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13 Epilogue-Envoi I n an art form as dependent on continuity as music, all dates are often more or less arbitrary. Because of the particular situations in France and the United States, 1870, as I have explained, seemed a logical place to begin this study. But using World War II as a cutoff point is merely a matter of convenience, for musical life continued in France and America despite the battles and the occupation. While in a prisoner-of-war camp, Olivier Messiaen managed to continue his creative work, and the performance of Verdi’s Requiem at the Terezin concentration camp, as well as original works by Jewish composers sent there, all condoned and abetted by the notorious Adolf Eichmann, has been documented. The Nazis officially despised “ethnic” music, but they did not forbid jazz during the occupation of France, and in September 1941 there was a Festival of Swing at the Salon Pleyel.1 Classical concerts of all kinds continued, although many players were torn between their love for music and their desire to perform it and their reluctance even to seem to collaborate with the hated regime (unfortunately some, as we know, were willing collaborators). Nadia Boulanger and much of the Fontainebleau crowd, including the Casadesus family, moved to the United States to avoid the carnage; while here they taught, performed, absorbed American culture, and spread their own. Igor Stravinsky was able to join his colleagues Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann in Los Angeles, where all lived fairly normal lives—there are delightful film clips of some of these august refugees playing tennis, which somehow makes them seem a little more like the rest of us. French composers Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger joined Austrian Erich Korngold and Americans George Antheil, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson in composing for the movies; with their talents and tastes they made an art form out of the background music so vital to the atmosphere of a film, winning many an Oscar along the way. Quite a few composers and performers found employment at New York City’s New School for Social Research, a truly liberal arts school not unduly worried about less-than-perfect English. Other universities and conservatories also tried to find room for these displaced talents. Epilogue-Envoi 141 Immediately after World War II, serialism seemed the way to go; Pierre Boulez was the leading composer in an increasingly intellectualized music. Boulanger, as she told her Fontainebleau students, thought Boulez had the most brilliant musical mind of the twentieth century, but—accepted as he was as an excellent conductor—his compositions appealed to even fewer people than had Schoenberg’s most austere works. The work started by Edgar Varèse, now dubbed musique concrète, was continued by Frenchman Pierre Schaeffer, who worked with technologically manipulated effects, such as prerecorded bell or percussion sounds juggled on many-tracked machines. Perhaps it was because of all this experimental composition, which most concert subscribers didn’t really care for, or perhaps it was just inevitable, but after World War II classical and popular music seemed to grow farther and farther apart, with most forms of classical music—opera seems to be the exception—losing considerable numbers of their supporters. This loss was gradual, but after the introduction of “hard rock” many young and even middle-aged listeners turned away from the piano or orchestral soundsthathadbeenpartofsomanypopularentertainments(Whoamong us of a “certain age” can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of Tonto and the Lone Ranger?) and that served as a bridge between lighter and more serious music. Nelson Riddle’s elaborately orchestrated arrangements of the songs of Cole Porter, for example, which were at one time much admired as popular entertainment, would now seem inappropriately elaborate and “classical” to most audiences, for they lack the pulsating, pounding beat so essential to contemporary pop. Sadly, jazz, once thought of as the quintessentially American form of music, suffered a decline in popularity comparable to that of classical music. Today it is at least as difficult, if not more so, to find a respectable jazz-oriented radio station as it is to find a classical one. Headlines like “Jazz Impresarios Try New Idea: Jazz, Just Jazz”2 are indications of how hard it has become to keep alive this music, which was once the most popular America had produced and which was regarded as our one indigenous art form. Had jazz, like so much twentieth-century art music, become inaccessible , or had it...

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