The Copland-flavored piece John Williams composed for Pres. Obama's inauguration prompted me to look back over the archives for a short article I wrote some years ago on the eternally elusive subject, "What is American music?" Posted below.
AMERICAN
MUSIC: a brief appreciation
(Written for
The New York Philharmonic, fall, 2005)
In 1838,
English actress Fanny Kemble, visiting a plantation in Georgia, looked out on
the slaves in the fields and heard the birth of American music.
“That which I
have heard these people sing is often plaintive and pretty, but almost always
has some resemblance to tunes with which they must have become acquainted
through the instrumentality of white men,” Kemble wrote in her diary, quoted in
Gilbert Chase’s America’s Music: from the Pilgrims to the Present.
One of the
tunes Kemble heard the slaves sing was “a distinct descendant of ‘Coming Though
the Rye.” Yet it had changed.
Through the agency of new ears and new voices, what had started out a Scottish
melody ended up an American song. Here was our native music’s present and
future: a mutual assimilation of disparate sensibilities, a democracy of sound
that anticipated the fulfillment of a deeply flawed and incomplete political
democracy.
Which brings
us to New Orleans. No place was more conducive to the cultivation of such
music. Its mix of French, Spanish, African and Italian cultures in the 19th
century formed the nexus for a new culture. Jazz started there in about 1895,
and as Leonard Bernstein noted in his 1958 Young People’s Concert, “What is
American Music?,” the arrival of jazz finally provided American composers with
a common language. In the 1920s, the new art spread all over the world. Not
only did George Gershwin adapt its gestures to concert purposes, but so did European
composers such as Ravel and Milhaud. More than any
other single music, jazz came to mean America around the world, possibly
because the voluntary compromises of its improvisations made it “the only music
that objectifies democracy,” in the words of Wynton Marsalis.
If New Orleans
was the seedbed, then American music is a garden where every weed is a
potential flower, where new growth blows from every corner of the earth and
countless individual plants blossom. These may be as varied as works that pay
homage to European forms (Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto), or scores that
emulate in sound the great, wide-open spaces of the American plains (Aaron
Copland). The blossoming Kemble witnessed was of the spiritual. But there have
been countless other births of American music. Chances are, you’ve witnessed
many of them yourself. When you attend a new musical, hang at a jazz club, tune
in an alternative rock station or hear the premiere of a new work by an
American symphonic composer, American music starts all over again.
There is no
historical development in American music in the sense of new trends building on
previous trends. The syncopations of jazz might be taken to an extreme over
time, culminating in bop, but that doesn’t explain a subsequent shift to rock
‘n’ roll’s unsyncopated, backbeat heavy framework. Because of this wild and
unkempt eclecticism, American musical artists are free of historical burden;
their only responsibility is to their art. Contemporary songwriters like Randy
Newman can draw on the past without being out of date. A
concert composer such as John Adams can emulate popular style by wrapping a set
of bubbling harmonies around a steady pulse in Short Ride in a Fast Machine.
Music theater composers may refer to Latin rhythms (Bernstein in West Side
Story) or to bluegrass (Adam Guettel in Floyd Collins). All these composers, no
matter the musical language they use, sound distinctly American, but do so
through their own individual dialects, remaining unmistakably themselves.
n Kenneth LaFave
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