More ambitious and possibly more interesting was the effort of Roy Harris to achieve a style that could be called “national” in a less external sense. His point of departure was the evocation of American history or American landscape; but from these beginnings he goes on to technical and aesthetic concepts aimed toward defining the basis of a new American music. It cannot be denied that Harris accomplished some results. For a time during the years just preceding World War II, his music attracted the attention of musicians on both sides of the Atlantic and achieved considerable success. His ideas and concepts, however, must be considered quite by themselves; music and technical concepts belong to different categories: it would be an error to judge either in terms of the other. Harris’s ideas of technique often have little or nothing to do with specifically American motivation, but to a large extent consist of a strange brew composed of anti-European revulsion, personal prejudice, and the projection of this or that problem, or a solution with which he has become acquainted. What is lacking, as in the entire nationalist movement in our music, is awareness of the fact that genuine national character comes from within and must develop and grow of itself, that it cannot be imposed from without, and that, in the last analysis, it is a by-product, not an aim, of artistic expression.
A third type of American musical nationalism may be dubbed “primitivist,” a term implying something different from the primitivism which for a time was current in European culture. Reference here is not necessarily to an interest in the culture of the Indians, whether the primitive of North America or the more highly developed of Central and South America. Primitivism of this variety is related to frank rebellion against European culture and is a vague and overstrained yearning for a type of quasi-music that is to be completely new, and in which one could find refuge from the demands, conflicts, and problems of contemporary culture manifesting itself everywhere. It is expressed in superficial experimentalism, not to be confused, in its basic concepts, with experimentalism concerned with the problems of contemporary music and culture. Actually, as happens frequently in matters of contemporary art, the two types of experimentalism are sometimes found in association, in a rather strange admixture. It would require special analysis—one which has no bearing on the present discussion—to dissociate them. One cannot entirely ignore this trend, however, a current always existing in one form or the other, though never achieving importance.
One might possibly add one more brand of nationalism to the folklorist, evocative, and primitivist—the attempt to base a national style on jazz. Such classification is of course artificial and of purely practical value. While folklorism, the evocation of American images, and the type of primitivism we have been discussing, are related exclusively to American backgrounds, jazz, on the other hand, though it originated in this country and is considered a product of our culture, has had an influence on music outside the United States. It has taken root in Europe and developed European modes on European soil, not as an exotic product, but as a phenomenon which is modern rather than exclusively American.
This author will never forget an occasion at a little restaurant in Assisi, in the shadow of the church of St. Francis, when he had to ask that the radio, blaring forth genuine jazz, be lowered so he might talk quietly with his colleague Dallapiccola; or another occasion in an Austrian village hotel, where jazz—also genuine though not of the highest quality—was constantly heard, either from a local dance band or on the radio: it was craved more by the young German, Dutch or Danish guests than by the Americans there. Jazz—unless one insists on an esoteric definition—has become, or is about to become, an international phenomenon like other mass-produced goods which, originally manufactured in the United States, lose their association with it and are assimilated elsewhere.
This is not to minimize the fact that jazz developed via American popular music, and that it contains a strong primitive ingredient from this source. However, other elements were added, as it were, by accretion, elements which derive from a predominantly rhythmic vitality and are supposedly inherited from the African past of the negroes. Long before the name jazz was given to this type of music, its rhythmical and colorist, and to a degree its melodic elements had attracted the attention of European musicians. Beginning as early as Debussy’s Golliwogg’s Cake Walk, one remembers a series of works by Stravinsky, Casella, Milhaud, Weill, and others. The influence remained active for a short time, and by the end of the thirties it had virtually disappeared.
Similar things happened in the United States, yet with far-reaching implications. Certain composers had hoped to find in jazz the basis for an “American” style and their efforts may be considered the most serious of all ever made to create an American music with “popular style” as its foundation (even though jazz can really not be called folk music in the accepted sense of the word). These composers in jazz saw characteristic elements which they believed rich enough to allow development into a musical vocabulary, one of definite character, though limited to certain emotive characteristics in turn believed to be typically American. Aaron Copland in his Music for the Theatre and his Piano Concerto (written in 1926) showed his audience novel points of departure such as had been suggested by Europeans; other Americans felt capable of carrying these beginnings still farther and discovered idiomatic features not only in the musical vocabulary, but in the American personality as well.
Copland, of these composers, undoubtedly was the most successful. However, he dropped the experiment after two or three works of this type, which can be counted among his best, in order to write, over a period of several years, music of a different kind, characterized by certain lean and harsh dissonances, angular, sharp, and at moments melancholy and which no longer had a connection with jazz. There is much more to say about this composer, whose music has passed also through other phases. It may be asked, however, why he decided to abandon the idiom chosen at the outset of his career, one based on jazz. Probably he saw the limitations of nationalist ideas as such and, like the European composers mentioned, came to the realization that by its very nature jazz is limited not only as material, but emotionally as well. Jazz may be considered a genre or a type, yet one discovers quickly that, passing beyond certain formulas, certain stereotyped emotive gestures, one enters the sphere of other music, and the concept of jazz no longer seems sensible. The character of jazz is inseparably bound to certain harmonic and rhythmic formulas—not only to that of syncopation but, if incessant syncopation is to make its full effect, to the squarest kind of phrase structure, and to a harmony based on most primitive tonal scheme. While immobility of these bases makes a play of rhythmic detail and of melodic figuration possible, this always is a question of lively detail rather than of extended organic development. The result is exactly what might have been expected: for the last twenty years, leaving aside occasional instances where jazz was frankly and bodily “taken over” for special purposes, it has ceased to exert a strong influence on contemporary music. On the contrary, it has borrowed incessantly from “serious” music, generally after a certain interval of time.
Though different from Copland, the equally gifted George Gershwin travelled in the opposite direction; from popular music he came to the extended forms of “serious” music. He remained a composer of “popular” and “light” music, nevertheless, for they were native to him. If his jazz is always successful and unproblematical even in his large works, like the Rhapsody in Blue and the opera Porgy and Bess, it is because in its original and popular sense jazz is his natural idiom, and Gershwin never felt the need for overstepping its limits, musical or emotive. True, he wanted to write works of large design, but herein he never succeeded. He never understood the problem and the requirements of extended form, and remained, so to speak, innocent of them. But since his music was frankly popular in character and conception, it developed without constraint within the limits of jazz; and since he was enormously gifted, it could achieve a quality transcending the limits of jazz convention.
In other words, Gershwin’s music is in the first place music, and secondarily jazz. Those who may be considered his successors in the relationship to “serious” or, let us say, ambitious music, set out from premises no longer derived from nationalism. There is no longer the question of, in Rosenfeld’s words, “affirming America,” but of gaining and holding the favor of the public. This was the concern of American composers during the thirties. Perhaps above all, American composers for the first time had won the attention of an American public; and it is natural that they wished to win and to enjoy the response of this public, and that some felt a challenge in the situation not altogether banal. For the American composer any vital relationship with a public was a new experience, one which seemed to open new perspectives. He felt for the first time the sensation of being supported by a strong propaganda for native music—something quite new in American music, though not without unexpected effects. Since the propaganda was in behalf of American composers as such, since it was always stated in terms of these composers, since their right to be heard and their problems rather than the satisfactions which the public would derive from them were stressed, or the participation which that public would gain from listening to American music, the effect soon was that of giving nationality as such a value in and for itself. Quality and intention of the music soon seemed nonexistent; performers satisfied the demands of Americanism, presenting whatever music they found most convenient, and often whatever was shortest or made the least demand on performer and listener. It seems as if our music was obliged to pay in terms of loss of dignity for what it gained in terms of, at least, theoretical acceptance.