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nice person,” while Poulenc pronounced Webern “an exquisite boy.” As might

be expected, this strained exchange of pleasantries didn’t last. By the middle of

the decade the ISCM was beginning to divide into opposing camps, one arrayed

around Schoenberg and another around Stravinsky. The old Franco-German

musical war resumed.

The twenties were years of runaway inflation, rampant stock speculation, and

instant fortunes. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of

Extremes, writes that the economic boom was largely illusory, underwritten by a

shaky network of international loans and undermined by widespread

unemployment. Music, too, seemed trapped in a bubble economy; a composer

could make his name with one or two attention-getting gestures but had a

harder time sustaining a career. Publicity was guaranteed for any work that

combined classical means with modern themes. Honegger proved adept at this

trick, writing pieces titled Rugby, Skating-Rink, and the much-played Pacific 231

(a steam locomotive with two front axles, three main axles, and one axle in the

back). The young Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů produced works depicting

a football match (Half-Time), crowds celebrating Lindbergh’s flight (La Bagarre),

jazz-dancing kitchen utensils (La Revue de cuisine), Satan as a Negro Cyclist

(The Tears of the Knife), and a ballet about music itself (Revolt), in which

classical music fights dance hits, gramophones rebel against their masters,

critics commit suicide, Stravinsky escapes to a desert island, and a Moravian

folk song saves the day.

The festivals of the twenties were the first great battleground of what the critic

Bernard Holland has called the twentieth century’s “politics of style.” Composers

weren’t simply engaging in artificial games; they were asking mighty questions

about what art meant and how it related to society. Yet, as in the salons of

Paris, this discussion about music and modernity took place within an unreal

ecosystem that was removed from daily life. The audience at the new-music

festivals was a motley gathering of elites—culture-building captains of industry,

American heiresses looking to acquire European status, snob aesthetes with no

pressing responsibilities, members of the new leisure classes. Ordinary people

could not book a hotel for a week in Venice or Zurich. The audience at the

average symphony-orchestra subscription concert was more socially diverse;

those in the upper galleries made modest wages and came out of a simple love

of music. But most preferred to hear Brahms.

“That is no country for old men,” William Butler Yeats cries in “Sailing to

Byzantium.” The youngest composers, the children of 1900, adapted most

easily to the racing tempos of the twenties; they had the metabolism to digest

fresh paradigms overnight. The older ones faced an agonizing adjustment—and

to be old in that youth-mad time was to be over the age of forty. Bartók probably

spoke for many when he wrote in a letter of 1926, the year of Yeats’s poem: “To

be frank, recently I have felt so stupid, so dazed, so empty-headed that I have

truly doubted whether I am able to write anything new at all anymore. All the

tangled chaos that the musical periodicals vomit thick and fast about the music

of today has come to weigh heavily on me: the watchwords, linear, horizontal,

vertical, objective, impersonal, polyphonic, homophonic, tonal, polytonal, atonal,

and the rest …” Stravinsky let out a howl of disgust in a letter to Ansermet in

1922: “Here I am the head of modern music, as they say and so I believe, here I

am forty years old—here I am being passed over in the grand prizes of the

‘great international congress’ in Salzburg … The committee reserved places of

great importance on the program for Darius Milhaud, Ernest Blook [sic], Richard

Strauss (probably Corngold [sic], Casella, Varèse [sic], too)—all the musicians

of ‘international’ stature … Oh, the cons.”

Ravel’s moment of crisis came when he played his new ballet score La Valse

for Diaghilev in 1920. “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece, but it isn’t a ballet,” the

impresario told him. “It’s a portrait of a ballet, a painting of a ballet.” Evidently,

Diaghilev was saying that Ravel’s score lacked the pitiless spirit that the

postwar era required.

The verdict was bizarre, for La Valse is both a dazzling incarnation of the

twenties and a dazzling satire of it. It begins as a nostalgic journey in three-

quarter time, Old Europe waltzing in the twilight. A stepwise intensification of

dissonance and dynamics suggests the fury of the war just past, the wedding of

aristocratic pride to the machinery of destruction. In the last moments, with

trombones snarling and percussion rattling, the music becomes brassy, sassy,

and fierce. Suddenly we seem to be in the middle of a flapper gin party—and

there is no reason to feel any jolt of transition, since the Roaring Twenties were

underwritten by the same fortunes that had financed the prewar balls. This is a

society spinning out of control, reeling from the horrors of the recent past toward

those of the near future.

Bartók’s confusion went deeper than matters of style: his personal history had

been largely obliterated by the cartographic fiats of the peace treaties. The

reduction of Hungarian territory after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian

Empire meant that Nagyszentmiklós, the composer’s birthplace, went to

Romania, and that Pozsony, where his mother still lived, became

Czechoslovak.

Nonetheless, Bartók remained loyal to the landscape of his dreams—that

hidden empire of peasant music, which stretched as far as Turkey and North

Africa. As Hungary moved toward fascism under the authoritarian government

of Miklós Horthy, such multiculturalism attracted suspicion; nationalists

perceived Bartók as lacking in true Hungarian spirit. At the same time, his

allegiance to folklore made him a quaint, anachronistic figure on the

international new-music circuit. He was too cosmopolitan at home, too

nationalist abroad. He was, however, finding the balance he had always sought,

between the local and the universal. Less concerned with policing the

boundaries between genres, he stopped agitating against the supposed

contaminations of Gypsy music; Hungarian Gypsy fiddling appears all over his

two Rhapsodies for violin and his Second Violin Concerto. Occasionally, he

even indulged in a bit of jazz. As Julie Brown has pointed out, Bartók responded

to the rise of genocidal racism by extolling “racial impurity”—the migration of

styles, the intermingling of cultures.

In the first years of the postwar period Bartók strove to establish his modernist

credentials. When the Danish composer Carl Nielsen came to Budapest in

1920, Bartók asked him whether he thought his Second Quartet was

“sufficiently modern.” The ballet The Miraculous Mandarin, finished the previous

year, matched the polytonal violence of the Rite, with a hint of Futurism in the

honking cityscape of the prelude (“‘stylized’ noise,” Bartók called it). The

strutting harshness of the two violin sonatas, the Piano Sonata, the piano suite

Out of Doors, the First Piano Concerto, and the Third Quartet, all composed in

the early and mid-twenties, won respect from the Schoenberg camp. But

Bartók’s melodies retained a folkish shape, and the harmony again stopped

short of full atonality. These works use symmetrical scales that revolve around a

“tonal center,” a single pitch that sounds somehow “right” whenever it appears.

In the wide-ranging Fourth Quartet, written in 1928, dissonant dances frame an

ethereal slow movement that glides around the key of E major without quite

touching it. In the final tranquillo section, the violin plays a sweet folkish melody,

akin to the “Peacock Melody” of Magyar tradition. The composer has returned to

first principles.

In several masterpieces of Bartók’s last years—the Music for Strings,

Percussion, and Celesta (1936), the Second Violin Concerto (1937–38), and the

Concerto for Orchestra (1943)—the ceremony of homecoming is repeated. The

final movement of each work brings a palpable feeling of release, as if the

composer, who had observed peasants with shy detachment, were finally

throwing away his notebook and entering the fray. Strings whip up dust clouds

around manic dancing feet. Brass play secular chorales, as if seated on the

dented steps of a tilting little church. Winds squawk like excited children. Drums

bang the drunken lust of young men at the center of the crowd. There are no

sacrificial victims in these neoprimitive scenes, even if some walk away with

bruises. The ritual of return is most poignant in the Concerto for Orchestra,

which Bartók wrote in American exile. Transylvania was by then a purely mental

space that he could dance across from end to end, even as his final illness

immobilized him.

Bartók and Janáč met twice in the twenties. The second time, in 1927, Janáč is

said to have grabbed Bartók by the shoulders and dragged him into a quiet

corner. Posterity would love to have a precise record of that conversation, but

the eyewitness report is frustratingly impressionistic: “fascinating exchange … a

fireworks of personalities …” Did Janáček urge Bartók to be true to his national,

folkish self, as Debussy had urged Stravinsky?

By now well into his seventies, the Moravian master was more bemused than

intimidated by the culture of the festivals; he liked to tell the story that when he

tried to find his way to the stage to take a bow at the ISCM festival of 1925, he

opened the wrong door and found himself out on the street. The belated

international success of Jenůfa gave him the confidence to stay on the path that

he had marked out before the turn of the century.

Janáček’s creative Indian summer is often attributed to his infatuation with

Kamila Stösslová, a young married woman whom he met in 1917. Richly

imagined female characters populate his last works: the “dark-skinned Gypsy

girl” who seduces a farmer’s son in the song cycle The Diary of One Who

Disappeared; Katerina, the tragic heroine of the opera Katya Kabanova, who

throws herself into the Volga River to escape the tormenting rectitude of her

mother-in-law; the female fox at the heart of the animal fable The Cunning Little

Vixen, who finds love in the forest and then falls to the gun of a poacher; and

the unlikely protagonist of The Makropoulos Affair, a 337-year-old opera singer

who has achieved immortality at the price of being “cold as ice.”

Janáček’s late style is lean and strong. Melodies are whittled down but do not

lose their grace. Rhythms move like a needle on a gramophone, skipping as if

stuck in a rut or slowing down as if someone were fiddling with the speed. One

signature sound is a raw pealing of trumpets, which ushers in both the rustic

military Sinfonietta and the Glagolitic Mass, a setting of the Old Slavonic liturgy.

In the mass, liturgical phrases such as “Lord have mercy,” “Crucified for us,” “I

believe,” and “Lamb of God” are linked to changing phases of rural weather:

lashing rain, lightning, a clearing sky, a spell of moonlight, a pale sun the

following day. Christianity and paganism are reconciled.

The Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children’s tale and a profound

allegory of modern life, may be Janáček’s greatest achievement. It begins

innocuously, as a folksy old forester—as a child Janáčcek dreamed of being a

forester—captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok,

slaughters the chickens, and is banished to the woods. There she finds a

handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies post-Wagnerian opera,

notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle

shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the

forester steps out of his folk-tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He

seems to be musing about the very opera that he’s in: “Is this fairy tale or

reality? Reality or fairy tale?” The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the

animals of the woods surround him. He sees fox cubs at play and realizes that

they are the vixen’s children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking

he’s seeing the same “clammy little monster” whom he met in the first scene of

the opera:

FORESTER: Where have you come from?

FROG: That wasn’t me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.

In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the

forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago.

In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him—and

ourselves—across an immense space. “Good and evil turn around in life

afresh,” Janáček wrote in his own synopsis.

The forester smiles and goes back to sleep. His gun slips from his hands. The

vixen’s music returns, raised to extraordinary vehemence by pealing brass and

pounding timpani. A circular motif plays twice over chords of D-flat major, then

modulates to E major; finally, as the harmony returns to D-flat, the melody

clings to its E-major pitches, producing a rich modal sonority, a bluesy seventh

chord. It recalls the ending of Jenůfa, the walk into paradise. “You must play this

for me when I die,” Janáček said to his producer. Which they did, in August

1928.

Stravinsky’s moment of high anxiety arrived when he performed his Piano

Sonata at the 1925 ISCM festival in Venice. Janáček was there; so, too, were

Diaghilev, Honegger, the Princesse de Polignac, Cole Porter, Arturo Toscanini,

and Schoenberg, with his red gaze. Many questioned Stravinsky’s new

neoclassical style; the rumor went around that he was no longer “serious,” that

he had become a pasticheur. Schoenberg reportedly walked out. Stravinsky

must have been aware of the skepticism all around; insecurity, writes his

biographer Stephen Walsh, was “the demon that lurked permanently in the

inner regions of Stravinsky’s consciousness.” Emotional tensions preyed on him

as well. Yekaterina Stravinsky, his wife, had suffered a breakdown, the result of

a tubercular condition. Yekaterina’s devotion to Russian Orthodoxy seemed a

silent rebuke of her husband’s dandyish lifestyle, not to mention his ongoing

affair with Vera Sudeykina.

A few days before the concert, an abscess appeared on Stravinsky’s right hand.

Somewhat to his own surprise, he went to a church, got on his knees, and

asked for divine aid. Just before sitting down to play, he checked under the

bandage and saw that the abscess was gone. This sudden cure struck

Stravinsky as a miracle, and he began to experience a religious reawakening.

His official “return to sacraments” took place almost a year later, during Holy

Week of 1926, when he reported to Diaghilev that he was fasting “out of

extreme mental and spiritual need.” Around the same time, Stravinsky wrote a

brief, pungent setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Old Slavonic. Over the next five

years he wrote a trilogy of solemn-toned or explicitly sacred works: Oedipus

Rex, Apollo, Symphony of Psalms. Religion was his new “reality,” his new

foundation; it gave substance to his devotion to the past and, not incidentally,

direction to his mildly dissolute life.

In rediscovering religion, Stravinsky was, paradoxically, following fashion. The

year 1925 was one of newfound sobriety in French culture. Many were

pondering a valedictory essay by the recently deceased Jacques Rivière on the

“crisis of the concept of literature”; the critic had proposed that the arts were

becoming too disinterested, too “inhuman,” and he listed Stravinsky’s “music of

objects” among the symptoms of an ethical and spiritual decline. Cocteau,

having suffered the loss of his underage lover Raymond Radiguet, fallen into

opium addiction, and experienced a hallucinatory epiphany in Picasso’s

elevator, returned to Catholicism in June of the same year. Cocteau’s guru was

the neo-Thomist phisosopher Jacques Maritain, who believed that modern art

could purify itself into an image of God’s truth, into something “well made,

complete, proper, durable, honest.”

Stravinsky, too, fell under Maritain’s influence, perhaps chastened when the

phifosopher criticized the notion of “art for nothing, for nothing else but itself.”

After considering the idea of an opera or oratorio on the life of Saint Francis of

Assisi, Stravinsky elected to pursue a topic from ancient tragedy, and asked

Cocteau to write a French-language adaptation of the story of Oedipus. He then

had Cocteau’s text translated into Latin. “The choice [of Latin],” Stravinsky later

wrote, “had the great advantage of giving me a medium not dead, but turned to

stone and so monumentalized as to have become immune from all risk of

vulgarization.” The score instructed: “Only their arms and heads move. They

should give the impression of living statues.” This marked a commitment to

Rivière’s project of spiritual rehabilitation, to Maritain’s philosophy of art as

sacred work.

Cocteau’s involvement meant that Oedipus could go only so far in the direction

of solemnity. The Latin declamations were strung together with a self-

consciously, satirically pompous French-language narration. Cocteau’s Speaker

is so wrapped up in his literary dignity that he sometimes fails to notice what is

happening onstage. “And now you will hear the famous monologue, ‘The Divine

Jocasta is dead,’” he proclaims—but no monologue ensues.

Such self-conscious gestures might have turned Oedipus into another panoply

of camp. But Stravinsky was in earnest. “Kaedit nos pestis”—“Plague is upon

us”—the chorus chants at the opening, over five booming chords in the key of

B-flat minor. On its own, the core progression would sound a bit creaky and

clichéd. What adds drama is the bass line, which sticks to the notes of the B-

flat-minor triad but gnashes against the changing chords above. The

impression, here and throughout the work, is of damaged, decaying grandeur—

like acid streaks on cathedral marble. Yet Oedipus is a living statue, as the

score instructs. Stravinsky’s alertness to the rhythm of words puts bounce and

thrust into the archaic Latin text. The word “moritur,” coming at the end of the

three opening gestures, sets in motion a purring triplet figure that propels the

work to the end.

The ballet Apollon musagète, the second panel in Stravinsky’s sacred triptych,

is a serene spectacle of art in contemplation of itself: the young god Apollo

matures and achieves mastery in the company of the muses Calliope,

Polyhymnia, and Terpsichore. The scoring, for strings alone, reverses the post-

Rite trend toward hard sonorities of winds and brass, which, in a typical feat of

chutzpah, Stravinsky now chided his contemporaries for overexploiting. (“The

swing of the pendulum was too violent,” he wrote in his Autobiography, as if

someone else had set the pendulum in motion.) Apollo floats by on

straightforward major-key harmonies and draws on a vein of tender melody;

collage-like cutting and layering give way to a smooth, unbroken surface.

In a prior Ballets Russes season, the airy conception of a “white ballet” might

have been realized in an annoyingly precious way. With the arrival of George

Balanchine, though, Stravinsky found his creative other half. Balanchine’s

project of recapturing the equipoise of classical dance through modern

choreography—sometimes athletic, sometimes abstract—was the mirror image

of Stravinsky’s new style. The union of dance and music suggested a higher

union of body and spirit. Boris de Schloezer, who earlier in the decade had

attacked the composer for perpetrating musical jokes, grasped the new

Stravinsky when he wrote, “Logically, after Apollo, he ought to give us a Mass.”

This Stravinsky more or less did, in an attitude of grief. In August 1929 the

composer was stunned by the sudden death of Diaghilev, his discoverer,

protector, and substitute father, and his distress was intensified by the fact that

he had not had the chance to make proper farewells; the two men had lately

bickered and fallen out. Meanwhile, Yekaterina grew sicker and more devout.

Icons and candles filled the Stravinsky home, and there was talk of building a

private chapel. Out of this fervid atmosphere arose the Symphony of Psalms.

The texts come from the Latin vulgate versions of Psalms 38, 39, and 150, but

the music has something intangible in common with Russian Orthodoxy. For the

American critic Paul Rosenfeld, it “called to our mind the mosaic-gilded interior

of one of the Byzantine domes … from whose vaulting the Christ and his Mother

gaze pitilessly down upon the accursed human race.” The first chord fulfills

Rosenfeld’s cathedral metaphor: E-minor triads in the bass and treble are

arranged around columnar Gs in the middle registers. Throughout, the

habitually economical composer enlarges his sense of space. The setting of

Psalm 150 (“Praise God in his holy place, praise him in the heavenly vault of his

power”) goes on for a relative eternity of twelve minutes.

The Symphony is not all frozen architecture. Stravinsky’s trademark rhythms

make subtle appearances. At one point in Psalm 150, the chorus lightly

syncopates the phrase “Lau-da-te do-mi-nuumm,” with the “do” falling between

the second and the third beats and the last syllable prolonged to fill out the

bar—almost like the Charleston. And in the raptly contemplative coda, the

timpani repeat a four-note pattern over forty-two bars, the quasi-minimalist

ostinato creating an almost imperceptible tension with the prevailing meter of

three beats to a bar—a bounce of an ethereal, incorporeal kind.

Almost from the beginning, listeners worried that Stravinsky’s wizardly creations

were marred by an inner coldness. Ned Rorem, an American composer firmly

committed to the “French” rather than the “German” politics of style, has asked

himself: “Do I adore Stravinsky as I adore others who are perhaps less

overwhelming—Ravel, for example, or Poulenc? I am dazzled by his

intelligence and scared by his force, but my heart is not melted.” If anything by

Stravinsky can melt the heart, it is the Symphony of Psalms. The great

nonexpresser and maker of objects lets down his guard, giving us a glimpse of

his terrors and longings. Notice a telltale repetition of words in the first two

psalms that Stravinsky chose to set: “Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto

my cry … I waited patiently for the Lord; and he inclined unto me, and heard my

cry.” William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, wrote that a

condition of desperate mental flailing is often the prelude to spiritual renewal:

“Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! help!”

Help for what? Stravinsky’s biography provides plentiful fodder for speculation,

but the underlying impetus may have been a growing discomfort with modernity

itself—panic in the face of speed and noise. Reality, into which so many artists

yearned to plunge, turned out to be an engulfing medium. Young aesthetes

went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the

survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this

reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of “pure music”

now tried to find their way back in. In the end, the Germanic philosophy of

musical universalism, according to which a few set forms and procedures would

serve the composers of all nations, once more functioned as a bulwark against

an increasingly indifferent culture. As in Yeats’s poem, European composers

embraced the sublimity of artifice, “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium /

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

INVISIBLE MEN

American Composers from Ives to Ellington

To understand the cultural unease that gripped composers in the Roaring

Twenties, one need only read the work of Carl Van Vechten, the American

critic, novelist, and social gadfly who, in the 1920s, more or less defected from

classical music to jazz and blues. The writer started out as a second-string

music critic at the New York Times, dutifully chronicling the city’s concert life in

the years before the First World War. During an extended stay in Paris, he

warmed to the European moderns and witnessed the riot of the Rite in the

company of Gertrude Stein. By the end of the war, though, Van Vechten was

getting his kicks chiefly from popular music, and in a 1917 essay he predicted

that Irving Berlin and other Tin Pan Alley songwriters would be considered “the

true grandfathers of the Great American Composer of the year 2001.” Finally,

he pledged his allegiance to African-American culture, writing off concert music

as a spent force. In the controversial 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, he observed

that black artists were in complete possession of the “primitive birthright … that

all the civilized races were struggling to get back to—this fact explained the art

of a Picasso or a Stravinsky.”

The writings of Van Vechten, Gilbert Seldes, and other rebellious young

American intellectuals of the twenties show a paradigm shift under way. They

depict popular artists not as entertainers but as major artists, modernists from

the social margins. In the twenties, for the first time in history, classical

composers lacked assurance that they were the sole guardians of the grail of

progress. Other innovators and progenitors were emerging. They were

American. They often lacked the polish of a conservatory education. And,

increasingly, they were black.

One nineteenth-century composer saw this change coming, or at least sensed

it. In 1892, the Czech master Antonín Dvořák, whose feeling for his native

culture had inspired the young Janáček, went to New York to teach at the newly

instituted National Conservatory. A man of rural peasant origins, Dvořák had

few prejudices about the social background or skin color of prospective talent.

In Manhattan he befriended the young black singer and composer Harry T.

Burleigh, who introduced him to the African-American spirituals. Dvořák decided

that this music held the key to America’s musical future. He began plotting a

new symphonic work that would draw on African-American and Native

American material: the mighty Ninth Symphony, subtitled “From the New

World.” With the help of a ghostwriter, Dvořák also aired his views in public, in

an article titled “Real Value of Negro Melodies,” which appeared in the New

York Herald on May 21, 1893:

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded

upon what are called the negro melodies. This must be the real

foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be

developed in the United States … All of the great musicians have

borrowed from the songs of the common people. Beethoven’s most

charming scherzo is based upon what might now be considered a

skillfully handled negro melody … In the negro melodies of America I

discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They

are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold,

merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or any

purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot

be supplied with themes from this source.

At a time when lynching was a social sport in the South, and in a year when

excursion trains brought ten thousand people to Paris, Texas, so that they could

watch a black man being paraded through town, tortured, and burned at the

stake, Dvořák’s embrace of African-American spirituals was a notable gesture.

The visiting celebrity didn’t just urge white composers to make use of black

material; he promoted blacks themselves as composers. Most provocative of all

was his imputation of a “Negro” strain in Beethoven—a heresy against the

Aryan philosophies that were gaining ground in Europe.

Black music is so intertwined with the wider history of American music that the

story of the one is to a great extent the story of the other. Everything runs along

the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. Still, it’s

worth asking why the music of 10 percent of the population should have had

such influence.

In 1939, a Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein tried to give an

answer, in a paper titled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American

Music.” Great music in the European tradition, young Bernstein declared, had

grown organically from national sources, both in a “material” sense (folk tunes

serving as sources for composition) and in a “spiritual” sense (folkish music

speaking for the ethos of a place). Bernstein’s two-tiered conception, which

acknowledges in equal measure music’s autonomy and its social function,

makes a good stab at explaining why black music conquered the more open-

minded precincts of white America. First, it made a phenomenal sound. The

characteristic devices of African-American musicking—the bending and

breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of

rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound—

opened new dimensions in musical space, a realm beyond the written notes.

Second, black music compelled attention as a document of spiritual crisis and

renewal. It memorialized the wound at the heart of the national experience—the

crime of slavery—and it transcended that suffering with acts of individual self-

expression and collective affirmation. Thus, black music fulfilled Bernstein’s

demand for a “common American musical material.”

100

What Dvořák did not foresee, and what even the cooler-than-thou Bernstein had

trouble grasping, was that the “great and noble school of music” would consist

not of classical compositions but of ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, R & B, rock ‘n’

roll, funk, soul, hip-hop, and whatever’s next. Many pioneers of black music

might have had major classical careers if the stage door of Carnegie Hall had

been open to them, but, with few exceptions, it was not. As the scholar Paul

Lopes writes, “The limited resources and opportunities for black artists to

perform and create cultivated music for either black or white audiences …

forced them into a more immediate relationship with the American vernacular.”

Soon, jazz had its own canon of masters, its own dialectic of establishment and

avant-garde: Armstrong the originator, Ellington the classicist, Charlie Parker

the revolutionary, and so on. A young Mahler of Harlem had little to gain by

going downtown.

Separateness became a source of power; there were other ways to get the

message out, other lines of transmission. Black musicians were quick to

appropriate technologies that classical music adopted only fitfully. The

protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s epochal novel Invisible Man sits in his basement

with his record player, listening to “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.”

He says, “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of

being invisible.” The invisible man broadcasts on the “lower frequencies” to

which society has consigned him. Incidentally, Ellison once thought of becoming

a composer. He took a few lessons from Wallingford Riegger, an early

American admirer of Schoenberg. Then, like so many others, he stopped.

To tell the story of American composition in the early twentieth century is to

circle around an absent center. The great African-American orchestral works

that Dvořák prophesied are mostly absent, their promise transmuted into jazz.

Nonetheless, the landscape teems with interesting life. White composers faced

another, far milder kind of prejudice; their very existence was deemed

inessential by the Beethoven-besotted concertgoers of the urban centers. They

tried many routes around the intractable fact of audience apathy, embracing

radical dissonance (Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles), radical

simplicity (Virgil Thomson), a black-and-white, classical-popular fusion (George

Gershwin). For the most part, the identity of the American composer was a kind

of nonidentity, an ethnicity of solitude.

Aaron Copland, whose story will be told in later chapters, once pointed out that

the job of being an American artist often consists simply in making art

possible—which is to say, visible. Every generation has to do the work all over

again. Composers perennially lack state support; they lack a broad audience;

they lack a centuries-old tradition. For some, this isolation is debilitating, but for

others it is liberating; the absence of tradition means freedom from tradition.

One way or another, all American composers are invisible men.