Contemporary music elicited the interest not only of British, German, and French authors but also Americans, who published numerous monographs on the subject between the late 1950s and early 1960s. In The Complete Book of 20th Century Music, David Ewen (1952) portrayed composers who initiated new approaches in instrumentation (Cage with prepared piano), harmony (Henry Cowell and his clusters), and rhythm (Messiaen in particular). He further maintained that some composers favored excessive complexity (such as Sessions or Charles Ives), while others turned to musical languages of the past (Norman Dello Joio, among the most recent) or opted for economy of expression (Francis Poulenc). Still others preferred a style that could be understood by “unsophisticated audiences” (xxiv). Such was the case of Aaron Copland. In An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, Peter S. Hansen (1961) argued that Webernism had triumphed after the war and that Boulez and his contemporaries had then sought to understand the serialization of durations, dynamics, and articulations, leading to the “total control” of music and ultimately to electronic music. Added to these were parallel currents such as French musique concrète, the aleatoric music of Cage and Stockhausen—who were also composers of electronic music—and computer music (345–58). In his Introduction to Contemporary Music, Joseph Machlis (1961) divided contemporary music into two camps: the twelve-tone composers, on the one hand, with the central figures of Luigi Dallapiccola in Europe and Mel Powell in the United States; and the experimentalists, on the other, with Stockhausen or Boulez in Europe and Varèse in the United States. Varèse’s work was followed by Cowell and by Cage, an influential composer, but one whose experiments would probably be surpassed by advances in electronic music (632).
From one monograph to the next, the definition of American music is, if not contradictory, at least nebulous. Many works specifically dedicated to the music of America nonetheless aimed, in the late 1950s to early 1960s, to give a more precise idea of it. Among these, the third edition of John Tasker Howard’s famous work Our American Music (1954; originally published in 1931) figures prominently. “Anyone who has had occasion to study the music of America’s past has sought out John Tasker Howard’s book,” we read in Notes (Bellows 1957, 501). In the third edition of that book, a new chapter covers the period 1945–54.1 There we learn that except for a movement inspired by Parisian electronic music (A68–A69), American postwar music preserved its allegiance to established cultures. The new composers thus took the path of Webern’s chromaticism and Igor Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, or alternatively the exoticism of foreign cultures and diatonic folk music that arose in opposition to one or the other. Alexei Haieff, Shapero, Elliott Carter, Kirchner, Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Ben Weber, Babbitt, Henry Brant, Peter Mennin, Imbrie, Louis Calabro, and Leonard Bernstein were the leading lights of the new continent. In another work A Short History of Music in America (1957), Howard and coauthor George Kent Bellows sketched an even clearer portrait of the American music of his day. Music in the middle of the century was experimental with Ives and Cage, electronic with Otto Luening, twelve-tone with Wallingford Riegger and Weber, traditionalist from Vincent Persichetti to Shapero, eclectic from Howard Swanson to Alan Hovhaness, and operatic with William Schuman, Kurt Weill, and Bernstein. For Howard, even though American music was beginning to overtake European music, which had run out of steam (400), it remained in many respects anchored in the Old World tradition. Also in 1957, in the second edition of Howard’s Modern Music, American modern music was either that of Cowell, Varèse, and John Becker, in an experimental vein; or that of Vladimir Ussachevsky, electronic. It still tended to find its precedents in Europe, and furthermore, it was essentially serious. Not all musicologists shared that opinion. Indeed, David Ewen, the author of The Complete Book of 20th Century Music (1952), published Panorama of American Popular Music in 1957. It was, he affirmed, the first time that a “complete” history, or at least one exclusively devoted to American popular music, was published. For Ewen, this music—Tin Pan Alley, jazz, folk music, and musical theater—was the best expression of the “native” culture of the United States.
In fact, Ewen’s work was not the first to examine American popular music.2 It was part of a recent trend, notably represented by America’s Music by Gilbert Chase, who had recently called the “genteel tradition” his bête noire and the idea of “aesthetic progress” a fallacy (1955, xvii–xviii). On the heels of Charles Seeger, who founded the Society for Ethnomusicology the same year that Chase’s book was published, Chase aspired to discover an authentic and traditional American music style. Thus he closed his panorama of American music—after the experimentalism of Harry Partch and Cage, the twelve tones of Babbitt and Weber, and Broadway and the operas of Bernstein and Schuman—with Charles Ives. The composer managed “to discern and to utilize the truly idiosyncratic and germinal elements of our folk and popular music,” Chase asserted (659). Chase’s message thus contrasts, in part, with that of Howard: the richness of American music, as opposed to European music, perhaps could be heard not so much inside concert halls as outside of them—namely, in the folk and popular tradition.3 This idea was even more fervently supported by Henry Pleasants. The same year that Chase’s book came out, Pleasants published The Agony of Modern Music (1955), announcing the advent of jazz and the decline of modern music. For Chase and Pleasants, a virtual boundary separated the two worlds. When the British musicologist Wilfrid Mellers celebrated the music of the “New World” at the end of his Romanticism and the 20th Century, from 1800 (1957), he said the same: one could not expect there to be any connection between “artistic” and “commercial” music. In the end, this conception is one of the few to have enjoyed a consensus: various currents of modern music existed, but the only ones that did not interact were “popular” and “serious.”
What do we find if we dig even deeper—if, after searching the encyclopedias, the more general monographs, and those specifically devoted to the music of the United States, we examine the periodical literature? What do the Musical Quarterly, Notes, Journal of Music Theory, Perspectives of New Music, Music & Letters, Tempo, and the Musical Times have to say about American music? Based on these journals, consensus appears to have been rare: whether from one journal to another or within the same journal, the portraits of contemporary American music are conflicting and even contradictory. Efforts to synthesize the general state of contemporary music are likewise rare. Contributors regularly shy away from any attempt at exhaustiveness, the province of encyclopedias and monographs. The evident interests of authors or groups of authors (often composers) are even regularly criticized: in 1963, Joseph Kerman denounced Perspectives of New Music for being concerned only with the “new music” of the journal’s collaborators; he was replying to Charles Rosen’s claim that one should listen only to the composer’s perspective to understand a piece of music (Kerman 1963; Rosen 1962). Indeed, it is usual for each journal to favor one style, one school, one tendency, or sometimes even one music publisher’s catalogue. For example, over the course of the 1950s, the Boosey & Hawkes journal Tempo tended to provide a forum for its own composers’ views rather than those of others. In June 1955, when The Score published its twelfth issue, intended as an overview of American music, it presented a panorama that was mixed, to say the least: from Babbitt’s “twelve tones” to Cage’s experimental music, together with the music of “commerce” described by Wilfrid Mellers, the versions of the “American style” sometimes diverged widely.
The development of “commercial music” addressed by Mellers was also covered in music magazines and newspapers of the day: Melody Maker and New Musical Express in Britain, Down Beat in the United States.4 These publications were even less inclined than their scholarly counterparts to synthesize the general state of the music of their time. At best, the reader can glean information on new trends and noteworthy figures within specific genres or territories. The same goes for the music sections in influential US news publications such as the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, New York Magazine, Newsweek, and the Atlantic. As conventional wisdom would have it, the press is too local, too close to the present, too focused on its subject, too unstable. It is too “human,” lacking the necessary distance to “tell the truth.”
This excursion through the literature demonstrates