Seminar list • Abstract • Main Text
Grove article on North American music [APU Campus only].
Of the many influences on the USA, one of the most evident is that of Europe itself, and most especially, that of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). It is due to this influence that the dominant language, at least in terms of politics and the economy, is English.
Many of the place names around the East Coast remind us of places in Europe, and especially Great Britain - New York, New Hampshire, Norfolk, Birmingham, Newark:
The same things happened to the cultures. In terms of 'high' culture, those to whom it was appropriate clung to the same basic music that had been left behind. Famous emigres such as Dvorak helped to consolidate the export: Dvorák - Symphony no.9
A prominent teaching appointment in the century's latter years focussed public attention on musical nationalism in the concert hall. In 1892 Dvorák arrived in New York to serve as director of the National Conservatory of Music. Charged with encouraging the development of art music in the United States, Dvorák urged American composers to base their work on indigenous and folk traditions. In 1893 he composed his Symphony no.9 (‘From the New World’), inspired at least partly by African American melody. Shortly before returning to his European homeland in 1895, Dvorák wrote that although it mattered little ‘whether the inspiration for the coming folk songs of America is derived from the Negro melodies, the songs of the creoles, the red man's chant, or the plaintive ditties of the homesick German or Norwegian’, he believed that ‘the germs for the best’ American music lay ‘hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country’.RICHARD CRAWFORD: 'United States of America: Art Music', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 29 November 2002), http://www.grovemusic.com
charles Ives is now considered one of America's foremost composers. This judgement would have astounded his contemporaries, for after receiving a thorough musical education from his father George Ives, and from Horatio Parker at Yale, he followed a career in business. Neither a public performer nor a teacher by temperament (though he worked for a time as a church organist), Ives recognized early that no satisfying musical livelihood lay open to him. After finishing college in 1898 he entered New York's business world, succeeded there, and composed in his spare time until his creative inspiration ran dry in the early 1920s. Ives composed in standard European genres: art songs, sonatas, symphonies. Yet, admiring the open-hearted spirit that many musically untutored Americans brought to their singing and playing, he staked out territory where classical, popular and folk music seemed to merge. Ives's impatience with hierarchies and boundaries could lead in his music to jarring juxtapositions – quotations from Beethoven symphonies, for example, next to fiddle tunes and gospel hymns – and opaque overlappings, such as two tonally unrelated events occurring simultaneously. In ‘Putnam's Camp’, the second movement of Three Places in New England for orchestra (premiered 1931), Ives creates the illusion of two bands, each playing a different piece, marching towards each other. In The Unanswered Question (1908), a single trumpet intones repeatedly the same angular figure over a string ensemble's consonant, organ-like background, while four flutes respond with growing agitation to the trumpet's calls. Harmonic dissonance in the former is brought to a head in a cacophonous roar; in the latter, dissonance comes and goes, yielding to serene string consonances. In both, Ives's use of sounds that stretch the ears allow him, following the lead of his spiritual mentors Emerson and Thoreau, to probe hidden unities and mysteries of human existence. Ives paid a price for isolation and originality; his music enjoyed few public performances during his lifetime. In retrospect, it looms as a remarkable accomplishment and resource: a quintessentially American contribution to the repertory of art music, a challenge to the boundaries separating classical music from popular and folk music, and even a critique of music itself, questioning where sound and nature stop and music begins.RICHARD CRAWFORD: 'United States of America: Art Music', The New Grove Dictionary of Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed 29 November 2002), http://www.grovemusic.com
Ives - Three Places in New England - BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music