A History of American Music

Two rather bitter and pessimistic of letters from the composer MacDowell, recently given to the public, have directed attention to the quality and status of the music produced in this country. In one Mr. MacDowell resigned the professorship of music which he had held at Columbia, declaring that the limitations of the curriculum precluded any adequate or dignified development of the study of music, but adding that all the arts were treated equally ill, and that the graduates of the university were little other than barbarians in their knowledge or appreciation of æsthetics. In the other he asked withdrawal of a composition of his from a concert devoted to American music, on the ground that to put forward by themselves musical works written by Americans was an indignity and an injustice, inasmuch as it implied that they were unworthy to be presented on an equality with the writings of other composers as integral portions of an impartial programme. Without pausing to discuss whether this last point be well taken, or whether it might not be as forcibly pressed against a concert of Flemish, Russian, or English music, it is depressing to find a man of Mr. MacDowell’s talent and authority maintaining urgently such extreme views ; and yet one doubts whether America be, after all, a musical Nazareth from which no real good is to come.

But one feels relieved and cheered after examining Mr. Louis C. Elson’s volume,¹ many of whose statements of fact, incident, and personality reassure, and whose deductions and prognostications encourage. It should, however, be called rather an essay toward a history than a history ; for the materials, which have been gathered carefully, and no doubt laboriously, are not so well coördinated as to afford due proportion and perspective. So far as there is any complete conspectus of musical progress in this country, it is quite closely confined to New England, although the early existence of transplanted English music in the southern colonies, the life of opera in the French dependencies, the establishment of the Philharmonic Society in New York, and the desire for conservatories and orchestras throughout the country are recognized fully and fairly. Mr. Elson rightly places religious music first in the order of influence and development of the science and art in America, admitting that the real point of departure was from New England. Prayer and praise were associated in the minds of the early settlers, in spite of their many grim beliefs and the severe rigidity of their psalmody, so that the first efforts toward formal expression of native musical feeling naturally took the shape of religious songs and tunes, some of which have maintained themselves to the present time as exemplary and still available for public services.

The expansion of private gatherings for practice of such vocal music — as later for the social study of instrumental compositions, beginning in Boston near the end of the eighteenth century—into strong and permanent societies is considered justly as leading to that diffusion of musical understanding and interest which caused the formation of educational institutions, orchestras, choruses, and chamber-music companies.

The large and ever mooted questions of folk-songs and a distinctively American musical style or school receive chapters to themselves ; but the discussion ends nearly where it began, — that the aboriginal Indian music is difficult of preservation and virtually impossible of assimilation into modern composition because of its fluctuating tonality and abnormal progression; and that a national fashion of song is to be sought, if anywhere, in the plantation melodies and “ spirituals,” which rudely and yet tenderly try to press the emotional fervor and pathos of the negro nature into forms borrowed or adapted from general vocalism. Extreme value seems here to be set upon the work of Stephen C. Foster, who, after all, merely created a species of song better and more faithful in giving a graceful, lovable form to the sentiments of slave life than did others belonging to the same genus and epoch.

Some divisions of the book are devoted to composers and directors of orchestral and vocal music, to the spread of the opera, to the participation of women in composition, to the present conditions of musical education and criticism, and to the right and wrong tendencies of the American musical disposition, the latter deriving chiefly from the national disinclination to be serious, to move slowly, and to consider intrinsic worth before superficial brilliancy and material profit. But that America has made music that Europe has welcomed and esteemed is proclaimed plainly and stoutly as a cheering fact.

As has been implied, the only symmetrically developed portions of the book relate to Boston and its derivatives. Yet this is probably not due to partiality, for the author has evidently striven to be equitable, but rather to the difficulty of finding and collating material elsewhere. A kindly temper prevails, comparisons are avoided, and gentle judgments are the rule. The style is alert, fluent, and interesting, but qualified sometimes by a lenity that would suit better with an ephemeral chronicle than a permanent history.

The book itself is, as Holmes once wrote, “ a very heavy quarto,” bulky and fatiguing to hold, but handsome and legible in type, liberally and relevantly illustrated, and has a bibliography, together with an ample and excellent index.

Howard M. Ticknor.