It has been further delayed by the meagre native encouragement to effort of the better sort. The populace has been largely indifferent,—the inertia of all large bodies would explain that. A national, a constructive, and collaborative criticism has been conspicuously absent.
The leaders of orchestras have also offered an almost insurmountable obstacle to the production of any work from an American hand until very recently. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has been a noble exception to this rule, and has given about the only opening possible to the native writer. The Chicago Orchestra, in eight seasons under Theodore Thomas, devoted, out of a total of 925 numbers, only eighteen, or something less than two per cent., to native music. Yet time shows a gradual improvement, and in 1899, out of twenty-seven orchestral numbers performed, three were by Americans, which makes a liberal tithe. The Boston Symphony has played the compositions of John Knowles Paine alone more than eighteen times, and those of George W. Chadwick the same number, while E.A. MacDowell and Arthur Foote each appeared on the programs fourteen times. The Kaltenborn Orchestra has made an active effort at the promulgation of our music, and especial honor is due to Frank Van der Stucken, himself a composer of marked abilities; he was among the first to give orchestral production to American works, and he was, perhaps, the very first to introduce American orchestral work abroad. Like his offices, in spirit and effect, have been the invaluable services of our most eminent pianist, Wm. H. Sherwood, who was for many years the only prominent performer of American piano compositions.
Public singers also have been most unpatriotic in preferring endless repetition of dry foreign arias to fresh compositions from home. The little encore song, which generally appeared anonymously, was the opening wedge for the American lyrist.
Upon the horizon of this gloom, however, there is a tremor of a dawning interest in national music. Large vocal societies are giving an increasing number of native part songs and cantatas; prizes are being awarded in various places, and composers find some financial encouragement for appearing in concerts of their own work. Manuscript societies are organized in many of the larger cities, and these clubs offer hearing to novelty. There have latterly appeared, from various publishers, special catalogues vaunting the large number of American composers represented on their lists.
Another, and a most important sign of the growing influence of music upon American life, is seen in the place it is gaining in the college curriculum; new chairs have been established, and prominent composers called to fill them, or old professorships that held merely nominal places in the catalogue have been enlarged in scope. In this way music is reëstablishing itself in something like its ancient glory; for the Greeks not only grouped all culture under the general term of "Music," but gave voice and instrument a vital place in education. Three of our most prominent composers fill the chairs at three of the most important universities. In all these cases, however, music is an elective study, while the rudiments of the art should, I am convinced, be a required study in every college curriculum, and in the common schools as well.
Assuming then, for the nonce, the birth—we are too new a country to speak of a Renascence—of a large interest in national music, there is large disappointment in many quarters, because our American music is not more American. I have argued above that a race transplanted from other soils must still retain most of the old modes of expression, or, varying them, change slowly. But many who excuse us for the present lack of a natural nationalism, are so eager for such a differentiation that they would have us borrow what we cannot breed.
The folk-music of the negro slaves is most frequently mentioned as the right foundation for a strictly American school. A somewhat misunderstood statement advanced by Dr. Antonin Dvôrák, brought this idea into general prominence, though it had been discussed by American composers, and made use of in compositions of all grades long before he came here.
The vital objection, however, to the general adoption of negro music as a base for an American school of composition is that it is in no sense a national expression. It is not even a sectional expression, for the white Southerners among whose slaves this music grew, as well as the people of the North, have always looked upon negro music as an exotic and curious thing. Familiar as it is to us, it is yet as foreign a music as any Tyrolean jodel or Hungarian czardas.
The music of the American Indian, often strangely beautiful and impressive, would be as reasonably chosen as that of these imported Africs. E.A. MacDowell had, indeed, written a picturesque and impressive Indian suite, some time before the Dvôrákian invasion. He asserts that the Indian music is preferable to the Ethiopian, because its sturdiness and force are more congenial with the national mood.
But the true hope for a national spirit in American music surely lies, not in the arbitrary seizure of some musical dialect, but in the development of just such a quality as gives us an individuality among the nations of the world in respect to our character as a people; and that is a Cosmopolitanism made up of elements from all the world, and yet, in its unified qualities, unlike any one element. Thus our music should, and undoubtedly will, be the gathering into the spirit of the voices of all the nations, and the use of all their expressions in an assimilated, a personal, a spontaneous manner. This need not, by any means, be a dry, academic eclecticism. The Yankee, a composite of all peoples, yet differs from them all, and owns a sturdy individuality. His music must follow the same fate.