The Music Uptown

American Decades

THE MUSIC UPTOWN

The Symphonic Scene

Classical music in 1910s America was still strongly influenced by European traditions. An increasing number of Americans had access to symphonic music, thanks to the proliferation of symphony orchestras in cities and towns across the United States and the growing recording industry. (Both the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Boston Symphony were recording regularly by 1918.) Most major orchestras had been founded in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and the New York Philharmonic was three-quarters of a century old in 1917. Nevertheless, most American musicians and conductors went abroad for their training, and concerts given by American orchestras were dominated by works of European masters and new European composers such as Igor Stravinsky and Sergey Prokofiev. Even the orchestral accompaniment (played live) for early feature films was European music: at the 1915 premiere of D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, for instance, the score included works by Franz Schubert, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Gustav Mahler, and Richard Wagner.

A Distinctly American Composer

Ironically, at just this time one of the first major American classical composers was writing his best works, which would not be widely heard for several decades. Connecticut-born Charles Ives wrote music that drew on older musical forms while creating new ones through bold experimentation. Some of his scores, for instance, called for the simultaneous playing of themes in different keys or time signatures. Few of his compositions were performed within twenty years of their composition, and Ives was not taken seriously by the classical-music community until 1947, when his Third Symphony (completed in 1911, first performed in 1945) won the Pulitzer Prize for music. The work that is now his most popular is his Second Sonata for Piano: Concord, Mass., 1840-1860 (1915), with movements titled "Emerson," "Hawthorne," "The Alcotts," and "Thoreau." Ives published this "Concord Sonata" at his own expense in 1919, and it was not performed until 1939. His Fourth Symphony (1916), which mixed marches, ragtime, square-dance tunes, and hymns and included choral singers, was not performed until 1965, though it is now considered among the greatest American symphonies. Other Ives compositions also drew on American works: Genera! William Booth Enters into Heaven (1914) is based on Vachel Lindsay's poem of the same title; Charlie Rutlage (1915) derives from a cowboy ballad; A New England Symphony (1914) includes refrains from Civil War music; and Lincoln: The Great Commoner (1912) includes excerpts from several patriotic tunes. In A New England Symphony and Lincoln, the Great Commoner Ives also made musical reference to earlier American composers, including Lowell Mason, George Frederick Root, Henry Clay Work, Stephen Foster, and Scott Joplin.

Other Symphonic Composers

A few other American composers of the era chose native themes. John Powell's Sonata Virginianesque (1919) draws on southern American folk music. Henry Franklin Belknap Gilbert's Negro Rhapsody (1912) is based on African American vocal and dance music. Henry Cowell's Advertisement (1915), a frantic-sounding composition for the piano, was meant to convey the annoying intrusion of advertisers on twentieth-century American life. Other American composers were inspired by foreign texts and traditions. Charles T. Griffes, for instance, set several of Oscar Wilde's poems to music in 1912, and later in the decade he wrote Sho-Jo (1917), a ballet score influenced by Asian traditions.

American Opera

The foremost opera company in America during the 1910s was the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, though the relatively new Chicago Opera (founded in 1910) quickly became world renowned as well. The programs of American opera companies were heavily dominated by European composers and performers, but several American singers made their marks during the 1910s. Most were women, including Lillian Nordica (who made a series of phonograph records for Columbia in 1911), Rosa Ponselle, Louise Homer, Olive Fremstad, Geraldine Farrar, and Mary Garden. (Farrar and Garden successfully crossed over to the new medium of silent film.) The first major productions of operas by American composers occurred in the 1910s, starting with Frederick Shepherd Converse's The Pipe of Desire at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1910. Also during the decade the Met began an annual competition (with a $10,000 prize) for the best new opera by an American composer. The first winner was Dr. Horatio Parker of Yale University, whose Mona premiered at the Met on 14 March 1912; three years later his Fairyland won the top award from the National Federation of Music Clubs and premiered in Los Angeles. Some new American works were first performed outside major cities. For example, William F. Hanson's Sun Dance, a five-act opera about Native Americans, had its first production in Utah in 1913. Yet most premiered in New York or Chicago, including Reginald DeKoven's The Canterbury Pilgrims and Henry Kimball Hadley's Azora in 1917; Hadley's Bianca and Charles Wadefield Cadman's Shanewis (also with a Native American theme) in 1918; and Joseph Carl Breil's The Legend and John Adam Hugo's The Temple Dancer in 1919.

European Operas in America

Meanwhile, two great European opera composers were writing music that was not only well received by American audiences but also embraced by vaudeville and Tin Pan Alley. Richard Strauss, whose Salome (1905) was widely parodied in burlesque and vaudeville, wrote two new operas during the 1910s that became favorites with American audiences, Der Rosenkavalier (1911) and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912). Jerome Kern spoofed the latter in his 1915 musical, Very Good, Eddie. Giacomo Puccini—whose Madama Butterfly (1904) inspired the hit song "Poor Butterfly"—chose New York City as the site of the world premieres of all four works he wrote in the 1910s: La fanciulla del West (1910, based on American David Belasco's 1905 play The Girl of the Golden West) and Puccini's 1918 triptych, Il trittico: Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi.

Sources:

Gilbert Chase, America's Music from the Pilgrims to the Present, second edition, revised (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966);

Ronald L, Davis, A History of Music in American Life: Volume //, The Gilded Years, 1865-1920 (Huntington, N.Y.: Robert Krieger, 1980);

H. Wiley Hitchcock, ed., Music in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

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