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Music for All

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MUSIC FOR ALL

Music in FDR’s America

In 1934, Arnold Schoenberg moved to California, bought a Ford sedan, and declared, “I was driven into Paradise.” By the beginning of the forties, when the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and their respective satellites controlled Europe from Madrid to Warsaw, crowds of cultural luminaries sought refuge in the United States, and they were greeted by a significant irony. Europeans had long depicted America as a wilderness of vulgarity; the cult of the dollar had driven Gustav Mahler to an early grave, or so his widow claimed. Now, with Europe in the grip of totalitarianism, America had unexpectedly become the last hope of civilization. The impresario and Zionist activist Meyer Weisgal, in a telegram to the Austrian director Max Reinhardt, put it this way: “IF HITLER DOESN’T WANT YOU I’LL TAKE YOU.” Many leading composers of the early twentieth century—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, and Eisler, among others—settled in the United States. Entire artistic communities of Paris, Berlin, and the former St. Petersburg reconstituted themselves in neighborhoods of New York and Los Angeles. Alma Mahler was herself among the refugees; she escaped the German invasion of France by hiking across the Pyrenees with her latest husband, Franz Werfel, and by the end of 1940 she was living on Los Tilos Road in the Hollywood Hills.

That such disparate personalities as the White Russian Stravinsky and the hard-core Communist Eisler could feel temporarily at home in America was a tribute to the inclusive spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served as president from 1933 until his death in 1945. A patrician with a populist flair, Roosevelt embodied what came to be known as the “middlebrow” vision of American culture—the idea that Democratic capitalism operating at full tilt could still accommodate high culture of the European variety.

Back in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks had complained that America was caught in a false dichotomy between “highbrow” and “lowbrow,” between “academic pedantry and pavement slang.” He called for a middle-ground culture that would fuse intellectual substance with communicative power. In the thirties, the middlebrow became something like a national pastime: symphonic music was broadcast on the radio, literary properties furnished plots for Hollywood A pictures, novels by Thomas Mann and other émigrés were disseminated through the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The influx of European genius coincided with an upsurge of native composition. Pay no heed to the muses of Europe, Ralph Waldo Emerson had told American artists and intellectuals in 1837; by the 1940s the muses were studying for U.S. citizenship exams, and young American composers had found their voice. Aaron Copland wrote music in praise of the Wild West, Abraham Lincoln, rodeos, and Mexican saloons. Alongside Samuel Barber, Roy Harris, Marc Blitzstein, and other more or less like-minded colleagues, Copland reached out to a new mass public with the aid of radio, recording, and film, and, surprisingly, the U.S. government itself. The Works Progress Administration, inaugurated in 1935, launched an ambitious scheme of federal arts projects, and some ninety-five million people were said to have attended presentations by the Federal Music Project over a two-and-a-half-year period. The Democratic masses were evidently taking hold of an art that had long been the property of the elite.

Hence the exhilaration that Blitzstein felt in 1936, when he wrote an article titled “Coming—the Mass Audience!” for the magazine Modern Music: “The great mass of people enter at last the field of serious music. Radio is responsible, the talkies, the summer concerts, a growing appetite, a hundred things; really the fact of an art and a world in progress. You can no more stop it than you can stop an avalanche.”

The mass audience came, but it did not remain. No sooner had classical music entered the mainstream arena than it began to face insurmountable obstacles. One problem was political. Populists of Blitzstein’s type subscribed not just to the vaguely social-Democratic rhetoric of Roosevelt’s New Deal but also to the semi-Communistic doctrines of the Popular Front. When the New Deal came under political attack in 1938, Roosevelt promptly retreated, letting the federal arts projects collapse, and suddenly the picture was a lot less pretty.

There was the deeper problem of classical music’s true place in American culture. At some level Americans did not seem to believe that a Europe-based art form could speak for their condition; to most, Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman was a more convincing musical answer to Emerson’s demand for an American Scholar. Yet Copland and others of his generation succeeded in forging sounds so charged with patriotic feeling that they endure in movies and the media today. During the Depression and the Second World War, classical music, whether in the form of Beethoven symphonies or Copland ballets, encapsulated America’s we’re-all-in-this-together spirit; it showed how individual efforts could be pooled together in a “common discipline,” as Roosevelt said in his inaugural speech of 1933. That music has not lost its binding power. Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio for Strings plays on the radio.

Radio Music

Three major technological advances altered the musical landscape from the twenties onward. First, electrical recording allowed for sound quality of unprecedented richness and dynamic range. Second, radio transmission allowed for the live broadcast of music coast to coast. Third, sound was added to motion pictures. Common to all these breakthroughs was the innovation of the microphone, which had the effect of freeing classical music from the elite concert halls in which it had long been confined, and, consequently, from the domain of city dwellers and the wealthy. The millions whom Beethoven longed to embrace in his “Ode to Joy” showed up in the Hooper ratings—up to ten million for Arturo Toscanini’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony, and millions more for the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

Electrical recording set off a rush to rerecord the classics of the orchestral repertory. Leopold Stokowski and his Philadelphia Orchestra led the way with a disc of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre in July 1925. Toscanini was not far behind, and with the publicity machine of the radio-recording conglomerate of NBC and RCA behind him he would go on to sell some twenty million records. NBC’s first nationwide radio broadcast took place in November 1926; it carried a concert by the New York Symphony under the direction of Walter Damrosch, a genial conductor and lecturer who was to become a radio star in his own right. A rival network, CBS, inaugurated its existence in 1927 with Deems Taylor’s opera The King’s Henchman. Sound film created new careers for a host of composers, who fleshed out on-screen action with orchestral brouhaha. Contrary to legend, Al Jolson’s cry of “Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” was not America’s first experience of the power of sound film; in 1926, Warner Brothers created a nationwide sensation by releasing a film of Don Juan with rousing synchronized accompaniment by the New York Philharmonic.

To some extent, the radio vogue for classical music was imposed on the American public from above. One reason for the trend was utilitarian: the networks feared a government takeover of the radio industry, and by broadcasting classical music they could make a gesture toward “public service” and thus stave off the threat. Another reason was cultural: radio and record-company executives were naturally inclined to support classical programming, whether or not audience surveys demanded it. Many were émigrés or the first-generation offspring of immigrant families, and they considered Beethoven and Tchaikovsky a birthright. The radio pioneer David Sarnoff, who grew up in the same New York Russian-Jewish communities that produced George Gershwin, had declared back in 1915 that one of the advantages of the “radio music box” was that rural listeners would be able to enjoy symphonies by the fireplace. By 1921 Sarnoff had become general manager of the Radio Corporation of America, and five years later he created NBC. All along, he insisted that radio should aspire to class and culture. “I regard radio as a sort of cleansing instrument for the mind,” he once said, “just as the bathtub is for the body.”

Yet, even without the prompting of the radio executives, Americans of the period avidly sought the cultural improvement that classical music was presumed to provide. The middlebrow ideal was to be sophisticated without being pretentious, worldly but not effete, and classical music with an American accent fit the bill. NBC’s “Blue” network might carry Ohio State versus Indiana one afternoon and a Lotte Lehmann recital the next. Benny Goodman recorded both Mozart and swing. The classically trained composer Morton Gould appeared on radio as the star of the Cresta Blanca Carnival, and Harold Shapero switched between swing arrangements and neoclassical composition. Alan Shulman, a cellist in the NBC Symphony, composed “serious” works, joined an NBC jazz ensemble called New Friends of Rhythm (“Toscanini’s Hep Cats,” they were called), and mentored the master pop arranger Nelson Riddle.

There was no bigger star of radio than Toscanini himself, whom Sarnoff introduced to the national NBC audience on Christmas Day 1937. At the close of the first season, the New York Times editorialized ponderously that “Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Sibelius, Brahms are made manifest in many a remote farm house and in many a plain home.” Sarnoff’s radio idyll was complete.

The trouble was that Toscanini could not make classical music American. As the Times’s list of names suggested, the Maestro’s canon was focused on European composers and stopped short of the present, Sibelius having fallen silent. During his tenure with the New York Philharmonic, from 1926 to 1936, Toscanini had ignored American music week after week, conducting only six native works in ten years. He evinced little interest in living composers of any nationality, apart from a few Italians whom he knew personally. At NBC, his taste broadened slightly, and a smattering of American pieces—Roy Harris’s Third Symphony, Copland’s El Salón México, Barber’s Adagio for Strings, and Gershwin’s An American in Paris, among others—appeared on his programs. On a typical night, though, Beethoven and Brahms prevailed.

Two other celebrity conductors—Leopold Stokowski, who served briefly as co-conductor of the NBC Symphony, and Serge Koussevitzky, who led the Boston Symphony—treated new and American works far more respectfully. “Dee next Beethoven vill from Colorado come,” Koussevitzky declared. By the end of his twenty-five-year reign in Boston, the Russian émigré had hosted an astounding 85 premieres of American scores and 195 American works altogether. He also commissioned such international masterpieces as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, and Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony. Stokowski, who had promoted Edgard Varèse and other ultra-moderns back in the twenties, introduced two big new Schoenberg works, the Violin Concerto and the Piano Concerto. Between them, Stokowski and Koussevitzky created much of the core repertory of the mid-twentieth century. Yet they failed to stimulate the radio executives and the corporate heads who bought advertising. Stokowski’s advocacy of new music reportedly alarmed the higher-ups at General Motors, which had begun sponsoring the NBC Symphony. A few months after the premiere of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, it was announced that Stokowski’s contract would not be renewed, and composers lost their most forceful supporter.

Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson, the same dyspeptic duo who tried to stamp out Sibelius, mocked the cult of Toscanini, Walter Damrosch’s music-appreciation lectures for children, and other instances of classical hype in the thirties. If their diatribes were egregiously snooty in tone—“It is highly doubtful,” Adorno sniffed, “if the boy in the subway whistling the main theme of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony actually has been gripped by that music”—the critique of the middlebrow mentality sometimes hit home. The classical conglomerates, Thomson noted, confined themselves to a repertory of fifty masterpieces, because they were the easiest to sell. Yet the failure to support the new led inexorably to the decline of classical music as a popular pastime, for nothing bound it to contemporary life. A venerable art form was set to become one more passing fad in a ravenous consumer culture.

Young Copland

Aaron Copland hardly looked the part of the Great American Composer. He was a tall, wiry man with an angular, bespectacled face, resembling an awkward office clerk in a Hollywood genre picture. He was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants; he was an ardent leftist; he was gay. Yet he had a plausible claim to the evanescent mythology of the frontier and the Wild West. In the late nineteenth century, his maternal grandfather, Aaron Mittenthal, operated an emporium in Dallas, near such outfits as W. R. Hinckley’s tin shop and Ott & Pfaffle’s gun store. According to family legend, Mittenthal once hired the outlaw Frank James, brother of the famous Jesse James.

Copland heard stories of the West, but he spent his childhood in Brooklyn. His father ran a department store at the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue, and the family lived above it. Copland later described the neighborhood as “simply drab” and claimed that he had received no musical stimulus from it, although he could hardly have been unaffected by the diverse clamor of popular and classical airs that enlivened any Brooklyn or Manhattan block at the turn of the century.

Copland’s background was, as it happens, very similar to George Gershwin’s. Both were Brooklyn-born, a little over two years apart. Both were Russian-Jewish in origin. Both studied composition with a man named Rubin Goldmark. And they haunted the same locales in their youth; Gershwin attended recitals at Wanamaker’s department store, while Copland made his debut there in 1917. Copland noted some of the similarities in his memoirs, but said that no personal bond formed between them: “When we were finally face to face at some party, with the opportunity for conversation, we found nothing to say to each other!” Each may have envied the other’s advantages—Copland’s intellectual acclaim, Gershwin’s fame and wealth.

While Gershwin developed his craft in the back rooms of Tin Pan Alley, Copland followed more conventional avenues of European study. In 1921, at the age of twenty, he attended the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and plunged into the carnival of twenties styles. Walking through the city on his first day, he saw a poster for the Swedish Ballet and found himself sitting through Cocteau’s absurdist ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with music by five of Les Six. Over the next three years he showed impeccable taste in concertgoing, attending the first nights of Milhaud’s Creation of the World and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Koussevitzky’s performances of Stravinsky’s Octet and Honegger’s Pacific 231, and the Paris premiere of Pierrot lunaire. At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore he timidly approached James Joyce to ask about a musical passage in Ulysses. All told, he was very much in the middle of the action, although he observed more than he participated; it was his fellow student Virgil Thomson who danced all night at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

Copland’s teacher was the organist, composer, and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who honed the compositional skills of half the major American composers of the rising generation—Copland, Thomson, Harris, and Blitzstein, among others. Through Boulanger, Copland absorbed the aesthetics of the twenties—the revolt against Germanic grandiosity, the yen for lucidity and grace, the cultivation of Baroque and Classical forms. She preached, in other words, the gospel according to Igor Stravinsky. If you were to take a Stravinsky score such as the Octet or the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, loosen up the tightly controlled structure, and insert a few melodies of the New England hymnal or urban-jazzy type, you would have the beginnings of a Copland work such as Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring. The entire style is implicit in the “Pastorale” of Histoire du soldat.

In 1923 Boulanger did Copland the gigantic favor of introducing him to Koussevitzky, who, she had heard, would be taking over the Boston Symphony the following season. After hearing Copland bang out his Cortège macabre on the piano (Prokofiev happened to be in the room as well), Koussevitzky proposed that Copland write a work for organ and orchestra, with Boulanger as soloist. Walter Damrosch also promised the young composer a place on his New York Symphony concerts. Thus, Copland’s Organ Symphony was booked for performances in both New York and Boston—a sensational send-off for a composer aged twenty-four. The symphony begins in an atmosphere of spacious mystery, with a sweet, ambiguous flute melody unfolding over sustained notes on the viola. The ending is all action and gesture and dancing motion; the solo instrument begins to sound less like the voice of God and more like an organ at a fairground. The journey from nocturnal meditation to communal celebration brings to mind Ives’s American idylls, but Copland executes his design with a clarity and an economy that do credit to his French training.

Copland showed an uncommon flair for the lowlier arts of organization and publicity. He recognized that composers would make little headway with the public unless they formed a common front, as Les Six had done in Paris. “The day of the neglected American composer is over,” he wrote in 1926. The announcement had been made before, but Copland made it stick. He helped design Koussevitzky’s epoch-making American programming in Boston and also became the dominant figure in the League of Composers, which had formed as an alternative to the modernist-minded, racially bigoted International Composers’ Guild. (Carl Ruggles promptly dubbed the league a “filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews.”) With Roger Sessions, another Brooklyn-born music fiend, Copland developed the Copland-Sessions Concerts, which tried to bridge the gap between modernist and populist camps. A spirit of camaraderie and derring-do broke out among younger American composers. Virgil Thomson later fondly called this group Copland’s “commando unit.”

Copland acquired a degree of notoriety with two jazz-inflected works, the Music for the Theatre of 1925 and the Piano Concerto of 1926. Although his comprehension of jazz went not too much deeper than that of his Parisian contemporaries (“It began, I suppose, on some negro’s dull tomtom in Africa,” he wrote), he did send a strong rhythmic jolt into American concert music. The jabbing, bluesy riffs of the Piano Concerto point the way to Leonard Bern-stein’s West Side Story, while the climactic theme of Music for the Theatre’s “Burlesque” sounds like Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River,” written two years later. As Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack observes, the racy hint of striptease in the title can also be felt in the raucous, how-ya-doin’-honey orchestration.

Having “done” jazz, Copland moved on to the dissonant high modern. His Piano Variations of 1930 is a monolithic masterpiece that threatens to surpass the ultra-modern school of Varèse and Ruggles in the relentlessness of its attack. It is based on a broadly gesticulating four-note motif—E, C, D-sharp, C-sharp an octave above—that Copland probably extracted from the slow movement of Stravinsky’s Octet. The theme is subjected to an astringent sequence of permutations that at times approaches twelve-tone writing. By the end, the music is heading in a tonal direction: grand triads of A major and E major ring out in the treble, though with sharp dissonances attached. A new American harmony, brash and bluesy, grows from primordial chaos.

Copland’s early works won raves from progressive critics. Paul Rosenfeld, Varèse’s celebrant, called them “harsh and solemn, like the sentences of brooding rabbis.” But brooding did not pay the bills. In 1938, Pollack tells us, the composer’s checking account contained $6.93, and he was asking himself whether he should seek refuge in academia. He continued to struggle with feelings of spiritual hollowness, of social irrelevance. “I might force myself a little,” he wrote in his diary in 1927, contemplating the possibility of getting drunk. “My everpresent fear is that by thinking that I know myself, i.e. my normal self completely, I may circumscribe whatever latent possibilities I may have.” On Christmas Day of 1930 he wrote: “How does one deepen one’s experience of life. That is a problem that interests me deeply. Would serving as dish washer for a week help—or doing a term in prison? Or the Gurdjieff Method?” Copland soon found an answer to these nagging questions: his spiritual plunge, his drunken adventure, would take the form of leftist politics.

Popular Front Music

On October 24, 1929, Wall Street posted nine billion dollars of losses in a few hours, and the Great Depression began. The economic collapse staggered America’s urban elites, but it came as no great shock to farmers and agricultural workers, who had remained ungilt during the Gilded Age and had not roared during the Roaring Twenties.

Most rural Americans were still part of an agrarian society, functioning largely without indoor plumbing and electricity. Back in the final years of the nineteenth century, resentment against the powers that be had spawned the People’s or Populist Party, which mixed utopian socialism with religious revivalism and old-fashioned dem-agoguery. Populism was the first effective progressive movement in American politics, even though it never caught fire at the national level. Crucial to its rhetoric was a sacralization of the heartland and the Wild West, where, it was thought, a pure American spirit had resisted the encroachments of industrial capitalism. Populism entered the mainstream with the onset of the Depression, altering the vocabulary of urban intellectuals and Democratic politicians. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural speech, mimicked Populist jargon when he decried the “practices of the unscrupulous money changers” and demanded “a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”