|
The history of American music may be roughly
divided into three periods: (1) the colonial period (the 17th
and 18th centuries), dominated by British influence; (2) the
period from about 1800 to about 1930, when the United States
depended heavily for its musical culture on the importation
of music and professional musicians from continental Europe;
and (3) the period since about 1930 to the present, during
which American music attained an international importance
equal to that of European music.
COLONIAL PERIOD
Music had an important place in the life of the Puritan settlers
in New England. They used metrical psalms in their worship,
a practice that emphasized text more than music, but they
must also have brought with them folk songs that remained
unwritten and are therefore unknown today. The first generations
to settle in the New World were not skilled in music, and
the psalms were perpetuated by "lining out," in
which a leader recited or sang each line ahead of the congregation.
During the 18th century itinerant singing masters taught the
rudiments of music and created a market for the many collections
of psalm tunes that reprinted English pieces but also contained
the music of American composers, including James Lyon's (1735-94)
Urania in 1761. Except for William BILLINGS, whose ANTHEMS
and fuging tunes expressed a rugged individual style, most
music of American composers mirrored the styles that were
in vogue in England.
Religious vocal music touched all walks of life in the American
colonies, but a taste for concerts and more sophisticated
music developed early in the cities. Evidence indicates concerts
in Boston in 1731, in Charleston in 1732, in New York in 1736,
and in Philadelphia in 1757.
The market for concert music attracted foreign musicians,
many of them English, who were readily accepted after the
Revolutionary War. As business prospered and cities grew,
the large number of first-generation urbanites demanded a
semblance of the musical life they had known in their homelands.
Even so, the newly arrived musicians found it useful to have
another means of livelihood, and from their numbers came the
early music-store owners and music publishers. They also taught
music, repaired instruments, and organized performing groups.
Alexander Reinagle (1756-1809), Benjamin Carr (1768-1831),
James Hewitt (1770-1827), and Gottlieb Graupner (1767-1836)
were among the early composer-performer-teachers who established
a cultured level of musical taste alongside the vernacular
idiom.
A high level of musical creativity was reached in the 18th
century by the Moravians in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North
Carolina. They composed and performed CHORAL and instrumental
music that can be compared to North German works of the late
BAROQUE period. The Moravians kept apart from the life outside
their communities, and their music failed to influence the
development of an American idiom.
THE 19TH CENTURY
During the 19th century American-born composers, performers,
critics, conductors, and educators brought the country within
a respectable distance of European practices, although for
another century the United States was dependent on imported
personnel and materials for its highest level of music.
Lowell MASON, an important figure in the early years of the
Boston Handel and Haydn Society, and a founder of the Boston
Academy of Music (1832), influenced 19th-century musical life
in a number of ways. He introduced much European choral music
to the United States, pioneered in public-school music education,
and sired a musical dynasty that included publishers, organ
and piano builders, teachers, and the composer Daniel Gregory
Mason (1873-1953). He and his contemporaries, Thomas Hastings
(1784-1872), William Bradbury (1816-68), and Isaac B. Woodbury
(1819-58), wrote many hymns that continued to be used in the
20th century.
Following the European REVOLUTION of 1848 many German musicians
immigrated to the United States. Among them was the Germania
Musical Society, an orchestra of about 25 players that toured
the country for several years, bringing concert music to places
where it had never been known. Numerous teachers and performers,
both vocal and instrumental, settled in the cities; concert
artists arrived on tour to play in communities of all sizes.
The Austrian pianist Henri Herz, the Norwegian violinist Ole
BULL, the Swedish soprano Jenny LIND, and the French conductor
Louis Jullien attracted large audiences, only some of whom
had any experience with musical performances. Performers became
show-business properties: P. T. BARNUM promoted the concerts
of Jenny Lind; Jullien, engaged by Barnum, beguiled his audiences
with stunts and showmanship that often overshadowed his music.
The American-born pianist Louis Moreau GOTTSCHALK returned
from his European studies in 1853 and undertook concert tours
rivaling those of the great European virtuosos. With few exceptions,
however, the musical taste of Americans in the 19th century
was dominated by German traditions and taste. Only in the
music that reached into the unsophisticated levels of life
did American musicians find wide acceptance.
Vocal music had the most direct appeal to the majority, and
singing families, probably patterned after European folk-singing
groups, became popular. The best known was the Hutchinson
family, who associated their singing activities with social
causes, especially temperance and abolition.
The minstrel shows that arose in the 1820s combined song with
the theater. These blackface song, dance, and comedy-skit
shows remained popular for a century. At first they were entirely
the domain of white performers in costume, but by the mid-1850s
blacks also performed in them. The minstrel show was probably
begun by T. D. "Daddy" Rice (1808-60) and was popularized
by Daniel Decatur Emmett (1815-1904), composer of "Dixie,"
and E. P. Christy (1815-62). It brought the music of Stephen
Collins FOSTER to public attention, and gave him fame if not
a sufficient livelihood. His "Jeanie with the Light Brown
Hair," "Old Folks at Home," and "Camptown
Races" are among the most familiar of his more than 200
songs. Foster outshone all other American composers of the
period in popularity, and his works are known for their tunefulness
and poetic interest. His contemporaries included the English-born
Joseph P. Knight (1812-87) ("Rocked in the Cradle of
the Deep") and Henry Russell (1812-1900) ("Woodman,
Spare That Tree") and the Americans Septimus Winner (1827-1902)
("Whispering Hope" and "Listen to the Mocking
Bird") and John H. Hewitt (1801-90) ("All Quiet
Along the Potomac"). The last, along with "Dixie"
and "Tenting on the Old Camp Ground," was one of
the popular songs spawned by the Civil War.
New York City was the emerging center for the arts, and there
the cry for American music by American composers was first
raised. William Henry Fry's (1813-64) opera Leonora, performed
in Philadelphia in 1845, was the first by an American composer;
George F. Bristow's (1825-98) Rip Van Winkle, performed in
New York in 1855, was the first on an American subject. Both
men wrote instrumental music also, but their work overall
is undistinguished.
Music spread westward before the middle of the 19th century,
mainly to cities that had a large European-born population.
St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cincinnati, and Chicago were early in
establishing orchestras, opera companies, and choral groups.
Music societies were organized, and some became the nucleus
of permanent performing organizations. The NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC
was formed in 1842. A number of short-lived groups were organized
in New York and elsewhere, and the BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
came into existence in 1881; the CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
was formed a decade later. New Orleans had an established
opera house (1810) before any of those orchestras were founded.
The rise of performing groups brought the need for competent
conductors, and a number of men came forward to guide the
course of those organizations. Theodore Thomas (1835-1905),
who had played violin in Jullien's orchestra, organized his
own group in 1864, and after 1869 toured the entire country
with his musicians. He later conducted various established
orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, before organizing
the Chicago Symphony in 1891.
BANDS were popular on the American scene; one of the earliest
known band concerts was given in Boston in 1771 by Josiah
Flagg's (1737-95) 64th Regiment Band. Many 18th-century bands
were attached to military units and were little more than
small fife and drum corps, but they were heard in public concert,
and an enthusiasm for wind music was widespread. By the outbreak
of the Civil War, there were more than 3,000 bands in the
country; their place in concert life after the war was assured
by Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore (1829-92), composer of "When
Johnny Comes Marching Home," and by John Philip SOUSA,
composer of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," "El
Capitan," and "the Washington Post" marches.
Gilmore was bandmaster of the Union forces in Louisiana. At
the close of the war he remained in New Orleans and gave a
concert that featured more than 500 bandsmen and 5,000 voices.
Later, he organized his own band and toured widely. Sousa's
impact was even stronger. He directed the U.S. Marine Band
from 1880 to 1892, then formed his own group, hiring some
of Gilmore's best musicians after the latter's death, and
toured America and Europe to great acclaim.
Before the Civil War, a serious student of music had to study
with European masters, preferably German, since American conservatories
were still in the planning stage. The emergence of native
musicians and the rise of music schools went hand in hand:
the former needed the latter as places to study in their youth
and to teach in their maturity. The United States now has
a system of private and college-supported music schools, but
it has been little more than a century since the teaching
of music was first organized. The first conservatory of music
was at OBERLIN COLLEGE (1865), followed by the NEW ENGLAND
CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC in Boston two years later. Schools were
opened in Cincinnati and Chicago in that same year, and the
first professor of music at Harvard was appointed in 1875.
The country today has hardly an educational institution without
a program of music study.
Nevertheless, during the 19th century, music schools and conservatories
in the United States served more as preparatory institutions
than as finishing ones. Whenever possible, hopeful performers
and composers went to Europe to study with the masters at
the famous conservatories of Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich.
John Knowles PAINE prepared himself in that traditional manner.
Arthur Foote (1853-1937), one of the few who studied only
in the United States, was Paine's student at Harvard. He,
George Chadwick (1854-1931), and Horatio Parker (1863-1919),
the so-called Boston Group, taught many composers and teachers
of the next generation, including Daniel Gregory Mason, Charles
IVES, and Douglas MOORE.
A contemporary of the Boston Group, Edward MACDOWELL went
directly to the conservatories of France and Germany after
private instruction in New York. His work marked one of two
main streams in future American composition--imitation of
the European practice in the larger forms. The other, the
development of an American idiom employing Negro tunes and
rhythms, was developed by his pupil, Henry F. Gilbert (1869-1928).
THE 20TH CENTURY
The dependence on German training continued unabated until
World War I, during and after which fascination with the German
models for music diminished sharply. The postwar center for
music study was Paris, but those who remained at home found
the American schools prepared to teach them at a high level
of competence. Seeking a distinctive American idiom, a number
of composers turned to folk sources and the country's unique
musical utterance, JAZZ.
Rooted in the RAGTIME of Scott JOPLIN's generation and developing
through the addition of the BLUES style, jazz emerged at the
close of World War I, spreading northward from the brothels
of New Orleans to achieve respectability and wide acceptance
in night clubs and cafes. A host of specialized jazz artists,
highly skilled in improvisation, developed, and jazz influenced
European composers as well as Americans. Jazzmen of the stature
of Louis "Satchmo" ARMSTRONG and Edward "Duke"
ELLINGTON were world figures. George GERSHWIN brought the
jazz idiom to the attention of the concert world with his
Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928). His
opera Porgy and Bess (1935) combines the Broadway musical
and serious art.
The most significant American composer of the early 20th century
is Charles IVES, a businessman and part-time composer whose
work was almost unknown until long after he had given up composing.
Ives was an early experimenter with DISSONANCE, polytonality,
asymmetrical rhythms, and other advanced techniques; his quotations
of traditional American hymns, folk tunes, patriotic songs,
and ragtime were often set in this experimental context.
Some 20th-century American composers set out along unique
paths. Others were deeply indebted to the wave of Europeans
who came to the United States during the 1930s, among them
Arnold SCHOENBERG and Igor STRAVINSKY. Thus, contemporary
American music is characterized by its use of a wide variety
of forms and sounds. Composers who have sought a musical Americanism,
or who, like Ives, have merged American idioms with experimental
sounds, include Walter PISTON, Virgil THOMSON, Roger SESSIONS,
Roy HARRIS, Aaron COPLAND, Elliott CARTER, Samuel BARBER,
and William SCHUMAN, among the older generation of 20th-century
composers. The list of important experimental composers must
include Carl RUGGLES, Edgar VARESE, John J. Becker, Henry
COWELL, John CAGE, Milton BABBITT, George Crumb, and Charles
WUORINEN.
Others particularly involved in the making of ELECTRONIC MUSIC
include John Harbison, Jacob Druckman, Otto Luening, Gordon
Mumma, Morton Subotnick, and Vladimir Ussachevsky.
In 1948 the city of Louisville, Ky., founded the Louisville
Orchestra Commissioning Project, providing money for the commissioning
of new works by contemporary American composers, to be premiered
at concerts given by the Louisville Orchestra. Over a period
of 12 years the project commissioned some 120 orchestral works
as well as several operas, both from established composers
and from younger artists such as Ned ROREM and Lukas FOSS.
It proved to be a generative force in the field of American
music.
Another important funding source has been the National Endowment
for the Arts, which, since its inception in 1965, has provided
grants of assistance to music groups of all kinds. As a result,
many small professional groups--chamber orchestras, for example--have
been formed at universities or under the sponsorship of musical
organizations or municipalities. These new groups have helped
advance the role of contemporary American music for American
audiences; such composers as Gunther SCHULLER, John Corigliano,
Andrew Imbrie, Leon Kirchner, and George Rochberg have benefited
from their commissions and their performances of new works.
The field of opera once belonged exclusively to the Europeans;
successful American opera seemed to be confined to Gershwin's
Porgy and Bess (which was not ranked as a true opera until
the 1980s), the left-protest operas of Mark BLITZSTEIN, and,
more recently, Gian Carlo MENOTTI's popular, Italianate works.
More recent decades, however, have witnessed a gratifying
growth in successful operatic works by Americans, as well
as the establishment of new opera companies and small opera
groups. Numbered among American opera composers today are
Dominick ARGENTO, Mario DAVIDOVSKY, Norman DELLO JOIO, and
Douglas Stuart MOORE. The group of notable opera composers
who are women includes Libby Larsen, Joan Tower, Vivan Fine,
and Pulitzer Prize winner Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. All of them,
as well as John Adams and Philip GLASS, work equally successfully
in opera and other forms.
Of all forms of contemporary American music, musical comedy
has proven the most successful. Beginning with Victor HERBERT
and George M. COHAN, the musical theater has nurtured a host
of famous names: Jerome KERN, Cole PORTER, Irving BERLIN,
George Gershwin, Richard RODGERS, Alan Jay LERNER, Stephen
SONDHEIM, and Leonard BERNSTEIN, who is equally famous as
a conductor and a composer of "serious" music.
Even as American orchestras, opera companies, and other musical
organizations flourish, the enthusiasm of U.S. audiences for
American music remains lukewarm, at best. American listeners,
by and large, prefer the European "classics." The
few American composers who have succeeded with American listeners--Ives,
Gershwin, Thomson, Copland--have largely drawn on popular
traditions.
Thus, in the United States, only popular music can support
itself by means of the box office. Since the advent of ROCK
MUSIC, American popular music has become a major industry,
capable of employing thousands of talented young musicians,
and exercising a significant musical influence around the
world. The easy accessibility of recordings, radio, and television
has made music a constant companion in American life and has
exposed listeners to musical styles that have been drawn from
around the world and used in music of every variety. This
wide-ranging eclecticism--this willingness to incorporate
the musical languages of cultures as diverse as African Zulu
or Irish Gaelic, or to explore obscure American idioms of
the past--energizes and renews popular music.
A group of composers, among whom Philip Glass, Steve REICH,
and John Adams are the most widely known, have discovered
attractive new languages for "serious" music. Their
work may awaken American enthusiasm for contemporary composition.
 |
 |
|
- 
