V
America's contribution to church music has been large and varied. As chamber music seems to serve as the practice field for German composers, so does church music apparently occupy the less aspiring or intense moments of most of our writers. Composers of all classes and leanings have offered their share to the constantly increasing list of anthems and services to be found in the catalogues of our publishers and there seems to be, moreover, a legion whose entire efforts are in this field. As a whole this music may be classified like the music of other departments: a comparatively small percentage of it is good, much is mediocre, while the vast balance is worthless. The meritorious section of this work subdivides itself into several kinds of excellence. We have among our church musicians a certain few who write the sober and so-called ecclesiastical style which the canons of the English schools have laid down as being the fitting adjunct of the church's service, while, again, particularly in America, a large amount of church music is couched in an idiom somewhat more secular in tone, in which a more popular melodic treatment lends so-called 'human interest' to the work. To the more ascetic this form of writing is the bane of church music. Gounod is perhaps the instigator of this practice of importing into the church the profane sensuousness of a more worldly art. Despite a strong note of reactionary protest, he has had many imitators both in England and America, and the 'operatic' anthem has become a standard form. Of these two classes of church music, namely, the essentially sacred and that more secularly tinged, it is the latter that is abused in American church music. Whereas in England the great respect for tradition keeps most of her church composers within the narrow paths of ecclesiastical austerity—where, it must be said, they often become contrapuntally arid or musty—the American anthem writer too often sins on the other side and has a strong tendency to become sentimentally maudlin in accepting as a working rule Voltaire's keen definition of church music as 'the pursuit of sensuous pleasure in the duties of a cult established to combat such a pursuit.'
Many of the composers whose works have been the subject of the foregoing pages have written for the church, and in some cases their church music represents an important phase of their work. We have already spoken of Mr. Buck's importance as a church composer; other earlier composers whose church music was important are G. W. Marston, who wrote many anthems and sacred songs; W. W. Gilchrist, whose list of anthems and church cantatas is a long one; C. C. Converse, who, besides essaying a vast deal of serious music in a larger way, found his best success in several well-known hymns. Richard Henry Warren, Remington R. Fairlamb, and Smith N. Penfield are also names that have figured in the recent decades of ecclesiastical composition.
Horatio Parker, whose works we have already reviewed, is at present the most representative church composer in America. Parker has devoted some of his best inspirations to the church and has written many fine anthems and services, while his stirring hymn-tunes, with their modern harmonies, mark a real stage of evolution in that restricted field. Foote and Chadwick have both done much in church music; there is, however, a neutral quality about their anthems and they possess neither the distinctive qualities of the purely ecclesiastical style nor that of the popular anthem. Arthur Whiting has written comparatively little church music but the few things that he has done are among the best of all American church music. There is a feeling of great strength and solidity in Mr. Whiting's vocal writing and his style is always pure. The other church composers who generally follow the more severe style are mostly members of America's English colony of organists, true to the tradition of their training: Will C. Macfarlane, Clement R. Gale, T. Tertius Noble, are to be named as some of the best known of these writers.
It is most fortunate that the more popular style of anthem has one exponent who brings to it not only its essential elements of popularity, but who is able to add as well those sterling qualities of intrinsic musical worth which place his anthems in a unique class. This writer is Harry Rowe Shelley. Shelley was born in 1858. His first studies were under Dudley Buck and he later studied with Dvořák in Europe. His list of about fifty anthems are deservedly the most popular of native works used in American churches to-day, and his sacred songs are also a most serviceable addition to the church répertoire. It must be added that, although Mr. Shelley has found his truest mission in church music, he has had larger ambitions which he has not entirely failed in fulfilling, and the list of his works includes an opera, 'Leila,' a symphonic poem, 'The Crusaders,' a dramatic overture, Francesca da Rimini, an oratorio, 'The Inheritance Divine,' a suite for orchestra, a fantasia for piano and orchestra, piano pieces and songs.
Among those whose work follows lines similar to that of Shelley is P. J. Schnecker, whose numerous anthems possess somewhat the physiognomy of Shelley's works, but are without their genuine musical qualities. John Hyatt Brewer has written church music of considerable distinction as well as several cantatas both sacred and secular. Brewer was a pupil of Buck and was born in 1856. Sumner Salter, Gerrit Smith, Louis R. Dressler, Frank N. Shepherd, Fred Schelling, are other names familiar to the choir loft. Important among church compositions are the works of Eduardo Marzo. Mr. Marzo's work is mostly for the Catholic service and, thus restricted in its use, it has not come to the general notice which it would otherwise have reached.
In concluding, we add a few names of those who, among the younger men, are producing church music of a freshness and vigor which promises well for a renaissance of sacred music that shall happily combine the dignity of the older schools with the more vital utterance of a contemporaneous expression. Frank E. Ward, whose secular compositions find mention in another chapter of this volume, has written many good anthems and two sacred cantatas. Philip James is the author of some strikingly good church music, while Mark Andrews, Clifford Demarest, Caryl Florio, and W. Berwald are well-known and esteemed names to those who follow the lists of standard church music.
B. L.
FOOTNOTES:
[86] 'Contemporary American Composers,' 1900.
[87] Op. cit.
[88] Vance Thompson: 'The Life of Ethelbert Nevin,' Boston, 1914.
CHAPTER XIII
ROMANTICISTS AND NEO-CLASSICISTS
Influences and conditions of the period—Edward MacDowell—Edgar Stillman Kelley—Arne Oldberg; Henry Hadley; F. S. Converse—E. R. Kroeger; Rubin Goldmark; Brockway; H. N. Bartlett; R. G. Cole—Daniel Gregory Mason; David Stanley Smith; Edward Burlingame Hill—Philip G. Clapp; John Beach; Arthur Bergh; Joseph Henius; F. E. Ward; Carl Busch; Walter Damrosch—The San Francisco Group; Miscellany—Women Composers.
Between the founders of musical composition in America, who felt chiefly the influence of that musical world of which Beethoven was the great central figure, and those who have looked to aboriginal and other native sources for inspiration on the one hand, or European ultra-modern tendencies on the other, there exists a large and important group of American composers whose artistic origin is to be associated with the so-called 'romantic' school, of which Schumann is the generally accepted protagonist. Proudly as the dramatic phase of the romantic movement shone forth at the same time in the genius of Richard Wagner, it was left with the non-dramatic wing of the romantic school to establish the ideals which should dominate and direct the romantic movement which was subsequently to arise in America. There are a number of reasons why this should have been the case, as there are also reasons to believe that the full influence of Wagner's ideas has not yet been felt in America. In the first place, it was during the epoch of the romantic movement that the German musician and music teacher first began to look to the new world as a field for the broad extension of his labors. Every city and town of America came to have its German music teachers; they were accepted everywhere as representatives of the highest musical civilization of the world, and it is, in fact, to this early German musical emigration that the substantial foundations of our American musical education are due. As qualifying factors, however, in the influence which he was to exert upon the future, there were two facts in general which characterized him: his profession, which was usually that of pianist and piano teacher, and his anathematization of Wagner. While Beethoven was his musical god, in his capacity of pianist he also spread the influence of that side of the romantic movement which perpetuated, and developed, the tradition of piano music. Thus Schumann and Chopin, and their contemporaries, came to a measurable fullness of appreciation in America at a time when Wagner was held to be a mad and dangerous musical anarchist.
Quite aside from this group of circumstances, it was also true that nothing could be more remote from the American civilization of the time than the possibility of any semblance of the realization of Wagner's ideals. Opera was the most fitful and exotic of institutions, and the theatre in general, except for such occasional meteoric apparitions as Edwin Booth, was in a condition of the greatest crudity, as well as being under the ban of a puritanism which, fortunately, in these latter days, is beginning somewhat to relax its tenacity. Because of the unripeness of American life for a creative art of music, the influence of the early German invasion did not produce many composers. It had, however, implanted ideals which were to assume the greatest importance in the future. When the overwhelming Wagnerian flood at last arrived, in the splendid productions of the music-dramas under the direction of Seidl and the Damrosches, it found the ideals of the classical and romantic schools already well implanted; more than that, it found a rapidly increasing group of young composers who had arisen under the influence of those ideals. The result was that these composers, who did not share the prejudices of their Teutonic musical forbears, drank in with avidity the wonderful new harmonies of Wagner, and set about incorporating them, not in music-dramas, but in the sonatas and symphonies arising from the classical tradition, and all manner of free forms to which the romantic school had given birth. The Wagnerian harmonies were accepted, but the forms of the earlier movements were retained, except where the followers of Liszt ventured forth on scantily charted seas of formal emancipation. Similarly other new influences began to be felt, and Tschaikowsky, in a new symphonic emotionalism, and Brahms, in a new flowering of thematic development, gave encouragement in the retaining of earlier forms. The dual product of these various influences was, on the one hand, a romanticism which claimed both harmonic and formal freedom, and a neo-classicism which welcomed the new harmonic world opened up by Wagner, but inclined to cling to the forms of the classical epoch.