The Young Composer in America

Before going to the United States, I had only the vaguest notions of American music—a state of affairs not unusual in Europe, where the names of Copland, and now, increasingly, of Sessions, are respected, but of nobody else, unless one mentions Gershwin. To the European, American music is still obsessed with an overt nationalism, as it was indeed in the twenties and thirties, when the prime concern was American folk music, and above all, jazz. At that stage the American composer needed an easily assumed and recognizable identity to distinguish himself from the European, and he self-consciously set about finding it. In Europe the only countries then cultivating a specifically nineteenth-century style of Romantic musical nationalism, with the implied tinge of self-indulgent sentimentality possible in the lack of a sterner musical tradition, were the musically under-developed ones, or rather those which, for various historical reasons, had lost their musical traditions, perhaps even hundreds of years ago: Spain and England. The musical nationalism of Hungary, with Bartók and Kodály, was quite a different matter, indebted to the unique half-oriental character of her folk music, introducing rhythmic, melodic and harmonic progressions new to the symphonic concert hall; on the other hand, contemporary Russian musical nationalism, despite a wealth of similarly interesting folk music, lost its chances of comparable spontaneity when composers were obliged to follow an official ‘party line.’ Probably the American sort of nationalism combined something of a spontaneous interest in and reaction to the new possibilities of folk music and jazz, comparable to the Hungarian situation, with the self-conscious bandwagon jumping and the substitution for real musical substance of folksily wistful meanderings current in England at that period.