Arthur Farwell, president of the American Music Society, thinks differently. He says: "One must make a very broad study of the works of eighty or one hundred American composers before he will begin to perceive the indisputable American qualities arising in our music. The endeavor not to repeat, parrot-like, the formulæ of the Old World has driven many American composers to seek out new inventions and has led to a freshness, in a considerable mass of American work, as in MacDowell's, which may be said to be directly a product of American conditions."
Music is seldom a thing of nationality or locality. Early opera in Germany was Italian and the French grand opera school was founded by a Florentine. The style of music that appeals most keenly to the people of a country or community influences largely the method and manner of its native composers. Authors, musical and literary, write more often to fill a demand, subjectively felt perhaps, than to create one or to establish a form representative of their nation or section, though occasionally, when the author is a genius and fearlessly gives expression to his own divinity, regardless of precedent, he finds himself responsible for a new order, though in that case the individuality of the author is the leaven that leaveneth the lump, and not the locality.
We are only beginning, as a nation, to recognize music as an essential to general culture. A new country must become familiar with and learn to appreciate what has already been done along artistic lines before it is capable of evolving its own type in any permanent, living fashion. We have no people's music. "Give me, oh give me, the man who sings at his work," said Carlyle, and I often think when I hear an American laborer singing at his task that if dear old Carlyle were only alive and I could give him the unmelodious disturber of the public peace, the pleasure would be all mine. American music, the music of the people, is built upon the Puritan hymn tunes and savors of the persecution that made the Pilgrim Fathers fly to the new land.
Some think that the negro melodies should form the basis of our American music; but why? The negro is an importation, not a native, and if we want the real thing, it seems to me that we will have to find it in the Indian melodies, but it will take artistic handling to develop them from aboriginal simplicity to the intricacy necessary to represent in any sense present-day, cosmopolitan America.
Universality is just now the philosophical ideal, and it seems to me that America, the composite nation, is the proper center from which such a spirit should emanate. Why try to foster the limited local idea with regard to music, or any artistic or intellectual pursuit? Why encourage the production of distinctive American music in a country in which there is not even a distinctive type of face or mode of speech? Here is a Virginian, descended from an American Indian and an English colonist, living next door to a Plymouth Rock Yankee whose husband is a French Canadian. Across the street is a German-American born in the Middle West, who is married to a Californian of Spanish lineage. My cook is an African, yours is Chinese and perhaps your housemaid is Scandinavian, your chauffeur Irish, and so on. Music, to be effective in such a patchwork civilization as this, would have to be simply music —universal, composite, international.
MacDowell has created a typical music, typical of himself, not of any locality, and he wished it to be judged as music, not as American music, and the justice of his desire cannot be gainsaid. Recalling all of the influences of inherited and natural temperament, education, foreign environment and American experience, jealous as we are of his genius, we must admit that he caught in his productions the complexity of his time. His music is universal and reflects the genius of his contemporaries, as well as that of the older masters, impregnated with his individual creativeness. He had seeing eyes and hearing ears, and realizing the eternal principle of rhythm and the universality of tone, he caught the keynote of everything related to him in the outer world, with its corresponding relation in the inner or unseen realms, producing compositions that are complete in form, accurate in intellectual grasp and spiritually prophetic.
He fashioned his own wreath of immortelles,
With matchless skill.
Tones lent themselves with subtle eagerness
To do his will.
Repeat them as his genius did design,
His pow'r devise;
No higher tribute to his name and fame
From us could rise.
POETICAL INTERPRETATIONS
By ELIZABETH FRY PAGE