I
No American composer stands forth with a more sharply defined individuality than Henry F. Gilbert, and none has given himself with greater ardor to the accomplishment of something truly American in musical art. The ultimate stature of an artist finds a certain measure of adumbration in the absorptive and impressionable capacity of his early years. With Gilbert this capacity was exceptionally large and sensitive. As a mere boy in his teens he had an insatiable curiosity concerning every discoverable phase of the world's music, and at that age, while America was still in the throes of the Wagner controversy, he was thoroughly familiar with the music of the entire group of now famous French, Russian, Bohemian, and other composers, whose names at that time were wholly unknown on this side of the water, and comparatively little known at home. At the same time he gained an authoritative knowledge of the folk-songs of the world, and made extensive studies into remote aspects of the world's literature. Gilbert was born in Somerville, Mass., in 1868, and studied for a time with MacDowell, in Boston, but he never had much academic training. Concerning his formative influences, the composer may be allowed to speak for himself, as he has done in the following words:
'It has been my ideal not to allow any composer or school of music to influence me to the point of imitating them. I have striven to express my own individuality regardless whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. I prefer my own hat to a borrowed crown. Of course, I have had many admirations and have absorbed musical nutriment from many sources. I believe that catholicity of education is a thing greatly to be desired.... More than the music of any individual composer; more than the music of any particular school,—the folk-tunes of the world, of all nationalities, races, and peoples, have been to me a never-failing source of delight, wonder, and inspiration. In them I can hear the spirit of all great music. Through them I can feel the very heart-beat of humanity. Simple as these folk-melodies are in structure, they yet speak to me so poignantly, and with such a deep sincerity of expression, as to be (for myself, at least) more pregnant with inspirational suggestion than the music of any one composer.'
American Composers: John Alden Carpenter, Charles Martin Loeffler,
Henry F. Gilbert Campbell-Tipton.
Finishing in his earliest period with the strictly German influence, Gilbert had also done with the exhibition of a predominating modern French influence before his colleagues had awakened to the existence of such a thing. It is, however, significant to note that the 'Negro Episode' for orchestra, and arranged also for piano, dates from earliest days. An orchestral 'Legend' was a companion piece. The modern French influence appears in the richly colored and highly poetic soprano aria, 'Salammbô's Invocation to Tänith,' on Flaubert's text; in the very imaginative songs, 'Orlamonde' (Maeterlinck), and 'Zephyrus' (Longfellow), and in the fanciful tone-poem for piano, 'The Island of the Fay,' after Poe. From this general period came, in strong contrast, the barbaric and famous 'Pirate Song,' as well as the delicate 'Croon of the Dew,' and the 'South American Gypsy Songs.' A strong Celtic influence now asserted itself, based upon the Irish literary revival and a study of ancient bardic and other Celtic folk-songs. The chief results were the 'Lament of Deirdre,' a remarkable song of intensest pathos and mood-heaviness; four very individual songs called 'Celtic Studies'; and the 'Fairy Song,' all on verses of the Irish poets. A fine piece of American savagery from this period, presumably deriving from Whitmanic influences, is the song on Frederick Manley's poem, 'Fish Wharf Rhapsody.' These various phases finally yielded to a strong impulse toward a bold expression of Americanism, and Gilbert composed the 'Comedy Overture on Negro Themes,' a vigorous and jubilant work which has been widely heard and has awakened much interest in the composer. A less important 'Humoresque on Negro Minstrel Tunes,' for orchestra, followed, and a massive orchestral 'Negro Rhapsody,' first produced at the 'Norfolk Festival' under the composer's direction in 1913. 'The Dance in the Place Congo,' for orchestra, after a vivid word-painting by George W. Cable, is the composer's most extensive work. There are also for orchestra 'American Dances in Ragtime Rhythm,' and, in another vein, an impressive 'Symphonic Prologue' to J. M. Synge's 'Riders to the Sea,' conducted by the composer at the MacDowell festival at Peterboro, N. H., in 1914. There is a song on Whitman's 'Give me the splendid silent sun,' a chorus with orchestra, 'To Thee, America,' five 'Indian Scenes' for piano, and other works. Often rough in technique, though greatly resourceful, and rich in orchestral imagination, it is to the spirit of the time and nation that Gilbert makes his contribution and his appeal. He is the avowed enemy of tradition and fashion, whether in art, dress, or speech, and a fighter for freedom and individuality in music.
A. F.
Arthur Farwell is a composer who may well be called representatively American, inasmuch as his work contains elements which exemplify the spirit and aims of our native art. Mr. Farwell is perhaps most widely known for his studies in Indian music and for such of his compositions as are built from this material. He has realized, however, that presenting as it does only one phase, and that a more or less exotic one, Indian music in no way can stand as an accepted basis of our national musical art. Mr. Farwell has kept well abreast of the tide of modern music and has cultivated a style in which its idioms are employed with considerable originality and imbued with the rare poetic feeling that is his. It is with this broadness of view also that Mr. Farwell conducted the Wa-Wan Press, established by him in 1901. This institution had as one of its principal missions the promulgation of the Indian and other folk elements in American composition and the exploitation of such works as employed this element. Its pages were, nevertheless, open to all native composers, irrespective of 'school,' who had something to say, and its founder has to his great credit the record of having lent early recognition to a number of the younger and progressive American composers.
Farwell's earlier compositions reveal the usual sway of varied influences with a tendency to the original harmonic treatment that has remained the distinctive feature of his late work. He may be said to have first 'found himself' in an overture, 'Cornell' (op. 9), written while he was a musical lecturer at Cornell University. Combining Indian themes and college songs in a sort of American academic overture, the vigor of style and effectiveness of scoring has gained for this work a permanent place in the orchestral répertoire. Following this Mr. Farwell devoted himself for some time to the study of and experiments in Indian music, and thus follow in his list of works several of his best-known compositions; the book of 'American Indian Melodies,' for piano; 'Dawn'; 'Ichibuzzh'; and 'The Domain of the Hurakan.' The orchestral version of the last-named work is a score of great impressiveness and of brilliant color. It has had several conspicuous performances which have done much to win recognition for his larger gifts.
The 'Symbolistic Studies,' comprising opera 16, 17, 18, and 24, are tone-poems with a generic title. The composer describes them as being 'program music, the program of which is merely suggested,' an attempt, in other words, to create a form that shall offer the composer the means of unrestricted expression, while its musical coherence shall preserve an intrinsic worth and general appeal as absolute music. In the 'Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony' (opus 21) and the 'Navajo War Dance' (opus 29) Mr. Farwell has made further interesting and effective treatment of the Indian color. The set of pieces comprised under the former title contains some very atmospheric pages in which the strange monotony that marks the Indian song is obtained by novel uses of diatonic material at once bold and beautiful. The barbaric crudity is still further implied in the 'Navajo War Dance,' where Farwell has renounced almost all defined harmony, preserving only the vigorous rhythm of the dance in the bold intervals of the Indian melody.
Mr. Farwell was one of the first composers to write music for the so-called community pageants. In the 'Pageant of Meriden' and the 'Pageant of Darien' he has obtained a remarkable success by the masterly skill with which he has welded the diffusive elements of pictorial description, folk-song suggestion, dances and choruses, into a coherent and artistic whole. Equally successful along similar lines was Farwell's music for Louis N. Parker's play, 'Joseph and His Brethren,' and Sheldon's 'Garden of Paradise.'
In his vocal compositions Farwell shows some of his best inspirations. Among the larger of these works is a tone-poem for voice and orchestra, opus 34 (the words from Sterling's 'Duandon'), a score of rich color and poetic description in which the voice has little of what has heretofore been known as melody, but performs a more modern function of sounding the salient notes of harmonies that are woven in an ultra-modern profusion of color. The same is true of several other large songs, such as 'A Ruined Garden' (opus 14), 'Drake's Drum' (opus 22), and 'The Farewell' (opus 33). In the second section of 'A Ruined Garden,' however, there is a clearer line of melody over a harmonic scheme of haunting loveliness. This song is one of the more popular ones of Mr. Farwell's list, having been sung frequently by Florence Hinkle and others of note. There is an orchestral version of the accompaniment which enhances its rich color effects. In his two most recent songs, 'Bridal Song' and 'Daughter of Ocean' (opus 43), the composer has applied in a more modern and highly colored scheme some of the experiments with secondary seventh chords that lend such interest to his later Indian studies.
In some of his shorter songs Farwell has again made some valuable contributions to the nationalistic development. Besides the interesting cowboy song, 'The Lone Prairie,' already mentioned (see Chap. VII), there is a remarkable utilization of the negro element in 'Moanin' Dove,' one of the 'negro spiritual' harmonizations beautiful in its atmosphere of crooning sadness. In concerted vocal music Farwell has made a setting of Whitman's 'Captain, My Captain' for chorus and orchestra (opus 34), a 'Hymn to Liberty,' sung at a celebration in the New York city hall (1910); some male and mixed choruses, and part-songs for children.
B. L.
Harvey Worthington Loomis occupies not merely a unique place in American music, but one which is elusively so, and difficult of both determination and exposition. To place the delicate and fragile spirit of a Watteau or a Grétry in the midst of the hurly-burly of American life would seem a sorry anachronism, as well as anatopism, on the part of the Providence which rules over the destinies of art. Yet it is some such position that Loomis occupies, a fact which tends to explain why he has not received the attention at the hands of his countrymen that the rare originality, charm, and finish of his work merit. The court of Louis XVI would have opened its palaces and gardens to him, but the America of the twentieth century with difficulty finds standing room for him in the vestibule. Bringing with him such a nautilus-like spirit as animated the artists of an earlier France, he matured it in an America which as yet knew scarcely anything of any musical system or spirit beyond the German. It is, therefore, a wholly amazing phenomenon of art that, out of materials thus solid, Loomis contrived to fashion his aerial and delicately tinted fairy edifices of tone, of a character totally different from those of Teutons of the subtler sort, and foreshadowing the achievements of the later Frenchmen with a newly devised medium at their command. It is evidence of the purest kind of the yielding of matter to spirit.
Consider that exquisite masterpiece, 'In the Moon Shower'—a very epitome in miniature of Loomis' genius—a setting of Verlaine's L'heure exquise for singing voice, speaking voice, piano, and violin. It seems not to contain a harmony or a progression with which we have not long been made familiar by our Germanic system, and yet how complete the departure which it makes from the spirit of German tradition, and how utterly it dissolves the medium which it draws upon to re-materialize it as the shadowy reflection of a Verlaine dream. It is not that Loomis has not become familiar with, and in a measure assimilated, the later French idiom, but that, without the knowledge and employment of it, he earlier spontaneously breathed forth the quality of spirit which we now recognize in a Debussy or a Ravel. Loomis has also been exceedingly hospitable to native aboriginal themes and has treated them in the spirit of a delicate and refined impressionism. His technique is invariably of the nicest, with minute attention to every detail.
Loomis has produced much. There is a grand opera, 'The Traitor Mandolin'; two comic operas; incidental music of most aristocratic artistry to the plays 'The Tragedy of Death,' by René Peter, and 'The Coming of the Prince,' by William Sharp, and music of similarly refined mood to a number of pantomimes—a favorite form of Loomis—'The Enchanted Fountain,' 'Put to the Test,' 'In Old New Amsterdam,' 'Love and Witchcraft,' and 'Black and White.' There are many piano compositions of charm, sprightliness, humor, and impressionistic interest, including two books of 'Lyrics of the Red Man'; and many songs brimming with poetry and character, among them 'In the Foggy Dew,' 'Love Comes, Love Goes,' 'Hark, Hark, the Lark' (a delightful conception inviting no comparison with Schubert), and songs of negro character, such as the exquisite 'Hour of the Whippoorwill.' Loomis has written choruses and part-songs, and a stupendous quantity of excellent children's songs for schools. The composer was born in Brooklyn, N. Y., in 1865 and makes his home in New York. He started upon his musical career in the National Conservatory, where he was awarded a free scholarship by Dr. Dvořák.