ART AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY

Jerry Harkins

On December 5, 1985, the New York Philharmonic led by its Laureate Conductor, Leonard Bernstein of Lawrence, Massachusetts, presented an extraordinary program consisting of three symphonies: the Third of Roy Harris of Chandler, Oklahoma, the Third of William Schuman of Manhattan and the Third of Aaron Copland of Brooklyn.  This was distinctly American music of a high order—three serious, engaging works by contemporary American composers conducted by the first American-born Music Director of a major American orchestra.  All three works had been premiered by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1939, 1941, and 1946 respectively.

Everything about that concert—the program, the conductor and the fact that it was happening in New York said that America had come of age musically.  One hundred forty-eight years after Ralph Waldo Emerson claimed that, “…our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close” his assertion seemed at last to be credible. [1]  It will be noted that all four principals were protégés of Koussevitzky who was a Russian immigrant.  Both Copland and Harris had been students of the French composer Nadia Boulanger.  All of them, teachers and students, had deliberately set out to develop and nurture a classical musical idiom that was specifically and recognizably American.  It was their success Bernstein was celebrating that night.

National styles in the arts are not, of course, unusual and were, in fact, flourishing in several countries during the same period, notably in England, France, Hungry, Finland and the Soviet Union.  Throughout the Western world, classical composers were mining their own national folk traditions.  European painters, sculptors and writers were also taking inspiration from aboriginal material that was seen as emblematic of the subconscious archetypes being described by psychologists and anthropologists.  But everywhere else, such national or ethnic sourcing was peripheral.  In America, it was the mainstream.

It was also pervasive.  Eugene O’Neill’s plays and Martha Graham’s dances pioneered the exploration of psychological and anthropological themes.  Gertrude Stein, Vachel Lindsay, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, Langston Hughes and Robert Frost gave poetry its modernist form and function.  In architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright was already building a second wave of masterpieces in the late 30’s while the best Europeans were unable to get their designs executed.  Eliel Saarinen and his son Eero left Finland for America in 1923 and were followed by Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in 1937.  Europeans learned film making from D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett and Charlie Chaplin.  In spite of the Bauhaus, European design had become remote, academic and soulless in the aftermath of Edwardian excess.  Thus, the brilliant post-war European designers had to learn the modern craft from Americans like Walter Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Henry Dreyfus, Raymond Loewy and Brooks Stevens.

Thus it is fair to see the Bernstein concert as both a celebration and an assertion of American ascendancy.  New York was suddenly the center of the art world.  New York:  big, boisterous, smart, anxiety-ridden, electric, busy as hell.  Some European countries suddenly felt the need to enact laws against American “cultural imperialism” while their intellectuals heaped scorn on American philistinism and gaucherie. By the 1950’s, they were talking about American “culture” as though it meant only movies and television, theme parks and rock and roll.  Some added morals and values to the pot.  Interestingly they rarely spoke the same way about the visual or performing arts possibly because they considered these beneath their notice.  In spite of everything, the world became increasingly Americanized especially in the arts and sciences, in economics, language and cuisine.

“Specifically and recognizably American” is a phrase sure to get a writer in trouble.  It is debatable on many levels but, for the moment, it is sufficient to point out that a distinct American idiom was precisely what the artists of the era thought they were pursuing.  Copland, for example, returned from his three years with Boulanger in 1924 and immediately wrote his first symphony with its blues-infused scherzo.  Of it, he said his intention had been, “…to write a work that would be immediately recognized as American in character.” [2] He later experimented with serialism and with the neo-classicism of Stravinsky but the body of his work is unabashedly American.  Pieces like “Appalachian Spring,” “Rodeo,” and “A Lincoln Portrait” could not and would not have been written anywhere else.  Even the Europeans who made use of European folk themes—composers like Bartok and Vaughan Williams—could never be confused with the Americanist style.

It is admittedly difficult to define the elements of “Americanism” in music but it certainly begins with the use of jazz harmonies and rhythms.  Copland’s appreciation of jazz may have been ambiguous but, even in his more formal works like “Quiet City,” there is a blues sensibility that imparts an introspective feeling like that of a painting of Edward Hopper or Andrew Wyeth.  More obvious examples could be multiplied in the works of George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thompson and Gunther Schuller.  Thompson was a dedicated modernist but even his experimental operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All draw from American folk themes and employ jazz riffs.

Jazz had its roots in the music of the African slaves in the American South.  They brought with them the blue notes, improvisation and complex rhythmic patterns of African music and applied them to their call and response work songs and to the hymns and popular songs of their new environment.  After emancipation, jazz practice coalesced in New Orleans before spreading north and diversifying into multiple styles.  Within thirty years, it had become the defining characteristic of the American songbook and of much classical music.  But there is more to American music than jazz.  There is a narrative hallmark that that derives from three peculiarities of the American experience:  ethnic diversity, the frontier, and the commitment of the immigrants to the future.  The Europeans who settled the land, even those who arrived with little but the clothes they wore, were never Emma Lazarus’ “huddled masses” or “wretched refuse.”  Many, of course, were destitute but all were proud, strong, defiant people with the courage to test themselves against the unknown in search of a better life.  Until the nineteenth century, the lives of ordinary people did not change much from century to century and people generally did not expect or value change.  But the frontier seduced the immigrants.  Long after it ceased to exist physically, there remained the idea of a better future and a social contract that valued change and experimentation.  They had the sense of being part of the Novus ordo seclorum, a new order or new beginning of the ages.  They were and are a religious people but, from the earliest days, they were divided between hellfire and brimstone fundamentalists and less dogmatic modernists.  Their politics were often raucous and just as often corrupt but they valued democracy and made it work for them.  They insulated themselves against the worst of their frustrations through a healthy sense of humor.  Americans invented  the joke, the one-liner, the tall tale, slapstick and the situation comedy.  They developed a culture that was individualistic, innovative, bold or brash, pragmatic and not classless but mobile as to class.

There had never been anything like it.  When they came to translate these values into cultural pursuits, they became the first to embrace the idea that the only purpose of art is art.  American art was almost never esoteric or rarefied even if it occasionally ventured into obscurity.  It can be amusing to read commentaries of critics who think art should flow from academic ideologies.  The works of painters like Grant Wood, Edward Hopper and Norman Rockwell are nowhere near as complex as they can be made to seem.  The self-identity of critics is typically rooted in their investment in esoteric theory which may explain why they so often denigrate American artists and audiences.

If all this sounds like the Magic Kingdom, so what?  You don’t have to love it or even approve of it.  As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, “America is a pivotal point in the world where the future of man is at stake.  To like or not like her—these words have no sense.  Here is a battlefield, and one can only follow with excitement the struggles she carries on within herself, the stakes of which are beyond measure.” [3] The struggles were and are mighty.  The immigrants encountered the vicissitudes of the business cycle with its periodic panics and depressions.  They discovered that America was as much about the Dust Bowl as amber waves of grain.  It was about slavery and Jim Crow as much as the pursuit of happiness.  It displayed strong streaks of Puritanism and elitism and its intellectuals were always happy to denounce as shallow what they saw as the most overt symbols of its culture—Madison Avenue, strip malls and the Golden Arches. [4] Still, after all the disappointments, failures and outrages have been catalogued and castigated, there remains a sense that anything is possible and everything should be given a hearing.

And so it happened that during the first half of the twentieth century America emerged from nowhere to become a dominant force in virtually all the arts.  In each case, there had been a deliberate attempt to create something new that would be marked by a distinctly American character.  It happened suddenly.  America and, especially New York, became the world’s cultural center more rapidly and more completely than even Athens in the Golden Age or London in the Elizabethan Era.  Pretty much the same revolutionary process unfolded in music, painting, drama, literature, dance, design, architecture, photography, fashion and film.  And it tended to happen the same way:  a talented cadre of young native born Americans and older, already prominent immigrants came together in New York with the deliberate goal of breaking with the past and creating radically new art.  The art they sought would derive from, depict and explain the inexplicable character of America.  For painters, the cubism and surrealism of Europe were interesting but irrelevant.  For musicians, atonality was too intellectualized to comport with the directness, the high contrast of the frontier experience.  Europe was too refined, too precious.  America was, in Walt Whitman’s words, “blithe and strong.”  Its people were “…singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs…robust, friendly, clean-blooded, singing with melodious voices, melodious thoughts.”

Whitman reminds us that the American upsurge did not occur ex nihilo.  It was thoroughly if not exclusively grounded in Western, which is to say European esthetics.  Aristotle and perhaps even Plato would have been comfortable debating with the abstract expressionists of the Cedar Tavern.  In addition, the Americans were standing on the shoulders of giants.  Beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century, European writers, composers and painters had begun the modernist break-away from traditional forms. This happened at the same time and, to some degree, because the church and state were becoming less relevant as patrons of the arts and artists were free to court their own muses.  Their status and that of art itself grew and the artists gradually became cultural leaders. 

Just as American art was flourishing, Europe descended into moral and esthetic desolation.  World War I had been an abattoir, a danse macabre that left society and culture as well as millions of people on the slaughterhouse floor.  The effects were traumatic.  Between the wars, European intellectuals inside and outside the academy were derailed by the efforts of the existentialists to rationalize the barbarity and by the decadence that infected much of popular culture.  For all its youthful rebellion and sexual latitude, the Jazz Age in America was far less dissolute, less introspective.  Angst was replaced by exuberance fueled in part by the near universal defiance of prohibition.  The war had been shorter for Americans and had been fought far from home.  The economy survived and prospered and, even after the Great Depression arrived, Americans were able to mount a response that did not destroy hope.  The WPA’s Federal Art Project alone employed thousands of painters and sculptors and tens of thousands of writers, architects and musicians.  Today, the iconic images of the Depression are the bread lines, the Dust Bowl and the photography of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott.  The Yip Harburg lyrics for “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” might be remembered as the anthem of privation, but from Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields’ “On the Sunny Side of the Street” (1930) to Harburg’s “Over the Rainbow” (1939), almost all the popular music remained upbeat and forward-looking.  The immortal Woody Guthrie’s 1940 song “This Land Is Your Land” was written because Woody thought Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” was too soupy.  But “This Land” is at least as optimistic if somewhat edgier. [5]

Americans entered the years between the wars as the heirs, not only of late nineteenth century Europe but also of a long list of both immigrant and home grown artists of startling originality.  Among the latter are Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Mark Twain.  In classical music, Charles Ives was arguably as much the father of modernism as Wagner, Schoenberg or Stravinsky. [6] If there was a single trait that linked American innovators, a case could be made that it was eccentricity.  Indeed, eccentricity and innovation are closely related and both are on intimate terms with the risk and the reality of failure.  The twentieth century in America witnessed an explosion of truly radical genres in all the arts.  In music, these included a variety of methods of “composing” by means of random or other “aleatoric” processes for placing notes on paper with or without staves.  In some cases, the “composer” would have the players determine the notes using the readings of the I Ching.  John Cage did exactly that in his “Imaginary Landscape No. IV” of which he wrote, “It is thus possible to make a musical composition the continuity of which is free of individual taste and memory (psychology) and also of the literature and ‘traditions’ of the art.”  The ultimate expression of his philosophy is 4’ 33” which consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence in three movements.  These experiments had their parallels in the work of avant-garde choreographers.  Isadora Duncan broke from the conventions of classical ballet and sought to deemphasize the role of the feet in dance.  Merce Cunningham made dances, many in collaboration with John Cage, on the basis of random decisions made by his dancers.  In the late 1980’s, the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted an exhibition of ultimate minimalist paintings many of which were blank canvases.  Andy Warhol, one of the original pop artists, re-invented himself as a mass production artist and sold works he had never set hand to and maybe had never seen.  Many of these movements now seem excessively contrived and some were vehemently rejected by critics, audiences or, occasionally, both.  But art, like science, advances as much by failure as by success.

Ars gratia artis.  The American avant-garde may have taken its enthusiasms to an extreme but they became the driving force of twentieth century culture.  When Wagner started to compose The Ring of the Nibelung, he said his aim was to create “the artwork of the future.”  George Bernard Shaw admired it in spite of or perhaps because of its “gloomy, ugly music, [without] a glimpse of a handsome young man or pretty woman.”  He said it stood as a turning point in the history of opera and, indeed, of all music.  If so, it was a very tentative beginning.  Stravinsky and the members of the Second Viennese School extended Wagner’s atonality but it never did take hold in opera which reverted to the more traditional harmonies of Verdi and Puccini.  It was left to the Americans, immigrants and aliens among them, to bring to fruition the next stage in the evolution of musical drama and it did not occur in traditional opera houses.

In 1927 Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II created Show Boat based on Edna Ferber’s novel of the same name. Although it is often said to be the first modern Broadway musical, it is not.  It is a fully realized opera except that the story is not the least bit frivolous, the music is accessible and every song fits perfectly in advancing the narrative.  The show was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld and he cast it with several of his Follies stars including Helen Morgan. [7] The casts of its many revivals, however, have regularly included opera singers including Frederica Von Stade, Bruce Hubbard and Teresa Stratas in 1988 and Audra McDonald in 2012.  In 1935, George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward introduced what is still the quintessential American opera—they called it a “folk opera”—Porgy and Bess.  Ten years later, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II premiered their second major collaboration, Carousel.  In general it was well received although several critics thought it was excessively sentimental when compared to the1903 novel Liliom by Ferenc Molnár on which it is based.  But as Stephen Sondheim has observed, “Oklahoma! is about a picnic, Carousel is about life and death.”  In 1949, Lost in the Stars based on Alan Paton’s novel Cry, the Beloved Country, opened to a lukewarm reception in New York with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson.  Weill thought of it as a “choral play.”  His German collaborator Bertolt Brecht denounced it as the work of a sellout hack.  Brecht was wrong.  The libretto may be a throwback to nineteenth century melodrama but the music and lyrics are both masterful and modern.  This kind of serious musical drama—works such as Sunday in the Park with George (1984), The Lion King (1997) and Wicked (2003)—have by now become standard fare on Broadway and have laid legitimate claim to being the true heirs of classical opera. [8]

The era of American hegemony in the arts, as in other spheres, is now fading under the pressure of globalization.  Culture, like business, economics and governance, is becoming more homogenized than ever, a trend that seems to run counter to the political fragmentation that is on the rise everywhere. [9] One of these forces may ultimately yield to the pressure of the other.   But the driving force—the great enabler—of both homogenization and fragmentation is the Information Revolution and it is just beginning.  It took more than a century to ameliorate the dislocations brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  It would be foolhardy to try to imagine how the current upheaval will work out or how long it will take.  But it does seem safe to predict that the next century will be at least as unsettling as the last one. 

Notes

1.  The quotation is from “The American Scholar,” an address delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 31, 1837.

2.  “Composer from Brooklyn: An Autobiographical Sketch,”  Magazine of Art,  32, 1939, p. 549. 

3.  America Day by Day, translated by Patrick Dudley, London, 1952, p. 296.

4.  American critics and intellectuals, like their European cousins, are and always have been notoriously elitist.  One of my favorite examples is the reception that greeted Winslow Homer’s paintings of children.  Henry James wrote they were “barbarously simple” and “horribly ugly” which they were not.  Other critics denounced them as done to appeal to the simple tastes of American collectors.  George Gershwin fared even less well at the hands of the critics.  Lawrence Gilman of the Tribune reviewed the “Rhapsody in Blue” (February 13, 1924) with this broadside: “How trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are; how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment, under its disguise of fussy and futile counterpoint! ... Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!”  To this day, The New York Times rarely likes any expression of what this essay regards as American art.  On September 9, 1971, its senior critic Harold Schonberg called Leonard Bernstein’s Mass pretentious and thin, cheap and vulgar. The following Sunday, he added superficial and said it was, “…the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.”  Schonberg never liked anything Bernstein did.  But ten years later, the paper’s dismay was still unrelieved.  On September 14, 1981, Donal Henahan wrote that the piece, “…finds no time to say anything worth hearing.”  Moreover, “…much of the evening would sound as it were being improvised by the cast of ‘Saturday Night Live’ except that the humor is vapid and superficial.”  Nicolas Slonimsky filled a 325 page book with the stupidities of critics (Lexicon of Musical Invective, Coleman-Ross, 1953).

5.  Berlin’s original 1918 song was considerably less sugary than the 1938 version he wrote for Kate Smith which is the one sung today.  Right wingers sometimes say “This Land” is a Marxist anthem which is nonsense.  The song celebrates endless skyways, golden valleys, sparkling sands, diamond deserts and freedom highways.  It may also approve of trespassing and lament hunger but such attitudes do not require a close reading of Das Kapital.  Like many prominent Americans, Woody was a self-proclaimed socialist in the 1930’s and may have joined the Communist Party for a time.  He was listed as a subversive by the House Committee on Un-American Activities but was never officially blacklisted.

6.  It will be noted that both Schoenberg and Stravinsky emigrated to the United States and became American citizens in 1941 and 1945 respectively.  Neither participated in the events discussed in this paper although Schoenberg seems to have been influenced by the music of his good friend and tennis partner, George Gershwin.

7.  Those of us who never had the opportunity to hear Helen Morgan live can be forgiven for agreeing with the critic who called her voice "high, thin and somewhat wobbly."  In recordings from the 30's, she seems an unlikely torch singer who might have made a credible bel canto soprano.  Her voice was not terribly sexy as was Julie London’s but she knew how to put a song across with the best of them.  She was wildly popular and, like her peer Billie Holiday, her candle truly did burn at both ends.

8.  One of the first composers to follow and expand the new kind of musical drama was the classically trained British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber whose spectacularly successful works include Evita (1978), Cats (1981) and Phantom of the Opera (1986).

9.  The idea of the Global Village was propounded by Marshall McLuhan in his 1962 book, The Gutenberg Galaxy:  The Making of Typographic Man.  He foresaw that technology, especially television and “automation” (by which he meant computers) would result in people all over the world coming to share cultural assumptions and expectations.  He did not think this would produce unity or tranquility but, on the contrary, expected it would lead to increased dissension and political fragmentation as, indeed, it has.  Buckminister Fuller had a similar vision and developed his World Game in 1961 to counter what he called “desovereignization.”