The Great American Symphony: Music, the Depression, and War

2. SYMPHONIES OF THE MID- TO LATE THIRTIES

31 2 SYMPHONIES OF THE MID- TO LATE THIRTIES The year 1935 found the United States in the midst of social and economic crisis. The nation was threatening to come apart. Swift action was needed. Newly elected president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his federal administration immediately launched a wholesale attack on the country’s problems, seeing them as involving not just jobs but also lifestyles. He begged citizens to see themselves as belonging to one extended community , united in seeking the common good. He stressed making a united effort. The twenties belief that only the interests of the individual himself (whether business person, worker, or artist) ought to be paramount in decisions about his activities should and had to be put aside. Together, Roosevelt said, Americans could overcome the problems besetting the nation. In a radio address made to Young Democratic Clubs of America on 24 August 1935, the president spoke about the “higher obligation ” to analyze and set forth the “national needs and ideals which transcend and cut across all lines.” The recent depression, he continued, had taught Americans that no “social class in the community is so richly endowed and so independent of the general community” that it can go it 32 · The Great American Symphony alone: “It is my firm belief that the newer generation of America has a different dream. . . . Your advancement, you hope, is along a broad highway on which thousands of your fellow men and women are advancing with you. . . . The errors of unrestrained individualism” have been serious. If “each and every one of us were marching along a separate road . . . , if we insist on choosing different roads most of us will not reach our common destination.”1 Fourteen months later, on 28 October 1936, Roosevelt traveled to Bedloe’s Island, New York, to deliver an address on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Statue of Liberty. He insisted that Americans had “but a single language, the universal language of aspiration.” The aspiration of America continued to be upward, toward a better life— economically, socially, and culturally. “Even in times as troubled and uncertain as these I still hold to the faith that a better civilization than any we have known is in store for America.”2 Two and a half years later, he would speak specifically about the arts: “Art in America has always belonged to the people and it has never been the property of an academy or a class. . . . While American artists have discovered a new obligation to the society in which they live, they have no compulsion to be limited in method or manner of expression.”3 The thinking of many classical composers was now coinciding with that of their president. The lack of financial support, as jobs and monetary grants disappeared and the core of supporters shrank, forced recalcitrants to realize that artists are not so exceptional that they can “go it alone.” The principle that the interests of the artist alone are to be paramount in determination of what constitutes art was abandoned. The philosophy of modernism, especially that encompassing a conscious and deliberate break with the past and a hunt for novel forms of expression, was put aside. This large number of American composers became caught up in the notion of service and the optimistic spirit pervading the new administration . Those who had been modernists proceeded to reexamine the premises behind the music revolution of the twenties in which they had participated . A rapport began to develop between the arts and the national spirit and aspirations that Roosevelt was trying to foster. These musicians did not see their actions as surrender to the doctrine of mediocrity and Symphonies of the Mid- to Late Thirties · 33 abandonment of high artistic principles. Roosevelt’s New Deal dream was admittedly a tactic to raise the morale of Americans and encourage them to pull together. Yet it was, at least in part, also a vision meant to stand as a beacon for all in its expectation of a better future. The artist’s commitment was toward realizing this vision. On the other hand, a minority of artists would take slight notice of the Roosevelt administration’s desire for accessibility and would maintain the severity of their styles. They continued during the thirties to write in challenging modes that tested the ordinary listener’s understanding. Most of them were older musicians, including Carl Ruggles (b. 1876), Wallingford Riegger...