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Altered States

David Wright

‘The Invasion of America by the Great Musicians: We Suddenly Find Ourselves the Custodians of the Musical Culture of the World.’ So ran a 1925 Vanity Fair headline in what represents an American declaration of newly won musical self-confidence. Carol Oja’s central thesis in Making music modern: New York in the 1920s is that responses to musical modernism played a defining role in liberating America from its traditionally accepted subservience to European music, and that, by establishing a new sense of creative equality, it ensured that from the 1910s, visits across the Atlantic became each-way exchanges, undertaken on a very different basis to those characteristic of the nineteenth century. Making music modern is genuinely illuminating about the nature of New York’s engagement with musical modernism, and it reshapes our knowledge of the musical crosscurrents of the period and their subsequent effect on American composition. One strength comes from Oja’s perception that the study of institutions is central to an understanding of the movement, and that as well as composers, it involved ‘an intricate network of publishers, promoters, performers, editors and patrons. No movement of isolated trailblazers, American modernism grew out of an interconnected community’. It is Oja’s strongly drawn identification of the nature and extent of that community, together with the attitudes which it harnessed and in turn further reshaped, that makes this an invigorating as well as an informative history.

Oja organises the book around seven main themes, each elaborated by supporting chapters. While as a topic ‘The machine in the concert hall’ (centred on an interesting discussion of Antheil’s Ballet méchanique), has a certain familiarity about it, ‘Spirituality and American dissonance’ signals a fresh cast on the nature of Dane Rudhyar’s influence on the music of Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford. Similarly, ‘Myths and institutions’ produces an interpretation that is very different to the traditional composer-based assessment and one that is, in historical terms, considerably more satisfying because of its sophisticated treatment of context. The treatment of this particular theme, taken in conjunction with ‘European modernists and American critics’, gets to the heart of why it was that New York modernism was able to achieve so wide a transformatory effect in its more general rejuvenation of American attitudes to music.

One clue comes from a comment made by Walter Damrosch (then conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra) in 1923, ‘I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America’. While on the surface such a remark might be taken to refer only to concert clubs dealing in ‘safe’ canonical nineteenth century repertoire, Oja’s analysis of the work and organisation of the several societies concerned with modernist new music shows how much their effectiveness owed to the endeavours and skills of several remarkable, but largely under-recognised women contributors. These composer societies (such as the International Composers’ Guild, the League of Composers, the New Music Society, the Pan American Association of Composers and the Copland-Sessions Concerts) proved a crucial factor in ensuring modernism’s effectiveness and staying power, forming the vehicles by which the work of radical composers was supported and propagated, and the role played by many woman patrons and administrators was vital to their success. In ‘Women patrons and activists’ Oja identifies and discusses the telling work of several redoubtable and visionary people, such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Alma Wertheim, Blanche Walton and Claire Raphael Reis. Oja’s gender-based analysis of their situation is fascinating, and their treatment by several male beneficiaries makes for some uncomfortable reading. It was the gay composers, such as Copland, who were at ease in acknowledging the signi-ficance of the work and commitment of these women, rather than composers such as Antheil, Varèse and Ives, for whom modernist music projected an essential masculinity. Oja deals with this area in an objective and lucid manner, and the context she establishes gives a very different resonance to the curmudgeonly vituperations of Charles Ives against ‘ladies music’, utterances which otherwise can suggest themselves to be more in the line of eccentricity and born out of rejection. Oja’s redrawing of these lines places an interesting perspective on the nature of Ives’s isolation.

In relating the complex history of these composer societies, their allegiances and antagonisms, Oja provides a strong sense of the multiplicity of passions involved. It underlines the vibrancy of the New York scene, and thus its significance for composers, such as Carter who grew up under its influence. The initially inclusive approach which characterised the programming of the first Copland-Sessions Concerts, with their mixture of ‘ultra-modern’ and neoclassical idioms, underlines the breadth of the creative continuum which was kept in play. It is a background which suggests that Carter’s decision to study with Boulanger in Paris (despite his friendship with Ives) perhaps implies less of a clear cut ideological contradiction than might at first appear.

Oja’s identification of reception issues within the context of the wider social, cultural and economic context overturns several accepted myths. Thus the image long fostered by Varèse and his followers, namely that his work was derided and misunderstood, is reversed by Oja’s research into contemporary press coverage. She demonstrates that Varèse’s conscious development of his image with the press, which was as a Frenchman who had drawn inspiration from the new world and who was therefore a modernist of truly international credentials, secured astonishingly positive coverage, feted as ‘the matinee idol of modernism’. Certainly, Varèse made full use of the anti-Germanic sentiment engendered by the First World War to secure his own position. But more significantly, Oja’s reassessment of the attention Varèse received prompts the comment, ‘If critics felt incomprehension in the face of his avant-garde scores, they assumed it to be their problem, not his’. This reflects Varèse’s shrewdness of strategy, not least in offering critics a helping hand by planting for their use a ready made descriptive vocabulary; Oja identifies how phrases such as ‘telegraphic style’ which originated with the composer, were immediately adopted by critics and so achieved wide currency.

It perhaps comes as something of a surprise in our present climate to discover that a strong interest in Satie was propagated by the fashionable Vanity Fair, between 1921 and 1923. The discussion was serious, and included appraisals by the celebrated critic and modern music enthusiast, Paul Rosenfeld, as well as translations of some of Satie’s own essays. It indicates that there existed then a much wider sense of curiosity and general interest about unfamiliar modernist music than might be supposed from today’s perspective, something which highlights the extent of the fragmentation of today’s audiences into special interest groups. Currently in the UK we should be hard pushed to find any considered treatment of serious contemporary music in the generalist press, quite apart from such an interest being sustained over a period of time.

Throughout the book, ‘New York’ is treated more as, ‘a lens for focusing on compositional trends than a geographic perimeter’, and in the nature and scope of her discussion, Oja fulfils her stated aim of situating the material within its cultural, social and economic context, and does so persuasively. I should have welcomed more discussion as to the nature of the audiences themselves, although an appendix presents a very informative repertoire list of programmes given by modern music societies in New York between 1920 and 1931. Certainly Oja’s vivid identification of the very American character of the modernist movement in New York, gives a strong sense of the city’s musical life in a way that casts a revitalising light upon the preoccupations and motivating forces of the period.

It comes as something of a surprise, too, that anyone today should wish to attempt a single-volume history of American music. Quite apart from the historiographical issues which are raised by such a venture, there is the challenge of having a sufficient command of the spectrum of musical idioms involved to be convincing in discussing them, as well as the need to deal with an astonishing volume of primary and secondary material. Yet despite the truly daunting nature of the task, Richard Crawford has done so. The title, America’s musical life: a history, sets Crawford’s approach apart from those which characterised Charles Hamm’s monumental Music in the New World of 1983 (also published by Norton) and H. Wiley Hitchcock’s Music in the United States: a historical introduction of 1969. For the guiding focus of Crawford’s concern lies with performance (understood in its widest sense) as both an observable historical condition and an economic activity, that does not carry with it hierarchical implications about the music involved. As such, Crawford feels that it is an approach that offers a means of seeking to reconcile the distinct areas of musical activity of ‘concert’, ‘folk’ and ‘popular’ within American musical life in a way that carries no a priori aesthetic judgements while respecting the generic differences of the material itself. Rich in possibilities, the result is an eminently readable synthesis, but its politeness reflects a very contemporary preoccupation with the avoidance of value judgement. Thus the quality of balance which Crawford so clearly prizes comes at the expense of a vivid sense of individual perspective. But that may be a sacrifice which he considers to be worthwhile. For in this portrait of American musical life, he clearly wishes to convey a sense of a transcendent musical community, an aspiration reinforced by the concluding paragraph in which he expresses the hope that readers will be encouraged, ‘to reflect on their own musical experiences and where they might fit in the vast, diverse, interconnected landscape of American music making’.

David Wright is Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music.