What American music is American?

JOHN TASKER HOWARD

A critic scans the works of six native composers, and finds national unity binding their dissimilarities

It is, perhaps, quite idle to ask what American music is American, yet it nevertheless presents a question that has cost much ink and typewriter ribbon. Often it seems that critics are more concerned with how American a native composition is, than with how good it may be.

There are those who say our composers must go back to the soil if their work is to have a native flavor. In turning to authentic sources, they must claim as their own the songs of the Indian, the Negro, the mountaineer, or of any other people to whom song remains a natural, rather than a studied, expression. The mere objectivity of such a process seems to escape the gentlemen who hold such views. In the case of white composers, of European extraction, they are but borrowing something wholly apart from themselves when they adopt the melodic idiom of the Red Man or the Negro. And even if they do succeed in giving primitive tunes an appropriate dress, they produce something which represents but a narrow section of the American scene.

Others say that American music must be eclectic, chosen here and there from our

foreign background, and some day welded into a type that may be recognized as our own. The ultra-modernists, those bad boys who sprinkle notes haphazardly all over their music paper, say that the music of today, and of America in particular, must tell of our skyscrapers, subways, and riveting machines, of our nervous, restless energy.

Then, too, we have the jazzists, the apostles of Broadway's interpretation of Negro rhythms and the blues, who claim that this is the American music, that here we have at last produced something really our own, a music that none but Americans can write.

Each of these views may be argued consistently, and the man of judicial mind, one, like the hero of If Winter Comes, who forever sees both sides of a question, is likely to be lost in confusion. Yet this very multiplicity of theories may in itself provide the solution, for one important fact seems to escape those who write and talk about American music— namely, that the very lack of any definite native school, or style, is in itself most American. Our population is composed of all kinds of people, from everywhere in the world: all races, descendants of every nation. What then is more characteristic of us than that our composers should represent totally different types and produce all kinds of music?

A glance at the roster-of our creative musicians supports this theory. Line them up, and you may select any type of American you name. Even if you choose a mere half dozen from the scores who are writing music of the first order, you may still have variety.

First take John Alden Carpenter, a gentleman from Chicago with a long American ancestry, one who might be expected to represent the reactionary wing. But not at all; Mr. Carpenter is the type of man who represents the best in American culture. An aristocrat by blood and by bearing, he is nevertheless a person who can mingle freely with all kinds of people and enjoy them for what they are. He can investigate everything and accept what appeals to him, and weave it into a product that is definitely his.

Hence we have a composer who keeps pace with the moderns in music and art, but is always a few steps behind the 150 per cent radicals, simply because he refuses to throw from the artist's palette all traditional means of expression which are still useful and effective. In the ballet Skyscrapers Carpenter was indeed a modernist, to the extent of causing much talk in the newspapers. The work typified American life in the machine age, the extremes between our work and play, where there is real labor in relaxation. The music for all of this was noisy, deafening, as well it might have been to fit its subject.

In Krazy Kat, also a ballet, Carpenter offered another phase of American life, the slap-stick humor of the comic strip. In this score, he achieved the fine distinction of making the obvious subtle. Here he used jazz patterns, to a greater degree than in his earlier Concertino for piano and orchestra, which Percy Grainger introduced in 1916. There he had offered his first experiments in shifting accents on repeated rhythmic figures—the fundamental basis of jazz—and they added gaiety and sparkle to the lighthearted conversation between the piano and orchestra.

Carpenter is probably most loved by concert audiences for his first orchestral work —the Adventures in a Perambulator suite. This today is one of the most widely played American compositions. It has been performed in this country, in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin and Stockholm, and the good citizens of all these music centers have been thoroughly charmed by the sensations of an American baby as he sees the policeman, the hurdygurdy, the lake, and the dogs who frighten him with their incessant barking.

There is an important reason for the eternal freshness of Carpenter's music; composing is to him purely a diversion and a pleasure. He is not compelled to teach, to give concerts, or to write about music to make a living. He is a business man, vice-president of the Chicago firm of George B. Carpenter & Company, merchants in mill, railway and vessel supplies. To one who is able to separate his various interests, this is a most enviable situation, for it keeps drudgery away from art.

Carpenter, as a serious musician, turned to jazz as a medium expressive of the day. George Gershwin, on the other hand, started his brilliant career as a composer of gay tunes for musical comedies, and then developed himself as a symphonist, using the same materials. Yet it is not correct to assume that there are two Gershwins, as there are Carpenter, the musician, and Carpenter, the merchant—one Gershwin writing for the Broadway stage and the other for Carnegie Hall, in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde fashion. The writer of musical comedy tunes and the composer of rhapsodies for orchestra are the same person, and the fascinating jazz songs and the major works are different only in the way they are treated.

Fundamentally, the musical comedy tunes which Gershwin writes are good music. They come dancing from his head and fingers with a spontaneity, an unexpected twist of rhythm, melody and harmonic setting that give them an individuality lacking in many a symphonic poem. Such songs as The Man I Love, I'm Feeling I'm Falling, and Fascinating Rhythm have a very real distinction and a high degree of originality.

Just because Gershwin is the real thing in jazz, because he is so much a part of it himself, it may be that his very genuineness may prove his limitation in writing in the larger forms. In short, can he become the master of a style to which he is so close, and rise above his subjective feeling for it?

Almost eight years have passed since Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue made four reputations: the composer's, as a writer of concert music; Ferde Grofe's, for it was he who scored it for jazz band; Paul Whiteman's, as a conductor of a jazz orchestra entitled to play in Carnegie Hall; and finally that of jazz itself, for as the late Harry Osgood remarked, the Rhapsody was the first work that allowed jazz to stick its head outside the cabaret door. Since that time, Gershwin has pursued his supposedly dual career of writing for musical comedies and for the concert hall. Yet this is a divided profession in one respect alone—the light songs bring him a fortune which enables him to live in a pent-house on Riverside Drive, while his serious music gains him the satisfaction of accomplishment and considerable fame.

Some critics have remarked that Gershwin's later works, the piano Concerto in F and the tone-poem, An American in Paris, show repressions which had not inhibited the Rhapsody in Blue—that the composer has lost some of his natural exuberance in trying to hold his musical knife and fork correctly. For this reason, all eyes and ears are turned to his newest piece, his Second Rhapsody. This was written several months ago as part of a motion picture, Delicious, which Gershwin wrote in collaboration with his brother, Ira, and Guy Bolton. Four minutes of rhapsody were needed for a climactic spot in the picture, but when he went to work Gershwin developed the piece to many pages, so that only a portion of it could be used in the film.

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The Second Rhapsody contains many ingredients—jazz rhythms, of course, but also a decided Brahmsian flavor at times; a distinct Spanish languor in the andantino section; a kinship with the Stephen Foster of Old Folks at Home in the haunting intervals of the slow theme. The music is real Gershwin, combining an element of maturity with the original raciness of the Rhapsody in Blue.

Aaron Copland, with his piano concerto and the suite, Music for the Theatre, is another composer who turns to jazz as a medium for musical speech, but in a manner quite different from that of Gershwin. Like Carpenter, Copland looks at jazz from the viewpoint of the concert hall, and as a serious composer adopts syncopations and shifting accents.

Copland is an intellectual, a man who is little concerned with the commercial value of his product, but one who is sincerely exploring new paths through which American composers may express themselves authentically and individually, without reflecting European models.

Apart from Gershwin, Deems Taylor is the American composer most widely known among laymen. Here is no prophet of the future, no pioneer in new fields—to the inner cult his name is anathema, for its members say that in The King's Henchmen he merely rewrote Wagner; that all of his music is synthetic, old wine in bottles that are none too new.

It is true that there is merit in this charge, that there is nothing particularly original in the music that Taylor writes. Yet it is so cleverly devised, its instrumentation is so sumptuous, that it often accomplishes what more original music fails to achieve—it makes chills run up the listener's spine. Some wit remarked that Wagner's music is better than it sounds; it may be that Taylor's sounds better than it is.

Howard Hanson is generally considered the spokesman for the younger group of composers who look to the future without cutting all ties with the past, just as Copland is leader of the radical wing. Hanson admits that he is a militant chauvinist, one who believes that every race must write its own music—that no one else can create ours for us. Yet he has little prejudice regarding its idiom. To him nationalism is subtle, it cannot be produced solely by using ragtime, jazz, cowboy ballads, or other so-called American folk-songs. All of these elements may have their influence, but in a manner wholly subjective.

John Powell is a nationalist of another type, one whose views are as significant politically and socially as they are musically. A native Virginian, he naturally turns to the Negro themes he has heard since childhood. Yet, when he writes his Negro Rhapsody for piano and orchestra, he is seeking to interpret the Negro, not America. To him, the true American nationalism is found in a different direction—from Anglo-Saxon sources, from the tradition of the earliest white settlers.

It takes all sorts of people to make a world, and just because it seems to require a few more to make America, it takes many types of Americans to produce American music. This is a nation that allows free speech—in music at least—so there will be many languages. Why worry about the variety of voices? Why demand that they be merged into a composite mass, when the melting pot is so busy in other directions that it may never catch up with its job of melting? When it is possible to show one single type who is the American, then we may have a standardized product which is the music of America. And who wants that?