RECORDINGS IN REVIEW

1 7 5 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W D E W E Y F A U L K N E R Americans are a positive people, always bustling or bulling ahead, always driving towards some wondrous future, ignoring or demolishing their past, ever onward and upward. (Such is the view of many foreigners, and surely they are correct.) Yet America’s poets and novelists often dwell on loss and vacancy, and its composers have often depicted a vast emptiness at the heart of the U.S.A., both physically (the prairie in Copland’s Billy the Kid) and spiritually (William Billings’ ‘David’s Lament Over Absalom’). The compositions of Samuel Barber and William Schuman, both born a hundred years ago, are informed by this great want, though the former’s works dwell on its private aspects and the latter’s on its public ones. The American musical environment in which Barber and Schuman began to take their place was shaped by many forces, but two components had an especially powerful impact in the Thirties and Forties. Network radio from 1927 brought exposure to classical music, and electrical recording made fairly accurate reproduction possible. But in 1928 the Music Appreciation Hour featuring the grandfatherly Walter Damrosch debuted on NBC. Its positive aspect was teaching about the elements of music. Its negative one was to impose a canon on musical history, a canon that most 1 7 6 F A U L K N E R Y emphatically did not include modern music, which Damrosch termed ‘‘experiments’’. Thus the medium that should have helped modern American music the most was used to turn the public against it. The ‘‘Music Appreciation Racket,’’ as Virgil Thomson characterized it, valorized The Symphony. In The State of Music (1939) Thomson wrote of the new canon, ‘‘ninety percent of it is the same fifty pieces [that] were written between 1775 and 1875 and are called Symphony Number Something-or-Other.’’ When Serge Koussevitzky, America’s greatest champion of the modern, commissioned works for the Boston Symphony Orchestra centennial in 1930, he received symphonies from Igor Stravinsky, Albert Roussel, Serge Prokofie√, Arthur Honegger, Ernst Krenek, and Howard Hanson, along with Aaron Copland’s Symphonic Ode, which Copland termed ‘‘a big one-movement symphony.’’ Symphonies were a goal and a demand. Could The Great American Symphony be far o√? The performing agent of the new canon became Arturo Toscanini . On national radio with the New York Philharmonic from 1927, ‘‘The Maestro’’ had the NBC Symphony created for him in 1937 by David Sarno√; it broadcast regularly until 1954. Toscanini was the public’s idol, but he was also the incarnation of all the reactionary impulses in Music Appreciation, especially its opposition to modern music. To many listeners, if Toscanini played or recorded it, the music was worth one’s while. If not, it simply didn’t exist, especially if it was American and modern. Still, Toscanini was at times persuaded to play a few things later than Richard Strauss, and in response to public taste composers like Copland created music that spoke in ‘‘the simplest possible terms,’’ American terms. Not surprisingly the exponent of American music for a time became Roy Harris from Oklahoma. His Symphony 1933, recorded by Koussevitzky, presented a new wideopen -spaces idiom, one that reached its apogee in the Symphony No. 3 of 1937 and the Folk Song Symphony (No. 4) of 1939. Toscanini liked and broadcast the third symphony, Koussevitzky recorded it, and it was widely hailed as the sign of American musical maturity. Simple, appealing, and symphonic became the keys to success. In this atmosphere our two centenarians began their careers as R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W 1 7 7 R composers. One would become the great creator of popular pieces that retained integrity; the other would become a major symphonist . Neither one would create The Great American Symphony, an ideal that, like The Great American Novel, has vanished into the misty memories of the aging. Nor would they create the happy, positive pieces that...