The following article originated as a keynote address for the Arts
Leadership Program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York.
Historically, classical music in the United States was borrowed from Europe. The resulting relationship is complex: musical Americans have been grateful and resentful, confident and insecure vis-à-vis their cultural parents in the Old World.
The influx of European music and musicians to the U.S. has been continuous, but has varied greatly in impact over the course of two centuries. At first, many Europeans came chiefly for the money: for a Busoni or Mahler, an American tour or position was much more lucrative than playing, teaching, or conducting at home. Later, prominent musicians arrived fleeing the Russian Revolution or Hitler and world war; the list of composers alone includes Bartók, Hindemith, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.
By and large, every one of these eminent figures viewed the United States with ambivalence or relative indifference, if not distaste. At the opposite extreme are New York's two most influential musicians at the turn of the 20th century: the composer Antonín Dvorák and the conductor Anton Seidl. And the decade they inhabit - the 1890s - seems to me in many ways the most auspicious chapter in the history of America's musical high culture.
Seidl, born in Budapest in 1850, was one of the leading conductors of his generation. At the Metropolitan Opera beginning in 1885, he presided over six historic German-language seasons during which the German ensemble arguably surpassed any in Europe. With the New York Philharmonic, at the Brooklyn Academy of music, at Coney's Island's Brighton Beach resort (where he conducted fourteen times a week in the summer), he was also New York's leading concert conductor. The most important musician ever to have visited the United States and stayed, he became an American citizen, bought a country house in the Catskills, and would not be addressed as "Herr." He called for an elaborate system of musical education to counteract the harmful influence of itinerant foreign artists; his goal for the United States was a "national music," "an individual musical art."
If Seidl's opera school never materialized, its nearest equivalent was Jeannette Thurber's New York-based National Conservatory of Music, where Seidl taught conducting. Thurber was a visionary. No less than Seidl, she dreamed of liberating American music. Having herself attended the Paris Conservatory, she poured time and money into creating a world-class music school for Americans. For composers, she espoused an American idiom based on native sources. She offered scholarships for women, minorities, and the handicapped; African-American students were prominent at every level of study.
New York's central turn-of-the-century arbiter of musical taste, and the acknowledged dean of American music critics, was Henry Krehbiel of the Tribune. He was one of Seidl's few intimate friends. Like Seidl, he paid complex dual allegiance to the Old World of Beethoven and Wagner and a new world of American musical prospects. Like Seidl and Thurber, he embraced contemporary notions of cultural nationalism. He maintained that a nation's highest expression in art, music, and literature was to some degree of function of "race." An autodidact of vast erudition, he turned himself into an incipient ethnomusicologist. Documenting the relationship of folk song to national schools of composition, he researched and wrote about the folk music of Magyars, Slavs, Scandinavians, Russian, Orientals, Jews, and American Indians. Of special interest are his findings regarding "Afro-American folk songs," which he began publishing in the Tribune in 1909 and which in 1914 generated a 155-page book - not a vague armchair rumination but a closely argued report packed with scrutiny of modes, rhythms, and the like. Krehbiel hoped America's composers would appropriate plantation songs. He rebuked as "ungenerous and illiberal" those culture-bearers (outspoken in Boston) who balked at equating "Negro" and "American."
Enter Dvorák. Jeannette Thurber was the agent of his coming. The first director of the National Conservatory, the baritone Jacques Bouy, had returned to Paris in 1889; Thurber needed an eminent replacement. The Bohemian composer was not only eminent - with his rustic roots and egalitarian temperament, he was the kind of cultural nationalist to inspire Americans. Dvorák arrived in New York on September 27, 1892, the most prominent composer ever to take up a teaching post in the United States. He proved inquisitive and empathetic, as eager to learn as to teach. His aspirations for American music resonated with the hopes of Thurber, Seidl, and Krehbiel. A concerted mandate was pursued: a distinctive American canon of native works - of sonatas, symphonies, operas - would, it was assumed, anchor America's classical music to come.
The climactic moment in Dvorák's American career came on December 16, 1893 - the premiere of his "New World" Symphony at Carnegie Music Hall, with Seidl leading the New York Philharmonic. The concert was the most famous the Philharmonic gave during Seidl's tenure. The symphony - still the most popular composed on American soil - encapsulates Dvorák's agenda for America.
No less than Seidl before him, Dvorák had swiftly absorbed what musical New York had to offer. The frequent visitors to his home on East 17th Street included the twenty-five-year-old Harry Burleigh. Attracted by Thurber's scholarships for African-Americans, Burleigh had enrolled at the National Conservatory in 1892. Dvorák savored the plantation songs Burleigh sang for him; his favorites included "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," which infiltrates the E minor Symphony he was composing in sympathy with Thurber's suggestion that he "write a symphony embodying his experiences and feelings in America."
On May 21,1893 Dvorák was quoted in the New York Herald announcing: "I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies." Weeks later, he left for Spillville, Iowa, a Czech settlement where he encountered the touring Kickapoo Medicine Show, which included chanting Native Americans and two "n****rs" (as they were called in the show) who danced and sang with banjo and guitar. Dvorák returned to the National Conservatory the following September; in November of that year, Seidl secured permission from Dvorák to give the first performance of the "New World" Symphony.
A "public rehearsal" of the symphony took place the same evening. For the formal premiere the following night, Dvorák was present; after the second movement, the house erupted in applause (imagine such a thing today!). Seidl turned to gesture toward Dvorák's box. "Every neck was craned so that it might be discovered to whom he was motioning so energetically," reported the Herald.
Whoever it was, he seemed modestly to wish to remain at the back of the box on the second tier.
At last a broad shouldered individual of medium height, and as straight as one of the pines in the forests of which the music whispered so eloquently, is descried by the eager watchers. A murmur sweeps through the hall. "Dvorák! Dvorák!" is the word that passes from mouth to mouth. . . .
With hands trembling with emotion Dr. Dvorák waves an acknowledgement of his indebtedness to Anton Seidl, to the orchestra, to the audience, and then disappears into the background while the remainder of the work goes on . . . At its close the composer was loudly called for. Again and again he bowed his acknowledgements, and again and again the applause burst forth.
The critic - presumably Albert Steinberg, like Krehbiel a close friend of Seidl - called the work itself "a great one" and distinctively American in flavor. A signature trait of his review - and of others in the daily press - was the detailed description of musical content. Of the Herald critic's 26 paragraphs, twelve analyzed Dvorák's idiom (the flatted seventh tone of his scale, etc.), his folk sources, rhythms and harmonies, instrumentation, and structure. To the performance of the new work, the Herald critic allotted a single sentence, terming it "most poetical." He dispatched the remainder of the program with a sentence reading: "The orchestra played the 'Midsummer Night's Dream' music, and Henri Marteau played Brahm's [sic] violin concerto with an original cadenza by himself." This eager concentration on new music documents a moment, a century ago, when composer and audience were one.
Dvorák's example focused a debate that had grown vigorous, sophisticated, and dense. The general intellectual discourse of newspapers and magazines already routinely scrutinized America's concert and opera life, stressing issues of taste and identity. One frequent topic was the proper sources of a native compositional idiom: should it be consciously nationalist, or would some ineffable folk essence ultimately inflect American music without special effort? Rejecting Dvorák's advocacy of the first strategy, genteel critics such as Boston's Philip Hale and genteel composers such as Boston's John Knowles Paine dismissed cultural nationalism as quasi-barbaric. In New York, a city of immigrants, Native American and African-American influences seemed more pertinent, less exogenous.
In the wake of Dvorák's departure in 1895, the excitement of creating a distinctive American repertoire gradually diminished. Seidl died, tragically, at the age of 47 in 1898. Absent Dvorák, the National Conservatory faded into obscurity. After World War I, contrary to many predictions, no Great American Opera was composed (though Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which comes closest, is precisely the kind of folk opera Dvorák envisioned for America). Nor did American composers produce a viable canon of symphonic works to redirect attention away from Beethoven and Brahms. Charles Ives, our greatest symphonist, was stranded and forgotten during the interwar decades.
World War I proved a watershed: afterward, the act of performance replaced the creative act as the central preoccupation of American musical high culture. A sign of the times was the cult of the Great American Orchestra, as championed (for example) by Charles Edward Russell in his The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas (1927). Russell called the symphonic orchestra "our greatest national asset; our sign of honor among the nations" - and this notwithstanding the continued preponderance of foreign-born conductors and compositions.
And there was the cult of the Great Conductor, peaking with Arturo Toscanini, whose 1950 transcontinental tour with the NBC Symphony was hailed by NBC publicists as "a great and lasting monument to American culture." Ironically - predictably - Toscanini's tour repertoire included not a single American work save an encore: The Stars and Stripes Forever.
Against the backdrop of the 1890s, the Toscanini cult documents a sea-change in less than half a century. Dvorák, New York's most famous musician from 1892 to 1895, was a composer (imagine such a thing today); his sights were fixed on the music of the present, and on America. Toscanini, New York's most famous classical musician during the interwar decades, was a conductor, and dedicated to the European masterworks.
Dvorák and Toscanini even document two types of musical celebrity. Dvorák was a reluctant celebrity - he had to be coaxed by Seidl to stand up and acknowledge his ovation. But he was a public celebrity - any day of the week, he could be found smoking cigars and sipping beer opposite Seidl at Fleischmann's restaurant near Union Square. Toscanini was an eager celebrity - he enjoyed being famous. But he was a private celebrity, whose glamour was intensified by his remoteness. He was driven from his Riverdale home to NBC's Studio 8H, there to perform for an invited audience. Seidl's preferred mode of transportation had been the Second Avenue streetcar. He was recognized and greeted wherever he went.
Today, the Toscanini cult is not even a memory. The cult of the great conductor, of the great performer, of the great symphony - these dinosaurs are still with us. But there is an increasing awareness that it is time for something else. The question is: what? I offer a few signposts and suggestions.
In 1889 Debussy heard an Indonesian gamelan for the first time. It had the effect of an epiphany. The colors, textures and rhythms of Javanese music had a vivid impact on Debussy's compositional style. And the gamelan ideal was not only musical: it represented a different cultural function for music, divorced from the concert halls and opera houses of the West. In 1929 Kurt Weill, in Berlin, pondered jazz and its impact on performance practice. "A good jazz musician," Weill wrote, "has complete command of three or four instruments. Above all, he can improvise."
In the decades since Debussy encountered gamelan and Weill encountered jazz, "world music" has become a dominant presence. We have composers like Lou Harrison and Steve Reich who are fundamentally influenced by non-Western music. We have composers like Louis Andriessen, for whom be-bop is as important as Stravinsky, performers like Gidon Kremer, who is a likely to perform a Piazzolla tango as a Brahms concerto. Harrison, Reich, Andriessen, Kremer cannot even be termed "classical musicians."
What does "classical music" meant today? If the term is to retain anything like its old aplomb, it must refer to a moment now past: to a genre and its attendant prestige and influence. In fact, we can already look back on classical music as a cultural phenomenon peaking in the nineteenth century and declining after World War I.
What comes next in these post-classical times? We will find out. Certainly, we will not abandon Bach and Beethoven; Bruckner's symphonies will continue to furnish cathedral experiences in the concert hall. But the new direction of things, for orchestras, dictates reconsideration of repertoire and formats, and new roles for musicians. For conservatories of music, it dictates increasing attention to jazz, to ethnomusicology and world music, to improvisation, to music education and audience development as likely components of many, if not most, professional careers in music.
This doesn't mean that we all must become improvisers, or musical switch-hitters like Gidon Kremer. But it holds out the prospect of broader horizons, and peaceful intercourse between previously separated islands of musical experience.
If we trace the history of classical music in the United States - if we go back to Dvorák, and to the Toscanini cult, and trace the trajectory to the present day - we see a classical music citadel that has too often proved hermetic and defensive in response to the 20th-century growth of other types of music: consumed by an excess of purity and piety intended to ward off the threat of new experience, by a curatorial preoccupation with great music of the past unknown to classical music in its 19th-century heyday.
If we are to refocus on music - on the creative act - as in the 1890s, we need to throw open the doors of the classical music citadel and seek a broader understanding of music and of musicians' roles. Today, we cannot recapture the excitement once generated by the "New World" Symphony by playing the "New World" Symphony. And that's something we can accept and understand as an opportunity, not a disappointment.
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