Reflections on the Music Life in the United States — Inside the Classic

REFLECTIONS on the MUSIC LIFE in the UNITED STATES

This is Volume VI of the MERLIN MUSIC BOOKS (8 volumes).

Published in this series thus far:

I. _Bach: The Conflict Between the Sacred and the Secular_, by Leo Schrade, Professor of The History of Music, Yale University.

II. _Tudor Church Music_, by Denis Stevens, British Broadcasting Corporation, London.

III. _Stravinsky, Classic Humanist_, by Heinrich Strobel, Director, Music Division, Southwest German Radio System, Baden-Baden.

IV. _Musicians and Poets of the French Renaissance_, by François Lesure, _Librarian_, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; _Chief_, Central Secretariat of “Répertoire International des Sources Musicales.”

V. _Greek Music, Verse and Dance_, by Thrasybulos Georgiades, Professor of Musicology, University of Munich.

VI. _Reflections on the Music Life in the United States_, by Roger Sessions, Professor of Composition, Princeton University.

REFLECTIONS on the MUSIC LIFE in the United States

MERLIN PRESS--NEW YORK

THIS IS A MERLIN PRESS BOOK

OF THIS EDITION ONLY FIFTEEN HUNDRED COPIES WERE MADE

I. Background and Conditions 11

IV. Musical Theater 74

V. Music Education 98

VI. Musical Opinion 121

VII. Composers and Their Ideas: 140

Quest for Popularity 153

The following pages represent an attempt to account for the tremendous musical development of the United States during the past thirty-five years--roughly speaking, the years since the end of World War I. We can safely characterize this development as “tremendous,” even without recourse to statistical data, so frequently cited, regarding attendance at symphony concerts, sales of “classical” recordings, new orchestras which have sprung up during the period, and comparative sums of money spent on “serious” music and on baseball. Such statistics while convenient and fashionable, and assuredly not without interest, have a purely quantitative basis--such is the way of statistics--and of themselves do not reveal a vital cultural development. Leaving such matters aside, the achievement remains impressive indeed.

Let us consider certain facts which likewise tell us little of quality, but do reveal decisive changes in the conditions determining our music life. When the author of this volume decided, for instance, at the tender age of thirteen, to embark upon a career as a composer, there was no representative musician living in the United States. His parents sought the advice of two illustrious guests visiting New York to attend _premières_ of their works at the Metropolitan Opera. Having received due encouragement, the author pursued his studies and received some instruction of value; but as he began to develop, one of his teachers frankly told him that in the United States he could not acquire all he needed, and strongly urged him to continue his studies in Europe, preferably in Paris under Maurice Ravel. For good or ill, the outbreak of World War I made this project impossible. The author continued as best he could under the circumstances. However, not until he came into contact with Ernest Bloch, the first of a series of distinguished European composers who had come to live permanently in this country, was he able to find the guidance he needed, or even a knowledge of the real demands of composition toward which he had been rather blindly groping with the help of whatever he could read on the subject. It was not so much a question of the content of the studies pursued with Bloch, as that of attitudes and conceptions which the latter helped him to evolve. After all, harmony, counterpoint, and all the rest were taught in music schools and college music departments, and some of the instruction was excellent. What was lacking, however, was an essential element: the conviction that such study could conceivably lead, in the United States, to achievement of real value, and, above all, in the realm of composition.

The general attitude was not far from that of a lady of the author’s acquaintance: having had associations with musicians in many parts of the world, she probably had heard the best music possible. That lady asked him, a young student, to call on her, and, waving his compositions aside without bothering even to glance at them, begged him for his own good not to dream of a career as a composer. No American, she explained, could hope to achieve anything as a composer since he was not born into an atmosphere of composition and--as an American--probably did not even have music in his blood. She urged him to aim rather at being a conductor, and, as a step toward that end, gave him the (somewhat picturesque) advice to take up an orchestral instrument--preferably the oboe or the trombone--in the hope of finding a position in one of the large orchestras, as a stepping stone toward a conductorial career.