I
American musical composition lends itself to several kinds of classification, according to the point from which it is viewed. Historically, or, more properly speaking, chronologically, considered, the entire output of American composers divides itself rather naturally into two parts. The first comprises the works of those writers with whom this chapter deals, and who have adopted the older models of the classic and romantic schools. In the second group we find those writers of a later generation who employ post-Wagner idioms. Some of these have stopped at the Wagner boundaries, while others, naturally the younger men, have pressed on and are following in the steps of the ultra-modern German or French composers. In this classification, as in all artistic comparisons, there can be drawn no sharp line of demarcation. We find an occasional flash of modernity in a supposedly confirmed classicist, while, on the other hand, among the more advanced and iconoclastic of our modern writers we often find a remaining trace of a severer classicism.
Outside of these two principal groups we see to-day a constantly increasing number of composers who are making serious attempts to weld from the several folk-song elements of this continent a truly national music. It was Antonin Dvořák who first counselled the American composer to thus employ the methods from which alone could be formed a distinctive school. Dvořák himself, in setting the example, only proved how deep-rooted are the traditions and feelings of the racial vein, and placed our negro themes into a setting unmistakably Slavic. It must be confessed that a similar result has been obtained by most of our native composers and the surroundings in which they have set these various folk-song elements only serve to emphasize the decided and almost inevitable leanings of these composers toward one or another of the prevailing European schools.
From an æsthetic standpoint our native art exhibits the varied manifestations common to the art of all times, traits as varied as those of human character itself. Broadly speaking, there are always the large and the small, which in poetic forms we can conveniently label as epic and lyric. Of the former there is no prodigality of output by any age or people. There is always much of the spurious epic, and it must be confessed that America, with its lack of national consciousness and art discipline or tradition, together with its over-weening ambition, has already produced its share of this form of insincere art. On the contrary, the number of genuine lyrical writers which America can boast is surprisingly large, and those names which stand out conspicuously in the annals of American art may, almost without exception, be called lyricists.
Early American Composers: Lowell Mason, William H. Fry, Louis M. Gottschalk, Stephen Emery.
The first creative activities in American music were those of the psalm-tune writers in New England, William Billings, Oliver Holden, Lowell Mason, and others which have been spoken of in our chapter on the Beginnings of Musical Culture (pp. 45 ff.). Historically these early hymns are interesting, and, had not European culture so completely influenced the later course of American composition, it is not unlikely that they might have served in some measure as a contributory vein to our native art. They remain, however, but the reflection of the colorless puritanism which was their source, a naïve expression which can hardly be placed in the category of art and hence as American compositions do not here claim our further notice.
While in the early years of New England there was developing a music which, in a way, sprang from the people—a music which really expressed a vital phase of the common life—there were elsewhere springing up the first growths of a more sophisticated art. This art, borrowed from European culture, has served as the real foundation of all that is esoteric in American music to-day, but at the same time its presence has fostered those influences which constitute the barrier to a vital national expression. It is significant that these first appearances of a more ambitious art were in a department where there could be no nourishment from native roots of tradition, taste, or even understanding—that of opera.
In spite of these circumstances, so discouraging to the healthy growth of a natural art-expression, it must be related that the operas of William H. Fry (born in Philadelphia, 1813; died 1864) were serious in their aim and in their workmanship showed the hand of a surprisingly skilled artist and one well versed in the older dramatic formulas. The claim that Fry has to the title given him by certain writers as 'the first American composer' is therefore considerable. Fry's training was entirely European. He was for some time resident in Paris, where, we are told, he was a friend of Berlioz. Of Fry's several operas 'Leonora' (produced in 1845) seems to have been the most successful. The book is after Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris, and, while the score represents merely (as do many more modern American operatic scores) a strange mingling echo of the several European models of the day, there are a vitality and a grasp of form which make the achievement in a measure phenomenal.
Associated with Fry in his musical life was another pioneer of the opera field, George F. Bristow (born in 1825; died in 1898), whose scores, however, have less of dramatic freedom than have those of Fry, being more strongly marked with the influences of German classicism. Bristow's works include an opera, 'Rip Van Winkle,' an unfinished opera, 'Columbus,' the oratorios 'Praise to God' and 'Daniel,' five symphonies, two overtures, string quartets, and many shorter works.
Another name that finds place in the early annals of American music is that of Stephen Emery (born 1841; died 1891), counted a composer in his day but now known to us chiefly as one of America's first theoreticians and the teacher of many whose names are now well known.
Larger is the place filled by the name of Gottschalk. Louis Moreau Gottschalk may be claimed as an American, having been born at New Orleans in 1829, but his decidedly Creole origin and French education seem to remove him from the line of relationship with those Anglo-Saxon traditions which we are apt to consider as constituting the purely American.
Gottschalk enjoyed during his life equal fame as pianist and composer. His claim to the former was probably just; Berlioz himself spoke with enthusiasm of his playing and of our own artists we have the testimony of many, such as William Mason, Carl Bergmann, and Richard Hoffman, as to the genuine enjoyment which they obtained in hearing the concerts of Gottschalk. But how evanescent has been the fame of his compositions, existing only in the memory of comparatively few; as entities they are already silent pages of notes. All that is heard of his music to-day is an occasional faint tinkle of that surviving strain of sentimentality which was destined to such continued popularity in the polite répertoire, 'The Last Hope.' Gottschalk wrote two operas and several orchestral scores and many songs, but his piano compositions comprise the bulk of his works. While there are among these compositions many pages of beauty not unlike that of Chopin, and in the dance compositions on negro-creole and Spanish themes a certain vigor and distinction, the majority of them represent the merest vehicles of virtuosity written to tickle the ears of a public which had been brought up on the banalities played by the sensational pianists that visited America in those days. Over-sentimental, and at times vulgar, as the art of Gottschalk now appears to us, his place in American music is an important one and we cannot but feel that amid environments more sustaining to a higher ideal of art such a genuinely musical temperament as was his would have produced an art less ephemeral.