is related to life, a sense of futility and unreality, is what makes
the lot of the musician in America a hard one, and is responsible for
his failure as an artist. If people get the kind of government they
deserve, they most certainly get the kind of art they demand; and if,
comparatively speaking, there is no American composer, it is because
America doesn’t want him, doesn’t see where he fits in.
Suppose most American music is trivial and superficial? How many
Americans would know the difference if it were profound? The composer
here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured
contempt. Contempt, mind you, not for himself--that wouldn’t
matter--but for his very art. In the minds of many of his compatriots
it ranks only as an entertainment and a diversion, slightly above
embroidery and unthinkably below baseball. At best, what he gets is
unintelligent admiration, not as an artist, but as a freak. Blind
Tom, the negro pianist, is still a remembered and admired figure in
American musical history; and Blind Tom was an idiot. To an American,
the process of musical composition is a mysterious and incomprehensible
trick--like sword-swallowing or levitation--and as such he admires it;
but he does not respect it. He cannot understand how any normal he-man
can spend his life thinking up tunes and putting them down on paper.
Tunes are pleasant things, of course, especially when they make your
feet go or take you back to the days when you went straw-riding; but as
for taking them seriously, and calling it work--man’s work--to think
them up ... any one who thinks that can be dismissed as a crank.
If the crank could make money, it might be different. The respect
accorded to artists in our country is pretty sharply graded in
accordance with their earning power. Novelists and playwrights come
first, since literature and the stage are known to furnish a “good
living.” Sculptors have a certain standing, on account of the rumoured
prices paid for statues and public memorials, though scenario writers
are beginning to rank higher. Painters are eyed with a certain
suspicion, though there is always the comfortable belief that the
painter probably pursues a prosperous career of advertising art on
the side. But poets and composers are decidedly men not to be taken
seriously. This system of evaluation is not quite as crass as it
sounds. America has so long been the land of opportunity, we have so
long gloried in her supremacy as the place to make a living, that
we have an instinctive conviction that if a man is really doing a
good job he must inevitably make money at it. Only, poetry and music
have the bad luck to be arts wherein a man may be both great and
successful and still be unable to look the landlord in the eye. Since
such trades are so unprofitable, we argue, those who pursue them are
presumably incompetent. The one class of composer whom the American
does take seriously is the writer of musical comedy and popular songs,
not only because he can make money, but because he provides honest,
understandable entertainment for man and beast. That, perhaps, is why
our light music is the best of its kind in the world.
The self-styled music-lover in this country too often brings little
more genuine comprehension to music. He is likely to be a highbrow
(defined as a person educated beyond his intelligence), with all the
mental obtuseness and snobbishness of his class. He divides music into
“popular”--meaning light--and “classical”--meaning pretentious. Now
there is good music and bad, and the composer’s pretensions have little
to do with the case. Compare, for example, the first-act finale of
Victor Herbert’s _Mlle. Modiste_ with such vulgar rubbish as _Donna è
mobile_. Yet because the latter is sung by tenors, at the Metropolitan,
the highbrow solemnly catalogues it as “classical,” abolishing the
work of Herbert, Berlin, and Kern, three greatly gifted men, with the
adjective “popular.” In general, he is the faithful guardian of the
Puritan tradition, always sniffing the air for a definite “message” or
moral, seeking sermons in tones, books in running arpeggios. It never
occurs to him that just as words are the language of intellect, so is
music the language of emotion, that its whole excuse for existence is
its perfection in saying what lies just beyond and above words, and
that if you can reduce a composer’s message to words, you automatically
render it meaningless.
Music criticism in America is amazingly good in the cities. The system
under which the critics must work, however, whereby they are supposed
to “cover” everything (in New York this theoretically entails making
some sort of critical comment upon every one of three or four hundred
events in a single season) is so impossible that much of their work is
inevitably scamped and perfunctory. Elsewhere throughout the country
criticism is handed over to reporters, who generally avoid trouble
by approving of everything. There is a tendency toward the double
standard--holding the stranger strictly to account, especially the
foreigner, and being “nice” to the native--that produces demoralizing
results.
Of real musical journalism we have none. There is _The Musical
Quarterly_, good of its kind, but rather ponderous and making no
pretence to timeliness. The monthlies are chiefly for the teacher.
The weeklies are in general frankly “shop” organs, devoted to the
activities of the performer and filled with his advertisements,
portraits, and press notices. There is no medium for the exchange
of contemporary thought, for the discussion of topics having a
non-professional cultural interest. Music publishing here is an
industry, conducted like any other industry. The Continental type of
publisher, who is a scholar and a musician, and a gentleman who is
conscious of a duty to music as well as to the stockholders, is almost
unknown here. To our publishers music is a commodity, to be bought
cheap and sold dear, and most of them will publish anything that looks
profitable, regardless of its quality. Their typographical standards
are higher than those anywhere in the world, except Germany.
So the American composer in America works more or less in a vacuum. He
is out of things, and he knows it. If he attempts to say something,
through his art, that will be intelligible to his countrymen, he is
baffled by the realization that his countrymen don’t understand his
language. This particular difficulty, this sense of inarticulateness,
probably weighed less heavily upon the last two generations of American
composers; for they were, most of them, virtually German composers.
In their time a thorough technical education in music was so nearly
unobtainable here that it was simpler to go abroad for it. So, from
Paine to MacDowell, they went to Germany. There they learned their
trade, and at least learned it thoroughly; but they learned to write,
not only music, but German music. To them, German music was music.
Their songs were _Lieder_; their symphonies and overtures were little
sinister sons of Beethoven, Raff, and Brahms. So completely Teutonized
did our musical speech become that we still find it hard to believe
that French music, Spanish music, Russian music is anything but an
imperfect translation from the German. A few went to Paris and learned
to write with a French accent. MacDowell was, and remains, our best:
a first-rank composer, who died before his work was done. His earlier
music was all written, performed, and published in Germany, and it is
as _echt Deutsch_ as that of Raff, his master. Not until he approached
middle life did he evolve a musical idiom that was wholly of MacDowell,
the American. Most of the rest came back to spend their days fashioning
good, honest, square-toed _Kapellmeistermusik_ that had about as much
genuine relation to their America as the Declaration of Independence
has to ours. They might feel this lack of contact, but at least they
had the consolation of knowing that there were people in the world to
whom what they said was at least intelligible.
The American of the present generation has no such consolation. He has
probably not been trained abroad. He wants to write music, and being
human, he wants it understood. But the minute he tries to express
himself he betrays the fact that he does not know what he wants to
express. Any significant work of art is inevitably based on the
artist’s relation and reaction to life. But the American composer’s
relation to the common life is unreal. His activities strike his
fellows as unimportant and slightly irrational. He can’t lay his
finger upon the great, throbbing, common pulse of America because for
him there is none. So he tries this, that, and the other, hoping by
luck to stumble upon the thing he wants to say. He tries desperately
to be American. Knowing that the great national schools of music in
other countries are based upon folksong, he tries to find the American
folksong, so as to base his music upon that. He utilizes Negro tunes,
and when they fail to strike the common chord he devises themes based
upon Indian melodies. What he fails to see is that the folksongs of
Europe express the common _racial_ emotions of a nation, not its
geographical accidents. When a Frenchman hears _Malbrouck_ he is moved
by what moved generations of long-dead Frenchmen; when a Russian hears
_Dubinushka_ he is stirred by what has stirred Russians for centuries.
But even if some melody did stir the pulse of Geronimo, the mere fact
that he was a former resident of my country is no proof that it is
going to stir mine. If you insist that Negro music is the proper basis
for an American school of composition, try telling a Southerner that
when he hears _Swing Low, Sweet Chariot_, he is hearkening to the
voices of his ancestors!
A curious symptom of this feeling of disinheritance is the tendency of
so many Americans to write what might be called the music of escape,
music that far from attempting to affirm the composer’s relation to
his day and age is a deliberate attempt to liberate himself by evoking
alien and exotic moods and atmosphere. The publishers’ catalogues
are full of Arab meditations, Persian dances, Hindu serenades, and
countless similar attempts to get “anywhere out of the world.” The
best work of Charles Griffes, whose untimely death last year robbed
us of a true creative talent, was his symphonic poem, “The Pleasure
Dome of Kubla Khan,” and his settings of Chinese and Japanese lyrics
in Oriental rhythms and timbres. Not that the mere choice of subject
is important; it is the actual mood and idiom of so much of this music
that is significant evidence of the impulse to give up and forget
America, to create a dream-world wherein one can find refuge from the
land of chewing gum and victrolas.
These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the player-piano,
which so outrage the sensibilities of many a musician of the elder day,
are a very real force in helping to civilize this country musically.
The American is by no means as unmusical as he thinks he is. His
indifference to art is only the result of his purely industrial
civilization, and his tendency to mix morals with æsthetics is a
habit of thought engendered by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition
makes him fearful and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional
response, but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off
his guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is far
from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records because he is a
hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the expensive Caruso and
Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably he is bound to take some notice
of what they play and sing, and to recognize it when he hears it again.
In spite of himself he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical
background. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, and
is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to progress from
“blues” to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger.
But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this
country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always been a
necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order to compensate for
the uncanny silence in which these photographic wraiths unfold their
dramas. Starting with a modest ensemble of piano and glass crash, the
motion-picture orchestra has gradually increased in size and quality,
the pipe organ has been introduced to augment and alternate it, so
that the larger houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is
amazingly good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified
type of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show and
“pop” concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially to house it,
containing a stage that was little more than a picture frame, a large
pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large enough to hold seventy or
eighty players. He recruited a permanent orchestra large enough to play
symphonic works, and put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and
conductor, who had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the
performances. These, besides the usual film presentations, comprised
vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by the orchestra. All
the music played at these entertainments was good--in what is known in
this country as “classical.” Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment
to the films, assembled from the best orchestral music obtainable--a
sort of synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of the
film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it.
This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and is rapidly
becoming the standard offering at all the larger picture houses. It is
a significant step in our musical life, for it is the first entirely
successful attempt in this country to adapt art to popular wants. At
last the average man is going of his own accord into a public hall
and hearing music--real music--and discovering that he likes it. The
picture house allows him to pretend that he is going solely to see the
films, and needn’t listen unless he wants to. He finds that “classical”
music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. Freed from
the highbrow’s condescension, unconscious of uplift, he listens and
responds to music like the prelude to _Tristan_, the _Walkürenritt_,
the _New World_ symphony, Tschaikovsky’s _Fourth_, and the _Eroica_.
Theodore Thomas rendered no more valuable service to music in America
than have Samuel Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld.
We are still far from utopia, however. In one of his essays upon
communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of “the true Mediterranean
_esprit_, the viable art philosophy of the French race, which is
essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, free alike from
dogmatism and mysticism.” Try to frame a sentence like that about
America. Try to make any generalization about the American spirit
without using “liberty,” “free institutions,” “resourcefulness,”
“opportunity,” or other politico-economic terms, if you would know what
confronts the American artist, above all the American musician, when
he attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply have no
common æsthetic emotions. No wonder our music flounders and stammers,
and trails off into incoherence!
Wagner wrote _Die Meistersinger_ in a deliberate effort to express the
German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as an Italian; Glinka
founded an entire school of composers whose sole aim was to express
Russia. Such a task is beyond the American. The others were spokesmen
for a race: he has no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends
that he has, and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and
futile. To speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is naïve; you
might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American must accept his
lot. There is but one audience he can write for, and that is himself.
John Smith, American composer, dare not say: “I write to express
America.” He can only say: “I write to express John Smith. I accept my
life because, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it
is the only life I know.” And because John Smith is an American, and
because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, there must be an American
soul, then perhaps, if he does honest work and is true to himself, he
may succeed in saying something that is of America, and of nowhere
else, and that other Americans will hear and understand.
DEEMS TAYLOR
POETRY
There are many fashions, among contemporary critics, of regarding
American poetry, each of them perhaps of equal helpfulness, since
each is one facet of an imaginable whole. There is the view of Mr.
John Middleton Murry, an English critic, that it depends perhaps a
shade too much on narrative or dramatic interest, on bizarrerie (if
I may very freely elaborate his notion) or, in general, on a kind of
sensationalism, a use of superficially intriguing elements which are
not specifically the right--or at all events the best--elements of
poetry. There is the view of Mr. Louis Untermeyer, one of the ablest
of our own critics and also one of the most versatile of our parodists
and poets, that our contemporary poetry is good in measure as it
comes in the direct line from Whitman: good, that is to say, when it
is the voice of the poet who accepts, accepts joyously and largely,
even loosely, this new world environment, these new customs, social
and industrial, above all, it may be, the new sense of freedom which
he might, if pressed, trace back to Karl Marx on one hand and Sigmund
Freud on the other. There is again the view of Miss Amy Lowell that
our poetry is good, or tends to be, precisely in proportion as it
represents an outgrowing, by the poet, of his acute awareness of a
social or ethical “here and now,” and the attainment of a relatively
pure pre-occupation with beauty--the sense of freedom here exercising
itself principally, if not altogether, with regard to literary
tradition, especially the English: once more, I dilate the view to make
it the more broadly representative. And there is, finally, the view of
the conservative, by no means silent even in this era, that what is
good in contemporary American poetry is what is for the moment least
conspicuous--the traditional, seen as it appears inevitably in America
to be seen, as something graceful, sentimental, rightly ethical, gently
idealistic.
What will be fairly obvious is that if we follow a little way any
particular one of these critics, we shall find him attempting to urge
our poetry in a particular direction, a direction which he prefers
to any other direction, and analysing its origins in such a way, if
he analyses at all, as to make plausible its (postulated) growth in
that direction. This is the natural, even perhaps the best thing, for
a participant critic to do--it contributes, certainly, an interest
and an energy. But if in some freak of disinterestedness, we wish if
for only a moment to see American poetry with no concern save that
of inordinate and intelligent curiosity, then it is to all of these
views that we must turn, rather than to any one, and to the obverse of
each, as well as to the face. For if one thing is apparent to-day in
a study of American letters, it is that we must heroically resist any
temptation to simplify, to look in only one direction for origins or
in only one direction for growth. Despite our national motto, American
civilization is not so much one in many as many in one. We have not, as
England has and as France has, a single literary heart; our literary
capitals and countries are many, each with its own vigorous people,
its own self-interest, its own virtues and provincialisms. We may
attribute this to the mere matter of our size, and the consequent
geographical sequestration of this or that group--that is no doubt a
factor, but of equal importance is the fact that in a new country, of
rapid and chaotic material growth, we must inevitably have, according
to the locality, marked variations in the rapidity of growth of the
vague thing we call civilization. Chicago is younger than Boston, older
than San Francisco. And what applies to the large unit applies also
to the small--if the country in general has not yet reached anything
remotely like a cultural homogeneity (as far, that is, as we ever in
viewing a great nation expect such a thing) neither has any section of
it, nor any city of it. It is no longer possible, if indeed it ever
was, to regard a section like New England, for example, as a definite
environmental factor, say “y,” and to conclude, as some critics are
so fond of doing, that any poet who matures there will inevitably be
representable as “yp.” This is among the commonest and falsest of
false simplifications. Our critics, frantically determined to find
an American poetry that is autochthonous, will see rocky pastures,
mountains and birches in the poetry of a New Englander, or skyscrapers
in the poetry of a New Yorker, or stockyards in the poetry of a
Chicagoan, as easily as a conjurer takes a rabbit from a hat.
What refuge we have from a critical basis so naïve is in assuming
from the outset, toward contemporary American poetry, an attitude
guardedly pluralistic--we begin by observing merely that American
poetry is certainly, at the moment, if quantitative production and
public interest are any measure, extraordinarily healthy and vigorous.
We are accustomed to hearing it called a renaissance. The term is
admissible if we carefully exclude, in using it, any implication of a
revival of classicism. What we mean by it is simply that the moment
is one of quite remarkable energy, productiveness, range, colour, and
anarchy. What we do not mean by it is that we can trace with accuracy
where this outburst comes from. The origins of the thing are obscure.
It was audible in 1914--Mr. Edwin Arlington Robinson and Mr. Ezra Pound
were audible before that; it burst into full chorus in 1915; and ever
since there has been, with an occasional dying fall, a lusty corybantic
cacophony. Just where this amazing procession started nobody clearly
knows. Mr. Untermeyer would have us believe that Walt Whitman was, as
it were, the organizer of it, Miss Monroe tries to persuade us that
it was _Poetry: a Magazine of Verse_, But the facts, I think, wave
aside either postulate. If one thing is remarkable it is that in this
spate of poetry the influence of Walt Whitman--an influence, one would
suppose, as toxic for the young as Swinburne--is so inconsiderable:
if another is even more remarkable, it is that in all this chorus one
so seldom hears a voice of which any previous American voice was the
clear prototype. We have had, of course, our voices--of the sort, I
mean, rich enough in character to make imitation an easy and tempting
thing. Longfellow, Lowell, Bryant, Sill, Lanier are not in this regard
considerable,--but what of Poe, whose influence we have seen in French
poetry on Baudelaire, and in contemporary English poetry on Mr. Walter
de la Mare? No trace of him is discoverable, unless perhaps we find
the ghostliest of his shadows now and then across the work of Mr.
John Gould Fletcher, or Mr. Maxwell Bodenheim, or Mr. Wallace Stevens,
a shadow cast, in all these cases, amid much else, from a technical
and colouristic standpoint, which would have filled Poe with alarm.
And there is another American poet, perhaps as great as Poe, perhaps
greater (as he in turn is perhaps greater than Whitman--as poet, though
not as personality)--Emily Dickinson. Of that quietist and mystic, who
walked with tranquillity midway between Blake and Emerson, making of
her wilful imperfections a kind of perfectionism, why do we hear so
little? Do we catch now and again the fleetingest glimpse of her in the
early work of Mr. Robert Frost? If so, it is certainly nowhere else.
Yet it would be hard to prove that she has no right to a place with Poe
and Whitman, or indeed among the best poets in the language.