II
One of the rocks upon which the high character of modern American music is founded is the art-activity of Edgar Stillman-Kelley (b. April 14, 1857). While he has not given forth his compositions in rapid succession or in great quantity, he has, nevertheless, struck a series of telling blows for the honor and dignity of creative musical art in America. Especially is this true in view of the fact that he has formulated, maintained and promulgated definite ideals of music throughout a period which has been characterized mainly, in this respect, by confusion and groping, and, too frequently, even by grovelling. In a post-Wagnerian period in which vacillation, obscurity, and disorder have reigned throughout a large part of the musical world, he has steadily advanced the standard of lucidity, order, and faith. Lofty in imagination, of a high sense of beauty, and at the same time exceptional in scholarship and breadth of intellectual vision, he combines qualities which must necessarily single him out as a leader of importance in the musical movement to which America has given birth. The same qualities have also fitted him to exercise a beneficent influence, in certain directions, upon more recent and newly appearing phases of native musical evolution. It has been Stillman-Kelley's fate that both his name and his influence have outdistanced the general knowledge of his works. Two circumstances may be held accountable for this: the fact that he has given out no quantity of works in small forms through which his music might become accessible to music-lovers everywhere through the universal medium of the piano, and the further fact that it is particularly in just such forms as Stillman-Kelley has produced that, as a nation, we are slow in giving our own composers a wide hearing. The American symphony, on American programs, must wait, first, and perhaps rightfully, upon the classics, and, second, and often with bitter wrong, upon the sensational European novelties of the hour.
So independent and individual a thinker is Stillman-Kelley, so sui generis his work, that it can be explained by no theory of particular or individual influences, but only by a knowledge of the composer's broad survey of the modern field, with emphasis, to be sure, upon the greatest in Germanic tradition. The fundamentals of that tradition one feels the composer to have grasped, but of the principles thus deeply assimilated he makes his own use. In short, he follows principles, and not men, and for this reason the Wagnerian 'passage,' the Tschaikowskian phrase, which drip so easily from the pen of many latter-day composers, are never to be encountered in Stillman-Kelley's music. Into this technique, acquired through close observation and analysis of the works of the masters, the composer imports his own spirit; he has his own story to tell and is very certain of the manner in which he wishes to tell it. The superficial criticism of the day, which looks for raw and sensational departures from the pre-Debussyian musical scheme, will find Stillman-Kelley conservative, at moments even downright Teutonic; but the gulf which separates him, in spirit and message, from both his precursors and contemporaries, European and American, must be plain to every observant person. In this rapid age people are, however, not apt to be closely observant, and it appears that there will still be a considerable interval before Stillman-Kelley's true artistic and intellectual stature will be recognized.
To grasp the nature of the high distinction which must be accorded him, it must be understood that Stillman-Kelley's formative period was that very epoch of the Wagnerian cataclysm which blasted the individuality of composers as the cyclone devastates the forest. So surcharged with the dominating personality of Wagner was this epoch that it seemed no composer sympathetic to that personality could breathe the air of its period and retain his musical individuality. Futile blotches of misunderstood Wagnerian harmony took the place of compositions. This was the tide that Stillman-Kelley stemmed, and his position takes on the aspect of solitary grandeur when it is perceived that he is the only composer in the contemporary American ranks, receptive to the changing order, who can be said to have come through wholly unscathed. While guided primarily by a sense of the beautiful, it was through sheer force of mentality, and standing alone, that the composer achieved this feat and preserved for his nation a straight path for the classical tradition and ideal without relinquishing that freedom of mind which alone can secure the growth of the individual through the apprehension and application of contemporary thought.
The thought can almost be ventured that Stillman-Kelley was the first composer to use the post-Wagnerian harmonic vocabulary without the result sounding like Wagner. If a heroic instinct for thematic development in the face of the harmonic orgies of the time contributed to this achievement, it was secondary to a contribution of even greater distinction. This more original contribution may be termed the application of a geometrical poetic sense to the new harmony. Of the tyrant that enslaved the composers of the time Stillman-Kelley promptly made himself the master. Out of the new material he generated for his use harmonic motives, symmetrical blocks of harmony, bearing a particular relation to his thematic material, and, by the application of these well-defined and well-rounded harmonic motives to his formal structure, he attained, at a stroke, the employment of the new medium, the preservation of clarity and order, and thereto a new musical personality. He did not recede to an archaic classical purism and offer the familiar excuse of those who found in Wagner the ruination of pure music. He advanced bravely on to the dangerous ground of the new territory and made it his own without sacrificing the fundamental classical character of his ideals and without losing his wits.
Both in spirit and technique Stillman-Kelley's artistic personality may be seen in microcosmic scope, as it were, in his highly individual song, 'Israfel' to the poem of Edgar Allan Poe. Here are the serene beauty, the highly imaginative harmonic tinting, the touch of the fantastic, the formal amplitude and symmetry, the predominance of phantasy over passion, which characterize all of the composer's work. The companion song, 'Eldorado,' on Poe's poem of that name, is equally typical of the composer's genius, though strongly contrasted with 'Israfel' in subject.
Stillman-Kelley first became known through his intensely characteristic and 'atmospheric' music for 'Macbeth,' dating from early days in San Francisco. This he has in later years revised and cast in the form of an orchestral suite, composing for the play a wholly new overture of momentous proportions. This is a massive and sombre work, dealing with the conflict of conscience and evil ambition, its murky content being relieved only by the introduction of a theme of the joys of Gaelic royalty, which later on assumes a grim aspect, being stated in conjunction with the theme of ambition.
The 'Aladdin' suite has perhaps been less infrequently heard than Stillman-Kelley's other orchestral works. In this work the composer availed himself of certain Chinese themes, of which he made a characteristically thorough study while in San Francisco (and which resulted also in his widely known song 'The Lady Picking Mulberries'). This suite is in the composer's most genial vein and is a tour de force of piquant orchestration. Its movements depict 'The Wedding of Aladdin and the Princess,' 'A Serenade in the Royal Pear Garden,' 'Flight of the Genie with the Palace,' and 'The Return and Feast of the Lanterns.'
Stillman-Kelley's greatest recent offering is his 'New England' symphony, in B minor, produced by the Litchfield County Choral Union, at Norfolk, Conn., June 3, 1913. In it the composer has sought to embody 'something of the experiences, ambitions, and aspirations of our Puritan ancestors.' It was greeted as a work of large importance, needing further hearing for its full appreciation. The composer has completed sketches of a 'Gulliver' symphony and an 'Alice in Wonderland' suite, the subjects of both of which attest his love of the fantastic and call attention to his equal devotion to the element of humor. There is an orchestral score of 'Israfel.'
In chamber music form he has produced a quintet for strings and piano which has had much success on both sides of the Atlantic, and a less well-known string quartet in variation form. There are also a few early songs and piano compositions. Mention should be made of the composer's very successful and famous music for the dramatic presentation of 'Ben Hur,' and the exquisite 'Song of Iras' taken from it.
Born in Wisconsin, Mr. Stillman-Kelley has lived successively in Stuttgart, San Francisco, New York, New Haven (where he occupied the chair of music at Yale University during a year's absence of Horatio Parker), and Berlin. He now (1914) holds a 'composer's fellowship' at Western College, Oxford, Ohio, giving lectures there and at the Cincinnati conservatory. His chief teacher in theory was Seifriz, in Stuttgart.