Alec Wilder

6. The Music of Alec Wilder: An Assessment

111 6 The Music of Alec Wilder An Assessment in histories of american music in the twentieth century, Alec Wilder has stood just where he wanted to be: in the gaps. While his claims of embracing obscurity never seem completely genuine, he certainly took pleasure in testing the limits of traditional categories and prejudices, writing music that makes us question how and why conventional margins had been defined.“Labels bore me,” he wrote (The Search, 41). Unfortunately, his self-definition has been an obstacle to a full assessment of his significance and contributions. Having no true home in either jazz or classical spheres, his work has been too readily dismissed or misunderstood in equal measure from different directions. Fortunately, questions of piety and purity have become quaint relics in an age of pluralism. We can now appreciate Wilder’s anticipation of a twenty-firstcentury culture that celebrates diversity. If he was writing music that was poorly understood by his contemporaries, he was suffering the fate of all original thinkers , exploring obscurities that would later become widely familiar. He was not the only American composer of his era to reach across traditional boundaries— Copland incorporated popular and folk idioms into scores for ballets and films, and Gershwin translated the language of popular song into works for the concert hall and opera house—but he uniquely blended his influences into a language all 112 his own, a true musical melting pot incisively reflecting the culture from which it emerged. But let us set aside questions of style and classification. How does the music stand up when considered on its own terms? Listeners are often struck by the tunefulness of Wilder’s creations, whether a popular song or a concerto or sonata. To Robert Wason,Wilder “simply knew how to write a beautiful tune.”1 For Mark Tucker, Wilder was a “master of the expressive interval.”2 Gunther Schuller has described the “Serenade” theme from the Jazz Suite for four horns (1951) as “a melody worthy of an Ellington or a Gershwin, or a Schubert, and arguably one of the most beautiful melodies ever composed in [the twentieth] century.”3 Wilder himself felt that he had a “natural flair for melody,” that “tunes have always come easy” (Life Story, 42). Indeed, many of his melodies, in music of all types, easily satisfy one of his own standards of measurement in American Popular Song: that a good tune should be capable of standing alone, without accompaniment or any other contextualizing factors. At the same time,Wilder was equally devoted to a melody’s harmonic setting. As he explained in American Popular Song, some effective melodies are “conceived in terms of harmony” and may not work so well in isolation (282). To his popular songs he brought the harmonic language of late romanticism. To his music for the concert hall he brought the language of jazz harmony. The personality and distinction of his musical language in general are as much determined by his chord constructions and progressions as by the melodies they support. Wilder aspired in several ways to be more than a skilled melodist.Good melodies alone, he felt, “don’t provide an adequate emotional reward” (Life Story, 42). This is one reason he invested so much time and passion in the labors of instrumental composition, working with formal structures larger than a thirty-two-bar song.The movements of his sonatas,concertos,and quintets are rich with thematic relations, motivic development, contrapuntal complexity, and intermovement connections.They represent distinguished contributions to the repertoire for all the instruments, including some that have traditionally been underexplored. For students everywhere who work tirelessly in practice rooms and rehearsal studios perfecting their technique and musicianship, and their teachers,Wilder’s work is a treasure. That does not mean, however, that his large instrumental works blaze new trails in formal construction, on a par with the freshness and originality of his harmonic language or stylistic hybridizations. He set out only to master standard instrumental forms, not to revolutionize their conception. In truth, he worked most comfortably within relatively modest frameworks; at heart, to use his own a l e c w i l d e r | The Music of Alec Wilder 113 self-description, he was a “miniaturist” (The Search, 41). When he did broaden his formal ambitions, as in some works for large ensembles or some movements from the solo sonatas, his music can seem...