Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music

Rating:
Summary: "Who Cares If You Listen?"
Review: This quote, attributed to Milton Babbitt in his 1958 High Fidelity magazine article "The Composer as Specialist," sits in the middle of this intriguing book by Michael Broyles. Never mind that this was more editorial license than Babbitt, and that it haunted Babbitt forevermore. It conveniently divides Broyles's book into two unequal chronological parts: The "before," when composers were mavericks out of necessity, and the "after," when it seemed that every composer in a new aesthetic but not a serialist was saying "I want to be an American maverick too!" Put briefly, this book is all about "unorthodoxy" amongst American composers from Colonial times to today. It is well-written by Broyles, an expert on the history of American classical music and its relationship with culture and society.

Nearly 250 years of unorthodoxy in American music is a huge subject, and Broyles does well by it, if not quite to the extent suggested by the dust jacket blurbs. But that's a matter of the size of the assignment. Without highlighting some mavericks at the expense of others (and some interesting ones have been overlooked), this book would have been much larger. As it is, there is no shortage of material to hold one's interest.

Broyles covers the beginnings of American music with two early mavericks: William Billings in the Colonial era and Anthony Philip Heinrich in the decades prior to the Civil War. Both were mavericks by being composers when this was hardly a socially-acceptable endeavor. Both were self-taught and radical for their time. Billings is remembered for his hymnody. Heinrich is barely remembered at all, but in some respects was a precursor to Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen Foster and Charles Ives. The post-Civil War decades of the 19th century largely get glanced over; these decades were hard times for this maverick tradition: The establishment of symphony orchestras in America during this period, led by European conductors, marked a sea change toward European - or at least European-influenced - art music.

Broyles conveniently divides the 20th century in half: "before" and "after" the "tyranny of serialism" that took hold at mid-century. The first two decades were dominated by two mavericks: Charles Ives, the private composer who waited decades for much of his music to be performed, and Leo Ornstein, the Russian firebrand, newly in America and concertizing with his dissonant keyboard compositions.

The 1920s roared with the ultramodernist movement, including Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, Ruth Crawford, Henry Cowell, George Antheil, and even Aaron Copland in his formative years. Much of this ultramodernist "outbreak" took place in the brief 1922 - 1926 period, which Broyles calls American music's Cambrian Explosion. The ultramodernists didn't find public audiences for their radical music, so they simply did what the serialists were to do three decades later: They became their own community audience (enhanced by a few brave souls looking for something other than European art music).

With the Depression years, and then WW II, ultramodernism fell out of favor and went dormant. During these two decades, America saw the rise of populist music (Copland, Seeger and Crawford [by then Crawford Seeger]) and the relatively conservative comforts of neoromanticism and neoclassicism.

Broyles reserves most of the second half of his book for the recent half-century of these 250 years. This period is likely the one to interest most readers (and I include myself in this category). Regrettably, this is barely enough space to skim the surface, given that his emphasis is on "the tyranny of serialism" and a few (but hardly all) of the reactions to serialism: The last 50 years in American music has seen "upheaval after upheaval" and is easily worth a volume of its own.

The first such upheaval was, of course, total serialism itself, with its overt objective of removing all traces of Eurocentric expressionism from music, to be replaced by calculated parameters of pitch, duration, timbre and dynamics. That total serialism baffled and put off concertgoers at the time is to belabor the obvious; this was "academic" music-making that found its natural refuge in universities (but not necessarily music conservatories, which, by and large, stuck by their "traditionalist" roots). And, while Milton Babbitt's words, quoted at the top, largely fit the situation at the time, they seem better placed in the mouths of Pierre Boulez, and, to a slightly lesser extent, Charles Wuorinen, composers who - Broyles makes quite clear - were totally unsympathetic to audiences' pleas.

The major reactions to total serialism were the aleatoric ("chance") works of John Cage and the early minimalism of LaMonte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It almost seems beyond the point to state that virtually all of Cage's music, and much of early minimalism, was just as devoid of expression as was total serialism. What we DO begin to see here, particularly with Cage, is both a move toward "music not as 'music qua music' but as performance art" (a theme that Broyles carries through to the conclusion of the book) and the emergence of the "composer as cult of personality."

These two aspects lead quite naturally into a pair of strange bedfellows who share a chapter: Harry Partch and Frank Zappa. Had I my own druthers, I'd have placed Zappa and Cage in the same chapter, and given Partch a full chapter of his own: There is a "purity" to Partch's efforts to develop a unique compositional aesthetic and a true gesamtkuntswerk, well above and beyond the early steps toward "music as performance art" as put forth by Cage and Zappa.

In a penultimate chapter ("Looking Back: Puritanism, Geography and the Myth of American Individualism"), Broyles endeavors to summarize the American maverick composer tradition and its place among culture and society in general, mostly successfully. The final chapter ("Looking Forward: 'The End of the Renaissance?'!") is, I think, less successful (or at least less hopeful in its outlook). Using the works of Meredith Monk as a new paradigm for "music as performance art" (with a mention of Yo-Yo Ma's highly-stylized video of the Bach cello suites as a near-final throw-in), it is difficult to NOT conclude that Broyles sees the fetishization of music as performance art as the direction in which we might be heading.

I don't know whether anything should be made of the fact that the dust jacket has postage-stamp-sized photos of Ives, Ornstein, Cage, Zappa, Partch and Monk. Each in his (or her) way was a maverick in terms of setting out on a new path. Ultimately, history will record which of these paths were dead ends and which were not. My money is on Ives as the principal survivor, with an honorable mention to Partch for his integrity and singlemindedness of purpose against daunting odds (even though performances of his works largely died with him).

Fascinating reading! Even if Broyles seems, in his choices, to have emphasized personality over substance, and, in the process, made little if any mention of a host of composers who were (and are) equal to this maverick definition.

Bob Zeidler