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Chapter 3 Of Maestros and Minstrels: American Jewish Composers between Black Vernacular and European Art Music Jonathan Karp This essay describes a contest, informal but nonetheless real, to create the definitively American musical masterpiece. The contest took place during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, a period in which American Jews had begun to play an important role in American musical life. Though the exact nature of the prize would become clear only late in the game, from the start the participants recognized that victory would bring both material success and critical acclaim. The unspoken rules were likewise straightforward: devise the ideal musical synthesis that weds America ’s indigenous folk spirit to the formal rigors of the European art music tradition.1 Of course, such an aim could not be disentangled from the era’s racial conceptions. Since the late nineteenth century and particularly under the influence of the Czech composer Anton Dvořák (as discussed below), a growing number of musicians and critics had acclaimed African American music as the nation’s most authentic and vivid sound. Such praise of black music—partly rooted in a romanticizing of black culture—often went hand in hand with a prejudice whose effect was to deny African American musicians themselves an equal chance for success. The operative assumption was that blacks lacked a key qualification for victory: the capacity to handle classical and not merely vernacular musical approaches. In light of this imputed disability, the winning contestant, though not black, must be able to venture into—and emerge intact from—the world of black musical culture . He (a male gender was likewise assumed) must refine the ‘‘primitive’’ genius of black folk music into a work of enduring classical value. He must straddle multiple worlds: black and white, American and European, high and low. As in any competition, self-assurance could provide a psychic edge. The vaunted capacity of Jews to function as mediators between different seg- 58 Jonathan Karp ments of non-Jewish society (a stereotype, as discussed below, deriving from their European heritage as a ‘‘middleman minority’’)—between different classes and estates, religious groups, ethnicities, and castes—helped give composers of Jewish background a leg up. In fact, the propagation of an image of Jews as a uniquely integrative force took place on so many levels that at times the contest misleadingly appeared to be confined to the world of Jewish music makers alone. For our present purposes that world can be broken down into two basic camps: the first, referred to here as the ‘‘minstrels ,’’ were the songwriters of Tin Pan Alley, the popular music business headquartered in downtown Manhattan; the second, the ‘‘maestros,’’ comprised the art music composers of uptown. Yet despite their contrasting addresses, the members of both groups had originated from some of the same neighborhoods, most recently the Lower East Side, or sections of Brooklyn and the Bronx. And even earlier they (or their immediate forebears ) had flourished together in the towns and cities of Eastern Europe, where our account of their battle begins. Minstrels The image of Jews as preeminent musical and cultural mediators was rooted in both sociological realities and pervasive stereotypes. Indeed, the Jews’ ‘‘disproportionality’’ in certain industries and occupations constitutes a key fact of their historical experience. Not merely an alien religious group in premodern Europe, Jews have constituted a legal, social, and economic category as well. Existing outside the regular feudal and estate categories , but not isolated from them, their very presence in Christendom was partly a consequence of the roles they typically played as economic mediators between different sectors of the non-Jewish society.2 This middleman functionality persisted into the nineteenth century, despite the fact that Jews came under intense pressure to divest themselves of their occupational ‘‘peculiarities.’’3 By the late nineteenth century, impressionistic associations in the press between Jews and specific professions provided ballast to charges that the Jews refused to assimilate, and for anti-Semitic accusations that they sought a sinister domination over society.4 Many of the occupations that drew disproportionate numbers of middle-class Jews—in addition to commerce, law, and medicine—involved activities of cultural mediation, such as education and journalism, as well as brokerage as agents, dealers, impresarios, critics, and interpreters of the arts, including music, a pattern that continued among the two and a half million Jews who emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States between 1880 and 1924. It...

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