He is one of Spain’s great sons and the rich and sincere national spirit which he put into his music makes him beloved of his compatriots.
CHAPTER XXX
America Enters
Not long ago we visited the medieval castle of Amboise in Touraine, France, for the 400th celebration of the birth of the French poet, Ronsard. (Chapter XI.) A program of madrigals by Jannequin, Costeley, Lassus and others who had used Ronsard’s poems as texts, was given in the room where the poet himself had entertained his friends. We were impressed by the beauty of the old castle and the aged towers and ramparts. It was here that we realized the meaning of TRADITION!
The peasant children passing under the watch tower in the village below the castle are reminded daily of a past replete with history and romance! They know without having been taught that here their poet Pierre de Ronsard and the Italian painter, Leonardo da Vinci, lived, worked and died. This watch tower was old when Columbus discovered America!
The lack of tradition, this unconscious knowing of the past, that Europe has in abundance is often held up to us in America as a serious loss in our art life. The question came to us: Is there nothing in our country to make up for the absence of this historical and romantic background?
As in a motion picture, there passed before our minds the Grand Canyon of Arizona, the Rocky Mountains, the snow-capped peaks of the Pacific slope, the Columbia River, the Mississippi and the Hudson, Golden Gate of California, Niagara Falls, and the Plains, lonesome stretches of sand and sage-brush vast as the sea! Surely such wondrous beauty should inspire artists to create great works.
But this is a day of cities, aeroplanes, automobiles, speed and unrest, when the mind rules instead of the heart! And we must “watch our step” or we will become the slaves of this Age of Invention instead of being the masters. All this is reflected in our art life and we must guard our creative talent if we would rank with European nations in the making of music.
We already rank with them in performing it, and in organizations, such as our orchestras, opera houses, chamber music organizations, music schools, music settlements, music club activities, community singing, glee clubs, oratorio societies, and amateur orchestras. America needs music and loves it as never before. Perhaps out of all this music study and concert-giving in addition to what might be done with the radio and mechanical instruments, which are now making records of the world’s finest compositions, there will come a race of real music lovers and creators. They will study our national traits and will unite them with the earnest work of American composers of today and yesterday; they will open their minds to the natural beauties of nature; they will try to raise the standard of the general public, and they will make music in America grow. May every American reader take this to heart!
In our chapter on “National Portraits in Folk Music” we told you that we have no definite traits in our music that could be called national because this country was settled by people of many different nationalities and races. All these peoples brought to the “Promised Land” their customs and traditions, their song and story world. We can still see traces in the present generation of the early settlers: New England and the South are Anglo-Saxon; Louisiana and the northern border, French; California, Spanish; New York and Pennsylvania, Dutch; Minnesota, Scandinavian; Missouri and Wisconsin, German. Besides, the Italians, Irish, Russians and Germans have settled in all parts of this huge “melting pot”!
There is however an Americanism that is hard to define, but is the result of the intermingling of all nationalities. It is the spirit of the pioneer that sent our forefathers, foreigners many, across the plains in the “covered wagon”; the spirit of youth and enthusiasm of a country still new; the spirit that works out gigantic commercial problems and miraculous inventions with the same fervor with which an artist creates; it is the spirit of an inspired sculptor before the unfinished block of marble. All of which must combine in our music before we can create a national idiom.