II
If, thus early, it may be said that the many musical ideals and influences which have struck root in America have centred and blended in any single composer, that composer is Frederic Ayres. The true eclecticism which constitutes the latest phase of American development, to have value for musical art, must necessarily involve the complete submergence and assimilation of hitherto unreconciled influences in a single new creative personality. Of such a new and authentic American electicism Ayres stands forth so clearly as the protagonist that a claim for him in this rôle will hardly be successfully disputed. This occupation of such a position is, however, a purely spontaneous circumstance, arrived at by obedience to no theory, but only through creative impulse.
Without being unduly extravagant, informal, though logical, as a formalist, Ayres commands his many qualities for the expressive purposes of a spirit eager for the discovery and revelation of perfect beauty. Such a perfection of beauty he by no means always finds; indeed, his earlier experimental excursions not infrequently left the ground rough over which he trod. And even at the present time he is only entering upon a full conscious command of his material. Only a keen sensitiveness to every significant influence, European and American, could have led to the development of so rounded and typical a musical character. Taught, in the first instance, by Stillman-Kelley and Arthur Foote, his broad sympathies led him early to blend the German, French, and American spirit through a devotion to no less striking a group of composers than Bach, Beethoven, Stephen Foster, and César Franck. A constant contact with natural scenes of the greatest grandeur, in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, has undoubtedly exercised a broadening effect upon his conceptions. While he has not employed native aboriginal themes, or even made a special study of them, many of his melodies have a strong Indian cast, which is difficult to explain except on the basis of some psychological aspect of climatic and other environmental influences.
The trio for piano, violin, and 'cello (opus 13) abounds in supreme qualities of freshness and spontaneity. Taken as a whole, it is typical of the manner in which the composer rises, easily and blithely, out of the ancient sea of tradition into the blue of a new and happier musical day. The work was first heard on April 18, 1914, at a concert of the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, and has since had various public performances. The violin sonata (opus 15) is of great beauty and rich in characteristic qualities, and presents an interesting study in formal originality. A piano sonata (opus 16) and a 'cello sonata (opus 17) have been completed. Ayres has written songs of surpassing loveliness and originality. His 'Sea Dirge,' a setting of Shakespeare's 'Full Fathom Five,' from 'The Tempest,' reveals a poignancy of imagination and a perception and apprehension of beauty seldom attained by any composer. Other highly poetic Shakespeare songs are 'Where the Bee Sucks,' 'Come Unto These Yellow Sands,' 'It was a Lover and His Lass.' A richly colored vocal work is 'Sunset Wings' (opus 8), after Rossetti. 'Two Fugues' (opus 9) and 'Fugue Fantasy' (opus 12), for piano, of American suggestiveness, Indian and otherwise, are striking tours de force of originality. The 'Songs of the Seeonee Wolves' (opus 10), from Kipling's 'Jungle Book,' are vivid presentations of the composer's conception of the call of the wild. Ayres was born at Binghamton, N. Y., March 17, 1876, and lives in Colorado Springs, Col.
One of the most keenly individualized of American composers, and one of the most daring and original in the employment of ultra-modern resource, is Arthur Shepherd, formerly of Salt Lake City and at present connected with the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Mass. His work, as a whole, is almost unique in American music in the completeness of its departure from the styles of any individual composers who may earlier have stimulated or influenced him. The dominating factor in his work, almost from the beginning, has been the will to express himself in a certain manner, wholly his own, and on this positive ground extraneous influences have been able to gain but a scant foothold. Of the Brahms and Wagner influences which he acknowledges, the former can be traced only in his earliest pages, and the latter seems nowhere to appear. His harmony would make any other German than a radical Strauss enthusiast shrink with horror, so sweeping and so subversive of the usual order are its departures from the accepted scheme, while, on the other hand, it can be said to be very little suggestive of the characteristic harmonic quality of the modern French school. Especially it eschews the luscious and velvety harmonic surface of Debussy. In both melody and harmony, the saccharine—even the merely sweet—the sensuous and the languorous, Shepherd dethrones with the sedulous intolerance of a Pfitzner and, like that composer, exalts in its place a clear and luminous spiritual beauty. Otherwise he works in lines that cut, in chords that bite and grip, and rises often to great nobility of conception and expression. In his latest works, 'The Nuptials of Attila,' a dramatic overture after George Meredith, and a 'Humoreske' for pianoforte and orchestra, he has fought against the tendency toward over-complexity manifested in his earlier work, and has gained a greater clarity of harmonic texture.
The pianoforte sonata in F minor (opus 4), with which the composer took the National Federation of Musical Clubs' prize in the 1909 competition, is a massive work of great breadth of conception. The second movement shows Shepherd's peculiar power of evoking deeply subjective moods; it presents an almost ghostly quality of the elegiac and has much of nobility. The third movement makes bold use of a cowboy song and has a magnificent original melody of a broad Foster-like quality, but the composer holds 'nationalism' to be merely incidental to a broader artistic function. He rises to an unusual naturalness in this movement, which, like the others, is highly virile. 'The City in the Sea,' a 'poem for orchestra, mixed chorus, and baritone solo,' on Bliss Carman's poem, is a large work of extraordinary modernity and individuality. 'Five Songs' (opus 7) are worthily representative and contain much of beauty. There are also 'Theme and Variations' (opus 1), and 'Mazurka' (opus 2), for pianoforte, and a mixed chorus with baritone solo, 'The Lord Hath Brought again Zion.'
Noble Kreider, through the possession of that more exalted sense of beauty and flashing quality of inspiration which illuminates only the rarer musical souls of any period, takes his place with those in the forefront of American musical advance. In this capacity, however, his place is less that of a militant than that of a standard-bearer of ideals of beauty. He has the further distinction of being the only American composer, of first rank at least, who has found the complete expression of his personality and ideals through the medium of the piano, and who, as an inevitable corollary of this circumstance, has more intimately and sympathetically than any other made the piano speak its own proper language. American composers write seriously, and sometimes admirably, for the piano now and then; Kreider lives and breathes through it. It responds to him sensitively and with its whole soul, as it did to Chopin. It has become identified with his imaginative quality.
Chopin has, indeed, been the strongest influence in the formation of Kreider's musical character, and while, in his earlier work, nothing was more evident than this fact, in his later nothing is more evident than the emergence of his own individuality. So distinct, however, is Kreider's personality that it is unmistakably present even in much of his earliest music. A mystery and sombreness, as of an influence of the North, foreign to Chopin, dominates certain of his moods; and then Kreider is more of a pagan than Chopin was.
The 'Two Legends' (opus 1) have beauty and inspiration, if not a particular distinction of modernity. The 'Ballad' (opus 3) is of heroic and Ossianic cast, restless, like much of Kreider's music, with contained passion—a passion which at times flashes forth in unexpected lightning strokes. A 'Nocturne' (opus 4) is haunting in melody and of an almost Oriental languor. The 'Impromptu' (opus 5) is a darting and upspringing inspiration, with a middle section of great lyrical warmth and beauty. Opus 6 comprises two 'Studies,' both containing a very high quality of beauty with special technical interest. 'Six Preludes' (opus 7) are characteristic, at times Chopinesque, and always fresh and inspirational. The 'Prelude' (opus 8) is a broad and powerful processional of great cumulative dynamic force. 'Three Moods' (opus 9) show the full emergence of the composer's individuality; the second, 'The Valley of White Poppies,' is a rarely perfect and ecstatic inspiration. Opus 10 contains a 'Poem' and a 'Valse Sentimentale.' There is also an unpublished work for 'cello and piano and a very original 'Nocturne.' Kreider's development has been chiefly self-directed. His birthplace and home is Goshen, Indiana.
Benjamin Lambord is a composer whose work reflects in a striking manner the evolutionary upheaval which, in the present generation, has carried the nation from the end of the old epoch to the beginning of the new. There could not well be a closer fidelity to the old German musical spirit and style, especially as pertains to the Lied, than in Lambord's early songs. Even that restricted medium, however, lent itself to all levels of creative impotence or dignity, and if there is a particular distinguishing characteristic in Lambord's work in that style, it is to be found in a peculiar depth of sincerity, an adumbration of personality yet to emerge in individualized expression. This quality will be observed in the first number, Christina Rossetti's 'Remember or Forget,' of the composer's opus 1, which consists of three songs. 'Four Songs,' opus 4, fall under the same dispensation; all indicate a leaning to poetry of high character. A trio for violin, 'cello, and piano (opus 5) from the same period shows good impulse and bold and well-defined themes, but is conventional in harmony and structure generally. An elaborate 'Valse Fantastique' (opus 6) shows a similar energy and boldness of contour. The modern musical ear must search diligently, however, to discover its fantastic element. 'Two Songs' (opus 7), on poems of Heine and Rückert, are deeply felt, and 'Lehn deine Wang' in particular manifests a tendency to enrich the older medium.
With opus 10, 'Two Songs with Orchestra,' however, the composer stands forth in a wholly new light, as an ultra-modern of exceptional powers, and with a subtlety, an imagination and a rich and varied color-sense of which the earlier works can be said to give no appreciable indication. The second of these songs, 'Clytie,' on a poem by André Chénier, is a highly mature expression in the ultra-modern Germanic idiom, technically speaking, though in its musical quality there is much of subtle individuality. The voice part is managed with an appreciation of both delicacy and power, as well as the requirements of artistic diction, and the accompaniment is a web of sensitive modulation and dissonance pregnant with sensuous beauty at every point. The upbuilding of the climax is masterly. The song was presented with much success at a concert of the Modern Music Society in New York in the season of 1913-14, when it was sung by Miss Maggie Teyte. At the same concert, under the composer's direction, was heard a number from his opus 11, 'Verses from Omar,' for chorus and orchestra. Here Lambord adds to his expressional scheme an effective pseudo-Oriental quality, gaining an insistent atmosphere with very simple means. Particularly interesting is the way in which he has varied the manner of employment of his main theme, showing a keen sense of thematic organization. Peculiarly gratifying is the a cappella rendering of the lines beginning 'But ah! that Spring should vanish with the rose' after the powerful climax for chorus and orchestra combined. The composer also has an 'Introduction and Ballet' (opus 8) for orchestra, a work of considerable elaborateness and much rhythmic and melodic variety, one which shows his thorough grasp of orchestral technique. With the nationalistic school Lambord has nothing in common. He is, however, a native New Englander, being born in Portland, Me., in 1879, and his earlier studies in composition were pursued under MacDowell at Columbia University. Later he travelled in France and Germany and studied orchestration with Vidal in Paris.