No. If he is not heard oftener in concert halls and upon recital platforms, it is because he is not good enough. There is, in the music of even the second-rate Continental composers, a surety of touch, a quality of evident confidence in their material and ease in its handling that is rarely present in the work of Americans. Most American symphonic and chamber music lacks structure and clarity. The workmanship is faulty, the utterance stammers and halts. Listening to an average American symphonic poem, you get the impression that the composer was so amazed and delighted at being able to write a symphonic poem at all that the fact that it might be a dull one seemed of minor importance to him. When he isn’t being almost entirely formless he is generally safely conventional, preferring to stick to what a statesman would call the Ways of the Fathers rather than risk some structural innovation what might or might not be effective. Tschaikovsky’s variation of the traditional sequence of movements in the Pathétique symphony, for example—ending with the slow movement instead of the march—would scandalize and terrify the average American.
This feebleness and uncertainty in the handling of material makes American music sound more sterile and commonplace than it really is. The American composer never seems certain just what, if anything, he wants to say. His themes, his fundamental ideas, are often of real significance, but he has no control over that very essence of the language of music, mood. He lacks taste. The fact that an American composition may begin in a genuinely impressive mood is no guarantee at all that inside of twenty-four bars it may not fall into the most appalling banalities. We start with lyric beauty and finish in stickiness. The curse of bathos is upon us. We lack staying power. Just as so many American dramatists can write two good acts of a three-act play, so many American novelists can write superb opening chapters, so do American composers devise eloquent opening themes. But we all fail when it comes to development. The train is laid, the match is applied, and the spectators crowd back in delighted terror amid tremendous hissings and sputterings. But when the awaited detonation comes, it is too often only a pop.
Such failure to make adequate use of his ideas is partially attributable to the American musician’s pathetically inadequate technical equipment. Generally speaking, he doesn’t know his business. He has been unable, or hasn’t bothered, to learn his trade. Imagine if you can a successful dramatist who can neither read nor write, but has to dictate his plays, or a painter who can only draw the outlines of his pictures, hiring some one else to lay in the colours, and you have something analogous to many an American “composer” whose music is taken seriously by Americans, and who cannot write out a playable piano part, arrange a song for choral performance, or transcribe a hymn tune for a string quartette. Such elementary work he has to have done for him, whenever it is necessary, by some hack. This, to say nothing of the more advanced branches of musical science, like counterpoint, fugue, orchestration. Though it is risky to generalize, it is probably safe to say that among Americans who write music, the man who can construct a respectable fugue or canon or score a piece for full orchestra is decidedly the exception. In Europe, of course, any man who did not have these technical resources at his fingertips would have to be a Moussorgsky to be taken seriously as a composer at all.
It is not entirely the American’s fault that he is so ill-equipped. Much of his comparative musical illiteracy, true, is the result of his own laziness and his traditional American contempt for theory and passion for results. On the other hand, the young American who honestly desires a good theoretical training in music must either undertake the expensive adventure of journeying to one of the few cities that contain a first-class conservatory, or the equally expensive one of going to Europe. If he can do neither, he must to a great extent educate himself. Some kinds of training it is nearly impossible for him to obtain here at any price. Orchestration, for instance, a tremendously complex and difficult science, can be mastered only by the time-honoured trial and error method, i.e., by writing out scores and hearing them played. How is our young American to manage this? Granted that there is a symphony orchestra near him, how can he get his scores played? The conductor cannot be blamed for refusing. He is hired to play the works of masters, not to try out the apprentice efforts of unskilled aspirants. What we need so badly here are not more first-class orchestras, but more second-rate ones, small-town orchestras that could afford to give the tyro a chance.
Because of their lack of technical skill many composers in this country never venture into the broader fields of composition at all. As a class, we write short piano and violin pieces, or songs. We write them because we do earnestly desire to write something and because they do not demand the technical resourcefulness and sustained inspiration that we lack. Parenthetically, I don’t for a moment mean to imply that clumsy workmanship and sterility are unknown in Europe, that we are all mediocrities and they are all Uebermenschen. As a matter of fact, we have to-day probably much more creative musical talent, if less brains, than Europe; but, talent for talent, the European is infinitely better trained. This, at least in part, because he respects theory and has a desire for technical proficiency that we almost totally lack. Then too, the European has some cultural background. There is a curious lack of inter-communication among the arts in this country. The painter seems to feel that literature has nothing direct to give him, the writer, that music and painting are not in his line, and the musician—decidedly the worst of the three in this respect—that his own art has no connection with anything.
The American composer’s most complete failure is intellectual. The fact that he writes music seldom warrants the assumption that he has the artist’s point of view at all. He is likely to be a much less interesting person than one’s iceman. Ten to one, he never visits a picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theatre is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, Snappy Stories, and best-sellers. He takes no interest in politics, economics, or sociology, either national or international (how could they possibly concern him?), and probably cannot discuss even music with pleasure or profit to anybody.
The natural inference that might be drawn from this diatribe—that the composing of music in this country is confined exclusively to the idiot classes—is not strictly true. Plenty of American musicians are intelligent and cultured men as well; but that is not America’s fault. She is just as cordial to the stupid ones. And the widespread impotence and technical sloppiness of American music is the inevitable result of the American attitude toward music and to the anomalous position the art occupies in this country.
Let me be platitudinous in the interest of clarity and point out what we so often forget: that our nation, unlike most of the others, is not a race as well. We have common wellsprings of thought, but—and this is significant and ominous—none of feeling. Sheer environment may teach people to think alike within a generation; but it takes centuries of common emotional experiences to make them feel alike. Any average American, even of the National-Security-League-one-hundred-per-centum variety, may have in his veins the blood of English, French, Italian, and Russian ancestors, and there is no saying that his emotional nature is going to find many heart-beats in common with some equally average neighbour, whose ancestry may be, say, Irish, Danish, and Hungarian. What national spirit we have has been determined, first, by the fact that the ancestors of every one of us, whether they came here twenty years ago or two hundred, were pioneers. Every one of them left a civilization whose cultural background had been established for centuries, to come to a land where the problem of mere existence was of prime importance. Again, many of them were religious fanatics. In the life of the pioneer there was little room for art of any sort, and least for music. What he demanded of music, when he had time to spare for it, was that above all things it distract him from the fatigue and worry of everyday life, either by amusing him or by furnishing a sentimental reminder of old ways. To the Puritan, music, both for its own sake and as entertainment, was anathema. As sensuous beauty it was popish, and as entertainment it was worldly pleasure, and therefore wicked. To be tolerated at all, it must be practical, i.e., perform some moral service by being a hymn tune. And what the American pioneer and the American Puritan asked a few generations back, the average American asks to-day whenever he is confronted with any work of art: Does it point a moral? If not, will it help me to kill time without boring me?
Instruction, release, or amusement: that, in general, is all we want of art. The American’s favourite picture is one that tells a story, or shows the features of some famous person, or the topography of some historic spot. Fantastic pictures he likes, because they show him people and places far removed from his own rather tedious environment, but they must be a gaudy, literal, solid sort of fantasy—Maxfield Parrish rather than Aubrey Beardsley. If he can’t have these, he wants pretty girls or comics. Purely decorative or frankly meaningless pictures—Hokusai and Whistler (except, of course, the portraits of Carlyle and his mother)—do not exist for him. Sculpture—which he does not understand—is probably his favourite art-form, for it is tangible, three-dimensionable, stable. He doesn’t mind poetry, for it, too, gives him release. He likes novels, especially “glad” ones or mystery stories. He even tolerates realism if, as in “Main Street,” it gives him release by showing him a set of consistently contemptible and uncultured characters to whom even he must feel superior. His architecture he likes either ornate to imbecility or utilitarian to hideousness.
In other words, the typical American goes to an art-work either frankly to have his senses tickled or for the sake of a definite thing that it says or a series of extraneous images or thoughts that it evokes—never for the Ding an sich. Of pure æsthetic emotion he exhibits very little. To him, beauty is emphatically not its own excuse for being. He does not want it for its own sake, and distrusts and fears it when it appears before him unclothed in moral lessons or associated ideas. In such a civilization music can occupy but a very unimportant place. For music is, morally or intellectually, the most meaningless of arts: it teaches no lesson, it offers no definite escape from life to the literal-minded, and aside from the primitive and obvious associations of patriotic airs and “mother” songs, it evokes no associated images or ideas. To love music you must be willing to enjoy beauty pretty largely for its own sake, without asking it to mean anything definite in words or pictures. This the American hates to do. Since he cannot be edified, he refuses to be stirred. There is nothing left for him, therefore, in music, except such enjoyment as he can get out of a pretty tune or an infectious rhythm.