The American of the present generation has no such consolation. He has probably not been trained abroad. He wants to write music, and being human, he wants it understood. But the minute he tries to express himself he betrays the fact that he does not know what he wants to express. Any significant work of art is inevitably based on the artist’s relation and reaction to life. But the American composer’s relation to the common life is unreal. His activities strike his fellows as unimportant and slightly irrational. He can’t lay his finger upon the great, throbbing, common pulse of America because for him there is none. So he tries this, that, and the other, hoping by luck to stumble upon the thing he wants to say. He tries desperately to be American. Knowing that the great national schools of music in other countries are based upon folksong, he tries to find the American folksong, so as to base his music upon that. He utilizes Negro tunes, and when they fail to strike the common chord he devises themes based upon Indian melodies. What he fails to see is that the folksongs of Europe express the common racial emotions of a nation, not its geographical accidents. When a Frenchman hears Malbrouck he is moved by what moved generations of long-dead Frenchmen; when a Russian hears Dubinushka he is stirred by what has stirred Russians for centuries. But even if some melody did stir the pulse of Geronimo, the mere fact that he was a former resident of my country is no proof that it is going to stir mine. If you insist that Negro music is the proper basis for an American school of composition, try telling a Southerner that when he hears Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, he is hearkening to the voices of his ancestors!
A curious symptom of this feeling of disinheritance is the tendency of so many Americans to write what might be called the music of escape, music that far from attempting to affirm the composer’s relation to his day and age is a deliberate attempt to liberate himself by evoking alien and exotic moods and atmosphere. The publishers’ catalogues are full of Arab meditations, Persian dances, Hindu serenades, and countless similar attempts to get “anywhere out of the world.” The best work of Charles Griffes, whose untimely death last year robbed us of a true creative talent, was his symphonic poem, “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan,” and his settings of Chinese and Japanese lyrics in Oriental rhythms and timbres. Not that the mere choice of subject is important; it is the actual mood and idiom of so much of this music that is significant evidence of the impulse to give up and forget America, to create a dream-world wherein one can find refuge from the land of chewing gum and victrolas.
These same victrolas, by the way, with their cousin, the player-piano, which so outrage the sensibilities of many a musician of the elder day, are a very real force in helping to civilize this country musically. The American is by no means as unmusical as he thinks he is. His indifference to art is only the result of his purely industrial civilization, and his tendency to mix morals with æsthetics is a habit of thought engendered by his ancestry. The Puritan tradition makes him fearful and suspicious of any sort of sensuous or emotional response, but it has not rendered him incapable of it. Catch him off his guard, get him away from the fear of being bored, and he is far from insensitive to music. He buys victrola records because he is a hero-worshipper, because he wants to hear the expensive Caruso and Kreisler and McCormack; but inevitably he is bound to take some notice of what they play and sing, and to recognize it when he hears it again. In spite of himself he begins to acquire a rudimentary sort of musical background. He begins by buying jazz rolls for his player-piano, and is likely in the long run, if only out of curiosity, to progress from “blues” to Chopin, via Moszkovski and Grainger.
But the greatest present-day force for good, musically, in this country, is the large motion-picture house. Music has always been a necessary accompaniment to motion pictures, in order to compensate for the uncanny silence in which these photographic wraiths unfold their dramas. Starting with a modest ensemble of piano and glass crash, the motion-picture orchestra has gradually increased in size and quality, the pipe organ has been introduced to augment and alternate it, so that the larger houses to-day can boast a musical equipment that is amazingly good. A few years ago S. L. Rothafel devised a glorified type of entertainment that was a sort of combination picture-show and “pop” concert. He built a theatre, the Rialto, especially to house it, containing a stage that was little more than a picture frame, a large pipe organ, and an orchestra platform large enough to hold seventy or eighty players. He recruited a permanent orchestra large enough to play symphonic works, and put Hugo Riesenfeld, an excellent violinist and conductor, who had been trained under Arthur Nikisch, in charge of the performances. These, besides the usual film presentations, comprised vocal and instrumental solos and detached numbers by the orchestra. All the music played at these entertainments was good—in what is known in this country as “classical.” Riesenfeld devised a running accompaniment to the films, assembled from the best orchestral music obtainable—a sort of synthetic symphonic poem that fitted the mood and action of the film presented, and was, of course, much too good for it.
This new entertainment form was instantly successful, and is rapidly becoming the standard offering at all the larger picture houses. It is a significant step in our musical life, for it is the first entirely successful attempt in this country to adapt art to popular wants. At last the average man is going of his own accord into a public hall and hearing music—real music—and discovering that he likes it. The picture house allows him to pretend that he is going solely to see the films, and needn’t listen unless he wants to. He finds that “classical” music is not nearly so boresome as many of its admirers. Freed from the highbrow’s condescension, unconscious of uplift, he listens and responds to music like the prelude to Tristan, the Walkürenritt, the New World symphony, Tschaikovsky’s Fourth, and the Eroica. Theodore Thomas rendered no more valuable service to music in America than have Samuel Rothafel and Hugo Riesenfeld.
We are still far from utopia, however. In one of his essays upon communal art Henry Caro-Delvaille speaks of “the true Mediterranean esprit, the viable art philosophy of the French race, which is essentially plastic, accepting and delineating life, free alike from dogmatism and mysticism.” Try to frame a sentence like that about America. Try to make any generalization about the American spirit without using “liberty,” “free institutions,” “resourcefulness,” “opportunity,” or other politico-economic terms, if you would know what confronts the American artist, above all the American musician, when he attempts to become articulate to his countrymen. We simply have no common æsthetic emotions. No wonder our music flounders and stammers, and trails off into incoherence!
Wagner wrote Die Meistersinger in a deliberate effort to express the German artistic creed; Verdi wrote consciously as an Italian; Glinka founded an entire school of composers whose sole aim was to express Russia. Such a task is beyond the American. The others were spokesmen for a race: he has no race to speak for, and the moment he pretends that he has, and tries to speak for it, he becomes conscious and futile. To speak of American music, in any ethnic sense, is naïve; you might as well speak of Baptist music. No. The American must accept his lot. There is but one audience he can write for, and that is himself. John Smith, American composer, dare not say: “I write to express America.” He can only say: “I write to express John Smith. I accept my life because, after all, it is mine, and I interpret my life because it is the only life I know.” And because John Smith is an American, and because somewhere, remote and inarticulate, there must be an American soul, then perhaps, if he does honest work and is true to himself, he may succeed in saying something that is of America, and of nowhere else, and that other Americans will hear and understand.
Deems Taylor
POETRY
There are many fashions, among contemporary critics, of regarding American poetry, each of them perhaps of equal helpfulness, since each is one facet of an imaginable whole. There is the view of Mr. John Middleton Murry, an English critic, that it depends perhaps a shade too much on narrative or dramatic interest, on bizarrerie (if I may very freely elaborate his notion) or, in general, on a kind of sensationalism, a use of superficially intriguing elements which are not specifically the right—or at all events the best—elements of poetry. There is the view of Mr. Louis Untermeyer, one of the ablest of our own critics and also one of the most versatile of our parodists and poets, that our contemporary poetry is good in measure as it comes in the direct line from Whitman: good, that is to say, when it is the voice of the poet who accepts, accepts joyously and largely, even loosely, this new world environment, these new customs, social and industrial, above all, it may be, the new sense of freedom which he might, if pressed, trace back to Karl Marx on one hand and Sigmund Freud on the other. There is again the view of Miss Amy Lowell that our poetry is good, or tends to be, precisely in proportion as it represents an outgrowing, by the poet, of his acute awareness of a social or ethical “here and now,” and the attainment of a relatively pure pre-occupation with beauty—the sense of freedom here exercising itself principally, if not altogether, with regard to literary tradition, especially the English: once more, I dilate the view to make it the more broadly representative. And there is, finally, the view of the conservative, by no means silent even in this era, that what is good in contemporary American poetry is what is for the moment least conspicuous—the traditional, seen as it appears inevitably in America to be seen, as something graceful, sentimental, rightly ethical, gently idealistic.