of the racial and national differences dividing human kind into
groups, and of the special features, technical and expressive,
characterizing the music of these various groups, is constantly
challenging our American music to disavow what it calls a featureless
cosmopolitanism, and to achieve individuality by idealizing some
primitive popular strain, whether of the Indians, of the negroes,
of the British colonizers, or of our contemporary "ragtime." In so
doing it usually accepts uncritically certain assumptions. It is apt
to assume, for instance, that interpretative truth is assured by
geographical propinquity. The chant of the Indian "expresses" the
modern American because the habitat of both is west of the Atlantic
Ocean. It often assumes that characteristic turns of idiom, such as
certain modal intervals or rhythmic figures, are of intrinsic value
as making music "distinctive." You can make a tune "American" by
"ragging" its rhythm, as you make a story American by inserting "I
guess" or "I reckon" at frequent intervals. It often mistakes the
conception of the average for that of the ideal type, and supposes
that the man in the street represents the best taste of America. Above
all, it condemns any attempt at universalizing artistic utterance as
"featureless cosmopolitanism" or "flabby eclecticism," and suggests
that the musician who speaks, not a dialect but a language understood
over the civilized world (as Tschaikowsky did, for example, to the
disgust of the Russian nationalists), has "lost contact," as the phrase
goes, "with the soil." In the interest of clear thinking all these
assumptions stand in need of criticism.
It is hardly possible even to state the first without recognizing the
large measure of absurdity it contains. That the crude war-dances and
chants of the red aborigines of this continent should be in any way
representative of so mixed a people, compounded of so many European
strains, as we who have exterminated and displaced them, is a thought
more worthy of savages who believe that the strength of their enemy
passes into them when they eat him than of our vaunted intelligence,
fortified by ethnological science. We should hardly entertain it if we
were not misled by the interest that attaches to anything unusual or
outlandish, and tempted by certain idiomatic peculiarities of these
monotonous strains to exploit their "local color." This may very well
be done now and then for an artistic holiday, as MacDowell has done it
in his Indian Suite; but if a folk-music is to enter vitally into art
it must bring with it something more than quaintness or distinctive
idioms, it must be genuinely expressive of the temperament of the
people using it; and of the complex American temper Indian music can
never be thus representative.
Somewhat similar considerations apply to the British folk-songs which,
introduced by our pioneering grandfathers, have in remote regions like
the Kentucky mountains survived uncontaminated by modernisms, and
have recently been rediscovered and widely acclaimed. Here again the
piquancy of unfamiliar idiom and a simplicity that falls agreeably on
over-stimulated ears has aroused an enthusiasm that overshoots its
mark. By all means let us enjoy these fresh songs, and even embody them
in our music if we find it an interesting experiment. But can we expect
that they will have any far-reaching interpretative value for us, that
they will express our national temper? That they are not even native
to the soil is a minor objection to them, for we are importations
ourselves. But that they are, with all their charm, British through and
through, makes it unlikely that they can adequately reflect a nation
which, though partly British, is also partly almost everything else.
The case of ragtime is rather more subtle. Here is a music, local
and piquantly idiomatic, and undeniably representative of a certain
aspect of American character--our restlessness, our insatiable nervous
activity, our thoughtless superficial "optimism," our fondness for
"hustling," our carelessness of whither, how, or why we are moving if
only we can "keep on the move." If this were all of us, if the first
impression which foreigners get of us, summed up for them oftentimes
in our inimitably characteristic "Step lively, please," were also the
last, and there was nothing more solid, sweet, or wise in America than
this galvanic twitching, then indeed ragtime would be our perfect
music. But every true American knows that, on the contrary, this is not
our virtue but our vice, not our strength but our weakness, and that
such a picture of us as it presents is not a portrait but a caricature.
And similarly, as soon as we examine ragtime at all critically we
discover its essential triviality. Its melodies are commonplace, its
harmonies cheap, shoddy, and sentimental. Even its rhythm, as we have
seen, is a clever formula rather than a creative form, a trick for
giving ordinary movement a specious air of animation. It is, in fact,
as the writer in the London Times points out, "a debased imitation of
genuine negro song, just as the popular Gaiety favorites of the late
eighties, 'Enniscorthy' and 'Ballyhooley,' were debased imitations of a
certain class of Irish folk-song." A few lines later this same writer
falls into the pitfall always yawning for the theorist about ragtime,
asks if the American composer will arrive who can extract gold from
this ore, states coolly that "Ragtime represents the American nation,"
and of course ends up with an edifying reference to an art "really
vital because it has its roots in its own soil." Does he consider
that "Ballyhooley" "represents the Irish nation"? Would he advise
Sir Charles Stanford to write a symphony upon it? Only an American
journalist could be more naïve, and here is one that is. "The important
point," he says, "is that ragtime, whether it be adjudged good or bad,
is original with Americans--it is their own creation."[64] This beggars
comment.
IV
So far our results are mainly negative. We have discovered fallacies
in several assumptions too commonly and easily made. We have set a
lower estimate on purely geographical considerations than is often
set. We have tried to distinguish between what in a popular strain
is merely quaint or piquant because of peculiarities of idiom, and
what is more profoundly true in expression to a national or racial
temper; and while admitting the superficial charm of such idioms and
of the "distinctiveness" to which they minister, we have insisted on
the far deeper import of interpretative truth. We have glanced at the
danger of confounding appeal to the majority with appeal to good taste,
which is always outvoted, or of supposing that "originality" is of any
importance in comparison with merit. From these criticisms certain
positive principles thus tend to emerge. It becomes evident that there
is a certain gradation of values in the qualities which a folk-music
may possess. Distinctiveness of idiom is a merit, but a less vital one
than interpretative power; higher than either is beauty, suitability
to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of
the world. Is there any body of folk-song available to Americans that
possesses any or all of these merits in a higher degree than the types
we have examined?
We seem to discover such a richer vein in the songs of the negroes--not
the debased forms found in ragtime and the "coon-songs" of the minstrel
shows, but the genuine old plantation tunes, the "spirituals" and
"shouts" of the slaves. In idiomatic individuality, to begin with, both
of harmonic interval and rhythmic figure, these songs will compare
favorably with those of any European nation. With many of these they
share, indeed, odd modal intervals of great antiquity, such as the
lowered seventh scale-step in major and the raised sixth-step in
minor. Like Scottish tunes they make frequent use of the incomplete or
pentatonic scale, omitting the fourth and seventh steps. A peculiarity
in which they are almost unique is a curious oscillation between a
major key and its relative minor, especially at cadences, so that
one gets a haunting sense of uncertainty that enhances tenfold their
plaintiveness. In "The Angels Done Changed My Name" (Figure XXXIV),
are exemplified the lowered seventh step--at "I went to pray"--and the
pentatonic scale; in "You May Bury Me in the East" the raised sixth
step--to the word "trumpet"--and the major-minor cadence. The last
line begins unmistakably in E flat, and ends equally unmistakably in C
minor, and gets from that veering in the wind, so to speak, a peculiar
flavor which we should recognize anywhere as "Negro." It is noteworthy
that both these songs have to be harmonized strongly and simply with
the staple triads--it is impossible to harmonize them otherwise. In
other words they are the product and expression of a primitive but pure
and strong tonal sense, refreshingly free from the effeminate chromatic
harmonies--the "barber-shop chords"--of ragtime. The one compares with
the other as the fervent childish poetry of the lines here, "Thank God
the angels done changed my name," or "I'll hear the trumpet sound in
that morning" compares with the slangy doggerel of the cabarets.[65]
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXXIV.
The Angels Done Changed My Name. From "Jubilee Songs."=]
I went to the hillside, I went to pray, I
know the angels done changed my name, Done
changed my name for the coming day, Thank
God the angels done changed my name.
[Illustration: =You May Bury Me in the East.=]
You may bury me in the East, You may
bury me in the West, But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that
morning. In that morning, my Lord
How I long to go for, For to hear the trumpet sound, In that morning.
It is often stated that the chief rhythmic characteristic of the negro
music is the so-called "Scotch jerk," the jump away from the normally
accented note to another, thrice exemplified in the third line of "The
Angels Done Changed My Name," and imitated in ragtime. A more typical
instance of it is "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" (Figure XXXV), which
also further illustrates major-minor idiom in its constant see-saw
between G minor and B-flat major. It is pointed out that the slaves had
a strong sense of time, that the overwhelming majority of their songs
are in duple or march time, with very few in the more graceful but
less vehement triple measure, and that in their "shouts" or religious
dances they rocked themselves into paroxysms of rhythmic excitement,
one group clapping the meter while the others sang and scuffled with
a "jerking, twitching motion which agitated the entire shouter and
soon brought out streams of perspiration."[66] No doubt the jerk
evidences their love of strong accentuation; but it must be noted that
accentuation is a purely local thing, affects the meter rather than the
rhythm, and may be assumed and put off by a tune (as in the "ragging"
of a standard melody) without changing its essential curve.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXXV.
Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel?=]
Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel D'liver
Daniel, d'liver Daniel, Didn't my Lord deliver
Daniel, And why not a ev'ry man?
[Illustration: =Going Up.=]
Oh, yes, I'm going up, going up,
going all the way, Lord, going up,
going up, to see the heavenly land.
Far more significant, therefore, than their half-barbaric fondness
for the jerk is the grasp shown by negroes over the larger and nobler
reaches of rhythm, their feeling for the phrase as a whole and ability
to impress upon it a firm and yet varied profile. The second half of
"You May Bury Me in the East," with its bold festooning of outline,
even more strikingly the tune "Going Up," with its piquant silences
and its even-paced insistence on "going all the way, Lord," show a
unity in their variety, a certain "all-of-a-piece-ness," compared
with which even "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" seems scrappy, and
the ordinary ragtime effusion pitifully poverty-stricken. There
is plenty of internal evidence, too, that these happy results are
attributable to genuine musical imagination, and not to luck in the
servile following of felicitous word-patterns. Indeed, the frequency
with which unimportant words are accented and important ones slurred
over shows that, as is so often the case with great melodists like
Schubert, the words were regarded more or less as convenient pegs to
hang the melodies on, and the specifically musical faculty did not
easily brook interference. "The negroes keep exquisite time," writes
one of the editors of "Slave Songs in the United States," the best of
the collections, "and do not suffer themselves to be daunted by any
obstacle in the words. The most obstinate hymns they will force to
do duty with any tune they please, and will dash heroically through
a trochaic tune at the head of a column of iambs with wonderful
skill." The sense of independent tone-pattern, which when possessed by
individual geniuses in supreme degree gives us the immortal melodies
of a Beethoven or a Brahms, waxes and wanes in these childlike tunes,
sometimes falling back into platitude, but sometimes advancing to a
real distinction and beauty.
Whether this beauty is of the kind we have desiderated as the highest
quality folk-song can have, rendering it "suitable to enter into
music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world," is
a further question, and one which brings us at length to the highly
controversial matter of the kind of treatment that the composer should
give folk-material in incorporating it into his more finished art.
The variations of taste concerned here are so subtle that probably
unanimity of judgement, even if it be desirable, will never be
attained. Yet it is certain that treatment of some sort there must
be. The mere collecting, collating, and setting forth of folk-songs,
attractively arranged for instruments or even orchestrated, such
as we have seen much of from all countries in recent years, is no
more musical art than a pile of bricks is a building, or a series
of anecdotes literature. So far as it tends to content the public
with such potpourris, the fad for folk-song is positively injurious
to taste, in something the same way that our modern floods of petty
journalism are injurious to the capacity for sustained reading.
Moreover, even on their own level such medleys are apt to be
unsatisfactory; for the tunes themselves are so definite, brief, and
complete, and the transitional passages between them are therefore
so obtrusively transitional, that the net effect is that of the
ill-baked bread pudding from which we eat nothing but the raisins. Mr.
Coleridge-Taylor's "Twenty-Four Negro Melodies," despite incidental
attractions, are on the whole an example of this bad model.
Far worse, however, are those "improvements" of folk-song which
consist in a general prettifying of its homely simplicity with all
the refinements and luxuries of sophisticated musical technique--as
if a country maiden should conceal her healthy color under layers of
rouge. Strange that composers skilful enough to use them should not
recognize the inappropriateness of Wagnerian chromatics and Debussyan
whole-tone scale harmonies, to say nothing of all sorts of rich
dissonantal trappings, to tunes as diatonic as "God Save the King" and
as square cut as the "Hymn of Joy." One would think that the sense
of humor, which revels in incongruity in music as in other things,
would keep them from doing it and us from taking it so seriously. It
would be invidious to name examples, but they can be discovered by the
discerning; for not even the negro complexion is proof against this
brand of talcum powder.
The kind of change that is both legitimate and necessary may perhaps be
best suggested by another example, "Deep River." Here we have, in the
first phrase, that free and firm molding of rhythmic pattern which is
often so surprising in these songs, so that we might look far in the
best composers without finding its peer in deliberate, calm beauty. But
just as our hearts are responding to the wave of emotion thus generated
it strikes, so to speak, a dead wall, falls shattered, and has to
begin over again, without being able to recover the lost momentum. The
imagination is vital as far as it goes, but its span is short, it lacks
sustained power and cumulative force. What is needed in the composer
who would deal with such material, then, in addition to a tact that
enters into its spirit, is a synthetic imagination capable of rounding
out its incompleteness, of tracing the whole of the curve it suggests,
of developing into full life what it presents only as a germ.
[Illustration: =FIGURE XXXVI.
Deep River.=]
Deep river, my home is over Jordan,
Deep river, Lord I want to cross over in to camp ground.
How difficult such a truly creative treatment is, only those fully know
who have tried it; how rare, musical literature testifies. To add a
measure to a folk-song is almost like adding a cubit to one's stature,
and for the same reason--that addition is not what is requisite,
but organic growth. That it is possible we see in Brahms's masterly
treatment of German student songs in his "Academic Festival Overture";
that it can be applied to negro melodies we have been shown especially
by Dvořák. In his "New World" symphony and his "American" Quartet and
Quintet he assimilated a peculiar idiom so perfectly that there is not
a note, even in the highly complex harmonies toward the end of the
symphony, that does not take its place in the scheme unobtrusively.
While the harmonic idiom preponderantly of simple triads dictated by
the material is maintained with an unerring sense of style, these
commonest of all chords are so deftly managed that they never become
commonplace. The twin pitfalls of platitude and sophistication are
avoided with equal success. The same felicity is attained in the
construction. However brief the themes, they do not sound trivial
or unconvincing, because we feel they have reached their natural
growth. Above all, the same sympathy and power that are shown in these
technical matters so control the conception as a whole that these
works form a true idealization of negro feeling, in its moods both of
half-barbaric dance and of naïvely pathetic sentiment.
Dvořák's example suffices by itself, then, to show that the negro
music, in the hands of a master, is capable of two of the three
qualities we demanded of any folk-song--idiomatic distinctiveness and
capacity for organized beauty. Does he also demonstrate in it the
third--adequacy to interpret the American temper? Something closely
kindred to that temper and easily endeared to it there certainly is in
the restless rhythmic energy, the unceasing motion and quick changes of
these scherzos, the vigor and dispatch of these allegro movements. Like
similar syncopations and other rhythmic peculiarities that we find in
those of our composers who have more than their share of our national
nervous energy, such as Chadwick and Whiting, the negro rhythms have a
crispness and buoyancy that is somehow appropriate to our clear skies
and self-helpful society. They give at least a far fairer portrait
of us than the caricature of ragtime. In its more sentimental moods,
too, negro music has an unsophistication, an unreserved naïveté,
that reminds us of similar traits in the traditional conception of
our fellow countrymen. It thus seems to express more of our national
temperament, and to leave less of it unexpressed than would on the
whole any other body of folk-song.
Yet the very attempt to formulate these considerations forces us
to realize how hopelessly inadequate they are as an account of the
possibilities of America in music. The picture they give of the
national type may do something like justice to it as it existed in
earlier times and simpler surroundings, as it appears, for instance,
in the pages of Mark Twain or Bret Harte, and as it is symbolised in
the person of Uncle Sam; but the modern American is a being quite
other, far more complex, far more cosmopolitan, the American not of
nineteenth century New England but of the twentieth century "melting
pot." He is wholly incommensurate not only with negro music or any folk
music, but with even individual composers like Dvořák in whom emotion
far outruns intellectual subtlety. No folk music, let us repeat, no
individual composer, no school of composers, can "express" America. The
age of such simplicities is past, if it ever existed. Whether we like
it or not, we have to take our age and our country as they are; they
are an age of rapidly accelerating intercommunication of all peoples
and a country in which the internationalism that thus slowly results is
being hastened by actual admixture on a heretofore unprecedented scale.
Such a condition doubtless has its bad as well as its good aspects;
but if those who bemoan our "featureless cosmopolitanism" and advocate
an impossible parochialism as the only remedy would try rather to see
how a wider outlook and a larger sympathy may deepen our art and make
it more truly human by laying less stress on local, national, or even
racial types, and more on the untrammeled expression of the greatest
possible variety of individuals, music would fare better. "National
literature:" wrote Goethe to Eckerman in 1827, "the term has no longer
much meaning to-day; the time for universal literature is come, and
each ought to work to hasten its advent." Signs are not wanting that
the condition thus discerned by the wisest men a century ago is now
gradually getting itself acknowledged in general practice.
V
If we accept, in the light of the foregoing considerations, the
ideal of enlightened eclecticism, not only for our own music here in
America but measurably for all modern music, since it is all subject
to the internationalization so characteristic of our time, the chief
undertaking that remains to us will be an attempt to define the
position of the American composer in relation to such eclecticism, the
advantages and disadvantages of his situation, the pitfalls he must
avoid, and the opportunities he should embrace. From this point of
view it will be seen that the enthusiasts of nationalism, in advising
our composer to confine himself to Indian, Negro, or ragtime material,
in adjuring him not to listen to the siren voice of Europe, are not
merely misleading but cheating him. They are asking him to throw away
his birthright of wide cosmopolitan influence for a mess of purely
parochial pottage. They are bewailing the lack in America of just those
geographical and racial boundary lines that split up Europe into a
series of more or less petty and hostile camps. They are inviting us to
descend from the point of vantage good fortune has given us, a little
removed both in space and in time from the thick of the battle.
For it is indeed the peculiar good fortune of the young American
composer that he finds spread out before him, as the models through
the study of which he is to acquire an important part of his technical
equipment and of his general attitude towards art, the masterpieces
of the various European countries, among which he may pick and choose
as his individual taste directs, and without being hampered by
those annoying racial and national jealousies from which the most
intelligent European cannot quite free himself. What he may acquire
of the special virtue of each school--the delicacy and distinction of
the French, the solid structural power of the German, the suave and
rich coloring of the Russian, the austere dignity of the English--is
limited, not by the accident of birth, but only by his own assimilative
power. No element in his complex nature need be starved for want of
its proper food. He is placed in the midst of the stream of world
influences to make of himself what he will and can.