Music in a New Found Land

Themes and Developments in the History of American Music

Wilfrid Mellers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351504188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The subject of this book is accurately defined by its subtitle. Music in a New Found Land does not pretend to be a comprehensive history of American music. Nor does Mellers strive to catalog what he considers to be authentic American music. Instead, he deals, in some detail, with comparatively few composers, most of whom have wellestablished reputations.

It has always been difficult to separate American music from its immediate relevance to the twentieth century. Mellers' theme involves the relationship between "art" music, jazz and pop music; he sees the segregation of these genres as both illogical and artifi cial. If the pop music of Tin Pan Alley may be anti-art, it has also produced Gershwin, Ellington, and composing improvisers such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis.

The study of American music is as relevant into any inquiry into a national culture as the study of American literature and painting. This book contains a large number of quotations from American writers, because Mellers thought American sensibility should parallel, reinforce, and comment on American music. In sum, this is the closest available one-volume history of American music, and a window into American culture.

Part One The Pioneer and the Wilderness

Wilfrid Mellers

If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries were made…. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction….

Between that earth and sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood against the sun, was exactly contained within the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination…. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It is no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.

WILLA CATHER: My Antonia

We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world … We are the pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a path in the New World that is ours.

HERMAN MELVILLE: White Jacket

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness and regarded whatever priest or legislators had established with hardly more reverence than an Indian would feel.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, of Hester, in The Scarlet Letter

It was about this time I conceiv’d the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that natural inclinations, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another as the site of a prison.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

I A pre-history of American music: the primitives, the retreat to Europe and the conservative tradition

Wilfrid Mellers

Though born on the cheating banks of Thames,

Though his waters bathed my infant limbs,

The Ohio shall wash his stains from me:

I was born a slave, but I go to be free.

WILLIAM BLAKE: Thames and Ohio

Every composer should be his own Carver.

WILLIAM BILLINGS

America is a polyglot culture, different from any other in that it is non-indigenous. For the native American culture, which was that of the. Indian, was exterminated by the settlers, or withered away of inanition; and the settlers brought with them a rag-bag of European traditions, out of which America grew. In this sense America is an extreme evolution from the European consciousness; we see in America what happened to “the mind of Europe” when, separated from the traditions of a civilized past, it was faced with “nothing but land—not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made”.

One might almost say that America begins with the disintegration of the Middle Ages and the triumph of humanism. In Europe’s High Renaissance flesh and spirit were one; but belief in man’s individual will in the long run led to spiritual impoverishment. Man, proud of his god-like potentialities, sought to conquer Time and Space; having conquered them, he no longer knew what to do with them. Puritanism became the Plain Man’s attempt to be responsible for his own destiny. The Puritan left Europe because he fought for his individual soul against entrenched privilege and moribund convention. But in fighting he lost the sense of religious ecstacy; his soul, indeed, became his privilege, of its nature littler, meaner, than those of Church and State which he had relinquished. So the souls of the Pilgrims, transplanted into the American wilderness, “descended into smallness, condemned to be unflowering”. In the words of William Carlos Williams—a poet who has experienced the “making of Americans” by an act of imaginative empathy—“they stressed the spirit, for what else could they do? They had nothing else. But the spirit is really an earthly pride which they, prideless, referred to heaven and the next world. They had a tough littleness to carry them through the cold; their religious zeal was not a thrust upwards towards the sun, but a stroke in: the confinement of the tomb. In fear and without guidance, really lost in the world, it is they alone who would later, at Salem, have strayed so far, morbidly seeking the flame—that terrifying unknown image to which, like savages, they too offered sacrifices of human flesh. It is just such emptiness, revulsion, terror in all ages, which in fire finds that which lost and desperate men have worshipped.”¹ Only with reference to this horror can we understand the forms that the transplanted European traditions were to take.

Roger Williams was reviled by the settlers for suggesting that they ought to buy their land from the Indians; to take the land from the “savage” was, they maintained, an act on behalf of their God, who, indeed, placed the Indians (offspring of the devil) in positions convenient for “divine slaughter at the hands of the English”. So, as the Puritan who fought for the liberty of his conscience struck off from the community into the vastness that is America, he left his “spiritual” justification behind. He never forgot the Savage he had had to destroy; and his simultaneous hatred and fear were only intensified when the exterminated Indian was replaced by the enslaved African. The Red-Black Man became the pioneer’s consciousness of guilt; and the guilt was inherent in the very attempt to conquer and subdue a strange land. The lonely pioneer, fighting for his spirit’s freedom, became the hunter, the killer, fighting for his life, and for the plot of land on which to live it. Because he was alone, each man for himself in the wilderness, he dreaded, yet thrived on, competition. Hunter was killer and trapper; trapper was trader; trader became boom-town manufacturer; manufacturer became cut-throat gangster. Counting heads turned into counting money—“for the glory of God and the advancement of the beaver trade”.

In the fusion of the Puritan and the Tracker we find, as the wilderness was opened up, the first great American mythological figure, immortalized by Fenimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking saga. The Pioneer Hero had both a positive and a negative aspect. His positive virtues are described in Cooper’s initial account of Deerslayer as a young man:

In stature he stood about six feet in his moccasins, but his frame was comparatively light and slender, showing muscles, however, that promised unusual agility, if not unusual strength. His face would have had little to recommend it except youth, were it not for an expression that seldom failed to win upon those who had leisure to examine it, and to yield to the feeling of confidence it created. This expression was simply that of guileless truth, sustained by an earnestness of purpose, and a sincerity of feeling, that rendered it remarkable. At times this air of integrity seemed to be so simple as to awaken a suspicion of the want of the usual means to discriminate between artifice and truth; but few came in serious contact with the man, without losing this distrust in respect for his opinions and motives.

Deerslayer’s “guileless truth” is American man’s innocence, his power to be born anew because, indeed, he is in a world that he has yet to make; and his ideal, platonic, a-sexual friendship with the Noble Savage is a wish-fulfilment, an expiation of guilt. At the same time Deerslayer is, and must be, a slayer if he is to conquer the wilderness; and the negative aspect of the pioneer myth is revealed in the complementary figure of Hurry, the giant of a man who looks half bear, and will obey no law but that of the jungle. When Deerslayer reprimands him for threatening any possible suitor to Judith Hutter, whom he desires, Hurry replies:

If an inimy crosses my path, will I not beat him out of it! Look at me! Am I a man like to let any sneaking, crawling skin trader get the better of me in a matter that touches me as nearly as the kindness of Judith Hutter? Besides, when we live beyond the law, we must be our own judges and executioners. And if a man should be found dead in the woods, who is there to say who slew him?

Hurry’s position is logical and there is no answer to it in terms that he would understand. Deerslayer’s innocence is the American search for a rebirth of belief, not in the Puritan’s God (which had been degraded in Man-alone, or Hurry), but in a power greater than his Will. “You are wrong”, says Deerslayer at a later stage of his career,

to distrust the power of God in anything. Them that live in the settlements and towns get to have confined and unjust opinions consarning the might of His hand; but we who pass our time in His very presence, as it might be, see things differently. I mean such of us as have white natur’s. A redskin has his notions, and it is right that it should be so, and if they are not exactly the same as a Christian white man’s, there is no harm in it. Still, there are matters that belong altogether to the ordering of God’s providence, and these salt and fresh water lakes are some of them. I do not pretend to account for these things, but I think it is the duty of all to believe in them.

Now the first art-music to be created by Americans manifests—as one might expect—both the virtues and the vices of the Puritan inheritance and of the pioneer’s innocence and savagery. The settlers that came over, especially from Britain, Germany and Holland, brought with them their folk-songs and the religious music which expressed the faith for which they were self-exiled. The folk-songs survived, were handed down in remote rural areas from generation to generation, were changed, and became—as we shall see in Part II of this book—one of the sources from which an indigenously American folk-art was derived. But the only music the Puritan settlers could officially tolerate was religious music, which could help them in their hard struggle with Nature; and although at first they did no more than sing the music they had sung at home, they increasingly came to sing it in ways that were changed by the wilderness. Thus the early seventeenth-century settlers in New England brought with them the psalm-singing traditions of the Reformation. In 1640 the pastors published the Bay Psalm Book, which consisted of metrical versions of the psalms made by members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: these were to be sung to “very neere fourty common tunes, as they are collected out of our chief musicians by Thos. Ravenscroft”. For worship in church the psalms were sung at rather fast tempi and in unison—so that God would have no difficulty in understanding the words. At home, for recreation, they were often sung in parts, as harmonized by British seventeenth-century composers such as Ravenscroft himself, Tomkins, Allison, East and the elder Milton. Both tunes and harmonizations were thus imported from the old country and—as in the archaic cantus firmus technique—the main melody was usually sung by the tenors. This comparatively sophisticated style could not, however, for long weather the conditions of pioneer life; as traditional skills were forgotten in the urgent necessity of keeping alive, the music began to acquire some of the barbarity of the land. In the eighteenth century, when the New England communities had acquired a measure of order, if not of the graces of civilization, the pastors made a conscious effort to revive religious music. Itinerant choral directors travelled around establishing singing schools, and published their own music in “tune-books”. As musical literacy increased, so did the number of mainly amateur composers. In the later half of the eighteenth century enthusiastic New England amateurs produced in abundance hymns, metrical psalms, anthems and “fuguing tunes” for use both in church and at home. This music was based on recollections of the old English and German Reformation music, only the memory had become a little fuddled, so the technique was clumsy and inexact. The half-intuitive composers, thinking modally, like folk-singers, did not know how to achieve the highly civilized equilibrium between horizontal polyphony and vertical homophony that characterized their European forebears. Yet their rawness was also their authenticity. Their “mistakes” in harmony and part-writing could be at times inspired; indeed, they were not mistakes at all, since they were a creative manifestation of their identities. For the first time we thus hear, in their music, the accent of a New World; their “guileless truth”, like that of Natty Bumppo, is inseparable from their barbarism.

Some part of the crudity of the New England hymnodists was, of course, an invention of their first critics who, nurtured on the strictest nineteenth-century principles, would undoubtedly have made similar objections to Machaut or Stravinsky. They objected strongly, for instance, to the New Englanders’ prosody, which followed sixteenth-and seventeenth-century tradition in disregarding the bar-accents, leaving changes of time to be inferred from the verbal stresses: so that it was precisely the independence of the melodic thinking that produced some of their most characteristic harmonic effects; it is also possible that some of the modal survivals in their music were modified in performance by the introduction of accidentals that they were chary of notating. As texts, the New England hymnodists favoured the Tate and Brady metrical versions of the Psalms, the hymns of Isaac Watts, and various biblical paraphrases. The metrical psalms and hymns were set in simple homophony, or as “fuguing tunes” usually in two sections—the first being in the customary triadic homophony with occasional passing notes, the second being in fugato of a rudimentary type derived directly from English and Scottish psalter style of the seventeenth century. Often the homophonic hymn is in triple time, the fugato in duple. The anthems were longer pieces usually on biblical texts in prose; they tended to be sectional (a series of linked hymns and fuguing tunes), or in repetitive forms such as the rondo and variation, since the composers had little skill in, or even interest in, the modulatory techniques of European eighteenth-century music.

The primitivism of the New Englanders’ music consists not so much in their “incorrect” harmony as in their avoidance of true polyphony. The dissonant suspension—the core of sixteenth-century style—is unknown to them: so consequently is the concept of music as a gradation of harmonic tensions. When they wrote in fuguing style (sometimes spelt fuging or fudging, and perhaps so pronounced, the uncons...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the 1975 Edition
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One The Pioneer and the Wilderness
• I A pre-history of American music: the primitives, the retreat to Europe and the conservative tradition
• II Realism and transcendentalism: Charles Ives as American hero
• III Men and mountains: Carl Ruggles as American mystic; Roy Harris as religious primitive
• IV Skyscraper and Prairie: Aaron Copland and the American isolation
• V The Pioneer’s energy and the Artist’s order: Elliott Carter
• VI The American frenzy and the unity of serialism: Wallingford Riegger and Roger Sessions
• VII The retreat from the west: science and magic: Charles Griffes, Henry Cowell and Edgard Varèse
• VIII From noise to silence: Harry Partch, John Cage and Morton Feldman
• IX Innocence and nostalgia: Samuel Barber and Virgil Thomson
• X Today and Tomorrow: Lukas Foss and the younger generation
• Part Two The world of art and the world of commerce: the folk-song of the asphalt jungle
• I Introductory: Music and entertainment in nineteenth-century America: Stephen Foster, Louis-Moreau Gottschalk and John Philip Sousa
• II Orgy and alienation: country blues, barrelhouse piano, and piano rag
• III Heterophony and improvisation: the New Orleans jazz band and King Oliver; Bessie Smith and the urban blues
• IV From heterophony to polyphony: from polyphony to the antiphony of the big band: improvisation and composition in the work of Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Count Basie
• V Jazz polyphony and jazz harmony: Duke Ellington as composer
• VI From art back to jazz. Modern jazz and the composing improviser: Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane
• VII From jazz back to art. Modern jazz and the improvising composer: Miles Davis and Gil Evans; Gerry Mulligan and John Lewis
• VIII From jazz to pop: the decline of the big bands: pianists, cabaret singers and the “musical”
• IX From pop to art: opera, the musical and George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”
• X From art to pop: Marc Blitzstein’s “Regina” and Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story”; the rebirth of wonder