenth century to composers in the early twentieth and back to performers (or performer-composers) after World War II. But the objective was always the same: to carve from an unreliable general audience a smaller, secure group of fans who could be counted upon to purchase each of their idol’s new products. The marketing of individual artists reinforces individualist tendencies in American culture: by proclaiming the irreplaceable genius of a 266 william brooks particular composer or performer, it encourages devotees of this genius to distinguish themselves from (and sometimes contend with) devotees of di◊erent individuals. Indeed, there often results an elitism akin to that associated with art music; contending enclaves of consumers deliberately disregard economic measures in order to argue the merits of their favorites on artistic grounds. In recent years some such enclaves have even come to constitute a separate marketing category, “alternative” rock. In practice, of course, individual composers or performers rarely o◊er a significant alternative. Their innovations are meant to attract devotees from their competitors or from a well-defined market, not to question the structure or function of markets themselves. Even when an individual (James Brown, for instance) is su√ciently inventive to precipitate an entire substyle, the consequences are essentially reductionist and divisive, continuing the status quo. More radical change results only when a di◊erent tactic is employed, often without conscious planning: the creation of a single, more universal audience by the conflation of enclaves previously devoted to wholly di◊erent musics or performers. This process depends not on innovation but on appropriation. Most popular music is derivative, of course, in that each marketable item appropriates much of its content from a pool of received material. Moreover, popular artists develop consistent styles by, in e◊ect, appropriating from themselves; and within genres, they imitate their rivals in attempts to capture fans. But when appropriation alters the orientation of an entire audience, it has a more profound e◊ect: a new, rather unpredictable market is created, with the possibility that a sea change in popular music’s structure and style will follow. I have previously discussed appropriation in folk and art music traditions, where the identity of the appropriated material is generally acknowledged openly. For art musicians vernacular material usually critiques the elitism of their own tradition, while for folk musicians appropriation openly confirms their essential egalitarianism. In popular music, however, appropriation is often masked, at least initially; the audience reorientation which it seeks to precipitate would be defeated were listeners to recognize the source, with all its concomitant associations. In its most limited form, then, appropriation results simply in a “cover,” re-presenting in a form palatable to certain listeners a song or performance which would not be acceptable in its original version. Were that all, a cover would simply be a mechanism for creating new products; but commonly at least part of the targeted audience eventually becomes reconciled (or even Music in America: an overview (part 2) 267 devoted) to the original. Thus Pat Boone’s Tutti Frutti was not merely a clean-cut, restrained rendition of Little Richard’s woolly, exuberant recording; it also, indirectly, encouraged at least some of its consumers to purchase Little Richard’s version itself. Covers thus serve in a sense as mediators, functioning economically the way the reform repertory did socially: they shape a new market by introducing purchasers to values they had previously rejected. When covers draw repeatedly from particular peripheral styles, aspects of those styles eventually surface, unmasked, in the mainstream. In the decade 1945–1955, for example, dozens of hillbilly (country music) hits were covered by mainstream performers like Jo Sta◊ord and Patti Page. Other artists, like Tennessee Ernie Ford, masked their country roots in mainstream recordings which were in e◊ect their own covers; still others, like Frankie Laine, built careers by hiding urban origins behind Western facades. African American music was appropriated similarly: white performers ranging from the Weavers to Johnnie Ray adapted widely di◊erent elements from it; black performers like the Inkspots and Nat King Cole masked parts of it to create mainstream hits. As the decade passed, elements from the appropriated styles surfaced more and more explicitly, gradually reorienting mainstream markets toward the periphery and the periphery toward the mainstream. The process culminated in seminal recordings (many of them still covers) by Elvis Presley and others, which fused both markets and styles into a new social and musical genre: rock and roll. Almost immediately, of course, the new market began to fragment, in ways already described; but the fractures were new ones, and the course of both style and industry had been irrevocably transformed. Similar developments had occurred at least twice before: in the 1830s and 1840s, when aspects of African American and lower-class white musics gradually penetrated a European-based song style, culminating in the music of Stephen Foster and the maturation of America’s sheet music industry; and in the 1910s and 1920s, when aspects of African American jazz not only transformed the mainstream style but fostered the industry’s shift from sheet music to recordings. In all three cases the appropriated (“covered”)materialsweretakeninlargepartfromAfricanAmericanmusic – a measure not only of the unrelenting marginalization and exploitation of black culture but also of its extraordinary vitality. In response, African Americans usually discarded the appropriated style, replacing it with a newly adapted one which in some way critiqued the exploitative mainstream; this was in turn appropriated, and the cycle continued. 268 william brooks Processes of assimilation and appropriation have been greatly accelerated by music technology. Recordings freed “covers” from the constraints of notation; they also decoupled venues for production and reception, so that in a sense a performance is appropriated every time a recording is played. Recent developments in sampling technology, especially as applied in hip hop and rap, have made recordings themselves subject to appropriation and challenged the very notion of ownership. (Again African Americans have been the primary innovators.) The internet may have even more radical consequences: in cyberspace itself there is nothing to be owned, and so marketing must focus on access, not products. Audiences and genres then become self-selecting, so that economic mediation between individualism and egalitarianism becomes far more fluid and unpredictable. Some form of that mediation, however, will remain fundamental to the working of America’s popular music industry. Improvisation and experiment New technologies commonly engender new skills unrelated to conventional schooling: hip hop virtuosity is not learned in conservatories. In this sense, much recent popular music is linked to the final path which I wish to trace through America’s musical terrain – a path marked by individuals who apparently deny that music-making requires formal training, conventional skills, or even talent. Some have worked primarily in performance, as musical improvisers; others have focused on composition and musical experiment. These domains are often entangled (in, for example, the music of Charles Mingus or Anthony Braxton); but even when separate, they can together be distinguished from other strands of America’s music. For all the paths thus far discussed, from reform to popular music, are implicitly a√liational: that is, they ask individuals – composers, performers, listeners – to ally themselves with others, to situate their work in a context of mutual support. In this sense (and this sense only) their fundamental orientation is collective and egalitarian. Improvisation and experiment, on the other hand, are fundamentally individualist; they require that each creative act be independent, and they permit (or even encourage) artists to imagine themselves isolated. Both improvisation and experiment reach back at least to colonial America; but both acquired new importance with the advent of recordings and are therefore often associated with the twentieth century. Improvisation might be said to occur any time an individual spontane- Music in America: an overview (part 2) 269 ously embellishes or transforms received material. In American culture, however, it is useful to distinguish between embellishments which seek only to realize the intentions implicit in the received material and those which impose an added layer of intention which is the performer’s alone. In the former case one speaks of interpretation; in the latter, of improvisation. Improvisation requires individual inventiveness, but it also has egalitarian implications: the added layer of intention places performers on a more equal footing with composers. Improvisation thus flourishes where veneration for composers is diminished; it also flourishes where tools are needed to protest imbalances in an allegedly egalitarian society. In America both these conditions exist; especially in America’s folk traditions, particularly of oppressed minorities (African Americans, for instance), improvisation has been absolutely central. An improvisation is usually assumed to be unique not only to a performer but to an occasion; that is, an improviser is expected to embellish a work di◊erently in each performance. When this is not the case, one might speak of a performer’s “version” of a work, rather than an improvisation; but the boundaries are often unclear: a version may crystallize from successive improvisations, and an improvisation may be assembled from fragments which are reused in successive performances. Moreover, di◊ering versions often function socially exactly like di◊ering improvisations. Thus, in the seventeenth century, when hymn singers developed idiosyncratic renditions of the received repertory, it was the variations between performers, not between successive performances, that so exercised literate musicians. It is assumed an improvisation will never recur; but a recorded improvisation does recur, as often as a listener wants. Recordings convert improvisation into composition: each recording becomes a piece in its own right, on which the entire evaluative apparatus associated with art music can be brought to bear, so that certain recordings can be judged especially artful, selected artists declared to be geniuses, particular performances cited as paradigmatic masterpieces. Around recorded improvisations there has thus coalesced an elitist subculture not unlike that associated with art music, and performers in improvising traditions – notably jazz – have confronted some of the same di√culties faced by art music composers. Certain recordings have come to constitute a core repertory, creating a canon which functions much like the art music canon and toward which each new generation of improvisers must take some sort of stance, respectful or otherwise. 270 william brooks The situation is further complicated because recorded improvisations, unlike art music, are often also commercial products. Folk improvisers are members of a subculture; recordings convert that subculture into a market and its improvisers into producers whose products are subjected to the strategies and measures associated with popular music. In particular, improvisers are asked to succeed, paradoxically, both in continuing the tradition (that is, creating re-productions which will maintain or broaden existing markets) and in distinguishing themselves from it (that is, creating an individual style around which a reliable submarket can be formed). However, because improvisation is often situated in economically marginal subcultures, the recording industry is especially motivated to produce “covers” which will appeal to audiences with greater purchasing power but who stand outside the tradition itself. Jazz – a primarily African American tradition in a racist culture – was therefore disproportionately represented either by white performers whose music, no matter how skilled, was derivative (The Original Dixieland Jazz Band, Paul Whiteman, Benny Goodman, the Dorseys) or by African Americans willing in e◊ect to cover their own music, either by masking themselves with white stereotypes (Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway) or by masking their work with white musicians (Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman). Musicians in improvising traditions – especially African Americans – thus faced an extraordinarily complex situation in the twentieth century. Before the advent of recordings the individualism intrinsic to improvisation was mediated by the ephemeral nature of performance and the egalitarian nature of folk traditions. Recordings upset this balance, setting improvisers competitively against not only each other but also all previous recordings (including their own). Recordings also thrust communitarian, non-commercial music into the mainstream, free-market music industry, which reshaped audiences and products for maximum profit. The results were unprecedented and paradoxical. Some musicians – notably Duke Ellington – sought to reconcile the conflicts intrinsic to their changing situation, to create a music which was abundant enough and large enough to absorb and transform the disparate cultural pressures to which it was subjected. Thus Ellington orchestrated individuals, not instruments, so that his band (far more than most) was a community shaped by distinct, improvising voices; he alternately exploited and challenged the technical implications of recordings; and he took racial and stylistic stereotypes – covers – to be the very subject of his music. Paradoxically, the great integrators of jazz (Ellington, Coltrane, Mingus, Music in America: an overview (part 2) 271 and others) were all extraordinary individuals – pioneers, even geniuses in the art music sense. Quite di◊erent responses were provided by groups of musicians who were acutely aware that recordings had come to serve either as an improvisational canon (art music) or objects of trade (popular music); their music critiqued both of these functions while inevitably being subsumed into them. Their responses ranged from revisionist (the New Orleans revival) to radical (free jazz); nearly always they arose first in noncommercial venues from small communities of players which may have included astonishing virtuosos (Charlie Parker, for instance) but did not depend on the leadership of a particular individual. Commonly the structure of the response was itself a comment on social or musical circumstances; thus the stereotypical form of a bop performance (unison head, solos by each player, unison close) asserts both the equality and individuality of the performers – a comment on not only the radical inequality of the Depression but also the commercial anonymity of big bands. Similar developments can be traced in other improvisatory genres: the blues, of course, but also country music, where the emergence and subsequent history of bluegrass closely parallels that of post-big-band jazz. However, it was in jazz that the social and aesthetic conflicts were sharpest. If, as many have claimed, jazz is the quintessential American music – as blacks are the quintessential Americans – it is because its history so directly manifests, in so many ways, the dialectical tensions at the heart of America’s culture. Since the 1950s rock and roll has largely supplanted jazz, in the public view, but rock di◊ers in crucial respects: it is explicitly commercial; it is more racially integrated; it is created specifically for recordings; and it quickly became truly international. As a result, even at its most “alternative,” rock has rarely achieved the self-aware complexities of jazz, and its artists have almost never found themselves alienated from their own tradition to the extent that jazz artists have. Indeed, in their post-war alienation jazz improvisers resemble not folk or commercial musicians but composers of art music, and devotees of jazz have also often been devotees of the contemporary arts. Musicians in both domains must somehow distinguish themselves from a received canon of works even though those works constitute the very tradition in which they were trained. They also stand in a tangential and paradoxical relation to popular music and to values associated with economic success. And, like all American musicians, they must find a way to reconcile individual creativity with good citizenship. The latter invites a more narrow parallel: between improvisers and what 272 william brooks have been called “experimental” composers. Innovative improvisers, it is argued, are largely self-taught; formal instruction may grant technical facility, but at the cost of converting a creative endeavor into a commercial one, sacrificing “soul” for success. Experimental composers make an analogous claim: although a formal musical education is usually presumed beneficial to the composition of art music, under some circumstances training is not necessary and may even be a liability. Experimental composition, in this view, entails the invention and application of a system, a collection of premises; each piece of music explores the implications of a particular system, and the value of the process (the experiment) transcends that of the outcome (the piece). But if composition requires invention rather than talent or training, then anyone – quite literally – can be a composer; all citizens stand on an exactly equal footing, unbiased by education or social standing. Complementarily, each newly invented music distinguishes its creator from all others; each experiment, regardless of its outcome, carries traces of a single person’s unique way of thinking. Experimental music thus empowers the Citizenry in the domain of art music exactly the way American democracy empowers them socially: it assigns equal value to each citizen, gives each a right to self-description, and places primary value on the integrity of a process, not an outcome. Experimental music is generally thought to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, with John Cage alternately serving as progenitor and apotheosis. But there are ample precedents in America’s past. William Billings, speaking for a generation of tunesmiths, declared that “every Composer should be his own Carver” (quoted in Chase 1966, p. 31), an assertion which gave him liberty to experiment widely with form and technique and served further as a premise embraced by nearly all the later shape-note composers and compilers. A more ambivalent precursor was Charles Ives. Dozens of Ives’s pieces explore newly invented methods for composing music; but Ives was also highly critical of music grounded only on such methods, finding them “a weak substitute for inspiration” which could be applied by “any high-school student” (Kirkpatrick 1960, pp. 126–127). This is, of course, precisely the point: experimental music is necessarily radically egalitarian. And for Ives egalitarianism was both ideal and inadequate; although he envisioned a day “when every man while digging his potatoes will breathe his own epics, his own symphonies . . .” (Ives 1961, p. 128), he also venerated “genius” (p. 91) as manifested in “men like Bach and Beethoven” (p. 73). Music in America: an overview (part 2) 273 Ives was, of course, an improviser as well as an experimentalist; indeed it may be in his work that these two approaches meet most closely. His objections to experimental methods have more to do with spontaneity and purpose than with the methods themselves: musical “substance,” Ives writes, “comes from somewhere near the soul” (Ives 1961, 77; an improviser’s phrase, surely), and systematic experiments are necessarily highly calculated, reminiscent of what Ives called “manner.” When such experiments were incorporated into larger works – when methods served ideas larger than themselves – Ives was more comfortable; but experimentalism’s egalitarian implications are quickly negated in such a larger, artful context. Most experimentalists followed Ives in this regard, employing their inventions primarily in more explicitly artful works. Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford, for example, invented and explored compositional methods which, in their theoretical transparency, were potentially applicable by “any high-school student”; but in nearly all their music these methods were deployed in support of a relatively conventional, somewhat elitist aesthetic. For other composers (Harry Partch, Henry Brant, Conlon Nancarrow), the invention of new methods was only one tool among many used to shape a highly refined art; though such composers are often described as experimentalists because of their self-reliance and inventiveness, they stand well apart from experimentalism’s social and aesthetic implications. Those implications were addressed much more directly by a later generation. The so-called “minimalists” – notably Steve Reich – began in the 1960s with works of such reiterative simplicity that they seemed to require no compositional activity whatsoever beyond the presentation of an initial premise. Closely allied were others who could be called “conceptualists” (Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, the Fluxus group); their works, though less repetitive, were similarly uninflected. For all these composers both the processes and the performances stood well apart from art music; each piece explored a premise which could have been proposed by anyone, and the performance techniques required had to be newly learned even by trained musicians. But like their predecessors, most minimalists and conceptualists eventually moved away from radical egalitarianism. Many of the latter – notably Oliveros – began creating large-scale structured improvisations, while the “post-minimalists” applied techniques like repetition and pulse to quite conventional aesthetic ends. The composer who most consistently resisted assimilation into art 274 william brooks music’s mainstream was John Cage, the paradigmatic experimentalist and arguably the art musician who most self-consciously addressed America’s social and political contradictions. Although Cage at first followed in the steps of his mentor, Henry Cowell, inventing methods and instruments which he applied in artful works like Sonatas and Interludes, his adoption of chance techniques led him irrevocably back to radical experimentalism. Chance techniques were unmistakably egalitarian; over the last fifty years of his life Cage constantly faced the objection that, as he himself phrased it, “if this is what music is, I could write it as well as you” (Cage 1961, p. 17). To which he invariably replied a√rmatively: yes, chance operations require only discipline, not talent or training. But chance techniques also invite individualism; because they set no limitations on materials or form, every piece is uniquely invented, and no two applications – no two compositions – are ever the same. Chance techniques thus apparently intercede between individualism and egalitarianism, making moot the conflict between them. Moreover, a score produced by chance techniques is both entirely unique and merely one of many possible outcomes; it is thus both irreplaceable and of no particular value, making moot the assignment of value to unique objects which has historically characterized the fine arts. Further, when chance techniques are incorporated into the score itself, each performance of the work is both unique and one among many equals; it too becomes both valuable and valueless, making moot the assignment of value to reproducible objects which has historically characterized the commercial arts. In these domains and others, by simultaneously a√rming both poles of the American dialectic, chance techniques call into question previous attempts to mediate between them. But in a larger sense the intercession of chance techniques (and to some extent of experimentalism in general) is not necessarily welcome. The dance, the struggle, the embrace between Pioneer and Citizen is not meant to end by separating the two figures; the conflicts intrinsic to American culture are not to end in a draw, any more than in a victory. It is the dance itself, in its constantly shifting gravities and balances, that animates American culture. To redefine music so that it can no longer be stressed by the pull between individualism and egalitarianism is to bypass tension in favor of tranquillity, to flatten into utopia the rugged resistance of America’s tangled terrain. It is in the persistence of the dance that America endures; that so many responses, rhythms, gestures, have been engendered – only a few of which have been traced in these overview chapters – Music in America: an overview (part 2) 275 speaks not only of the dance’s irreducibility but of America’s deep desire that it continue. Envoi On the cusp of the twenty-first century a book devoted to the history of American music is both anachronistic and timely, and for the same reason: that there is now a global culture is ever more certain, as is the hope of most Americans that that culture will be modeled on their own. Even at their least imperial, Americans seek to balance equality and individuality in phrasing their global visions: “To us and all those who hate us,” Cage wrote, “that the U.S.A. may become just another part of the world, no more, no less” (Cage 1967, p. [v]). And at their most imperial Americans insist not only on their core ideology but on a specific mechanism for mediating its contradictions: the free market, which – left to itself – converts all creation into commodities, all art into industry. But the world contains other visions and other forces – spiritual, ecological, moral, and more – and most of these are grounded in beliefs far removed from America’s central preoccupations. A truer extension of American ideology would ask that these multiple, individual visions somehow coexist as equals even though some may deny the very notion of equality. Such a recursive, paradoxical demand is impossible to countenance in domains like government, economics, or science; it can be expressed well only in the domain of art, and arguably best of all in that of music. If America’s musical progeny have a place in the next millennium, it is here, demanding that Di◊erence, by describing itself, close the sphere without bounding its contents. 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