Music Musique: French and American Piano Composition in the Jazz Age

5. American Composers in the 1920s, Part I

5 American Composers in the 1920s, Part I Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson T he four most important events of the early 1920s in the United States in the development of classical music on these shores centered around compositions of Charles Ives, Igor Stravinsky, George Gershwin, and Aaron Copland. The year 1921 brought the long-delayed publication of Ives’s monumental Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord. His most important work for solo piano, the sonata was written between 1908 and 1915, but was virtually unknown until its composer decided to have it published at his own expense (today, the piece is still hardly a staple of the recital stage). Equally long overdue was the American premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1922, nine years after its premiere in Paris. George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was featured in Paul Whiteman’s eclectic Carnegie Hall concert in 1924. Finally, Aaron Copland returned from his Paris-based studies with Nadia Boulanger bearing, at his teacher’s request, an organ concerto for her to perform with American orchestras. But were these avant-garde works the music most American concertgoers were hearing? A glance at the microfilmed programs of the New York Philharmonic during those years gives us the answer, and with the exception of the instantly popular Gershwin piece, the answer is a resounding no. Program after program for concerts in the 1920s lists the usual repertoire—Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner for the main course, with a smattering of Grieg, Dvořák, Smetena, and others for ethnic flavor. Russian composers are well represented, especially Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Rimsky-Korsakov, and the French are not ignored. Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune and Nocturnes for orchestra appear from time to time, as do works by Ravel, d’Indy, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Berlioz; and Chabrier’s España seems to have been a special favorite. (Oddly enough, the Andante from Debussy’s String Quartet, one assumes in an orchestrated version, shows up on a program or two.) Once in a great while an American work is featured—MacDowell’s Second Orchestral Suite, loosely based on American Indian themes, for example. Music Musique 44 One encounters a few unfamiliar names—Zdeněk Fibich (1850–1900), a now virtually forgotten Czech composer, his compatriot Vitězslav Novák (1870–1949), and Bohemian-born Josef Stransky (1872–1936), yet another composer/conductor who followed Dvořák to America. As part-time conductor of the New York Philharmonic, Stransky scheduled many of his own compositions, even, on more than one occasion, leading a complete program of his own works. In addition to MacDowell, among the few American composers we find George Chadwick (1854–1931) of the Boston School, and we know that Amy Beach was a welcome guest performer of her own Piano Concerto at many orchestral concerts. Toward the end of the decade, under German-born conductor Walter Damrosch’s baton, Gershwin’s Concerto in F and American in Paris were both heard, and by that time performances of his initial success, Rhapsody In Blue, had become standard. In short, today’s concertgoer would find very little difference between the music on their subscription series and what their great-grandparents were willing to pay good money to hear. In fact, the only really startling change is the price of tickets, which in 1921 ranged from fifty cents to two dollars. Yet the European tradition, with an emphasis on the Germanic style, still dominated American classical music. Chadwick, Beach, and even the slightly more “Americanized” MacDowell, had not in any significant way broken with it. But in no way does this change the fact that many new ideas were brewing behind the scenes. Most salient is the case of Charles Ives (1874–1954). In the opinion of many, an opinion with which I concur, Ives was the most innovative American composer of his day, perhaps of any day, exemplifying the American traits of independence and individuality. Of course, Ives admired Beethoven—he quotes the four-note theme from the Fifth Symphony in three of the four movements of the Concord Sonata—but after listening to an entire program of the master’s music, Ives found that he longed for something other than the major-minor tonicdominant formulas.1 Consequently there are few references to these timehonored systems in the sonata. But neither do we hear a Schoenbergian twelve-tone framework. Instead we have a compendium—a layering, if...