America 250 - Happy Birthday!

Music is a conversation. An intellectual property dispute over music is always going to be a mess, because you can’t really own a melody or a chord progression or an instrumental technique. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t acknowledge those musicians who have contributed to the art form in a unique way as a composer or performer, but that we can’t completely separate an individual contribution from the particular culture that individual was steeped in, even if they are mostly notable for how they deviated or rebelled against the norms of that culture. And those deviations become their own contribution to the culture regardless of that individual’s intentions. 

Another way of putting it: you can’t take the American out of American music.

Which is quite odd, because what distinguishes the culture of the United States is that it doesn’t have the same kind of recognizable attributes that define German or French or Spanish music. 

What makes music American isn’t a particular set of modes or a way of phrasing. It’s an attitude, an openness. The most clearly American of all art forms, jazz, takes away one of music’s most defining characteristics: listening to it as a journey toward a destination. You don’t know when it’s going to end. It is perpetually in the moment. It’s saying: we have all the time in the world – how are we using that time right now? And we can hear that in much American classical music as well. Even when it’s tautly organized, there’s a sense that the music is taking the scenic route. Rather than striving for that Beethovenian sense of inevitability, American composers seem to seek breathing room, recapturing that sense of wonder and possibility the North American landscape inspires, whether it’s in the expansive phrases of William Grant Still and Roy Harris, in both the neo-Romantic and modernist works of Samuel Barber, or in the hypnotic transformations of Steve Reich.

As musicians came to the New World, they seem to have shared a sense of starting over, of rebirth. This often meant resetting the musical clock back to the era before European music was fully developed. The counterpoint in a William Billings anthem or a wild Dixieland band resembles the Medieval polyphony of Machaut with their independent melodic lines much more than it resembles the architecture of a Bach fugue. Dvořák’s call for composers to root their musical material in the songs of indigenous peoples and African slaves meant in practical terms using the pentatonic scale as their primary mode (like constructing melodies using only the black keys of the piano), and many American composers eagerly embraced that even when they had completely different reasons for doing so, whether it’s George Gershwin evoking the blues, Lou Harrison evoking a Javanese Gamelan, or Pauline Oliveros breaking down the overtone series into its basic components in resonant spaces. (I heartily recommend watching Bobby McFerrin eloquently demonstrate the universality of the pentatonic scale.) This is also reflected in Roy Harris’s drawing on Gregorian Chant and Copland’s love for those open fourths and fifths, the most elemental of all intervals, in Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man.

Going back to the primal tonal language of music is also a way of democratizing it. While Copland deliberately strove to be accessible to the average listener as a kind of political statement, even those who were proudly modern and “difficult” were still dedicated to communicating. Elliott Carter’s music may be impenetrable but it’s somehow still engaging; when I listen to his music I feel like I’m watching a great foreign film in a language I don’t know without subtitles. I’m still invested even if I don’t understand what’s going on – but of course what’s going on is music, which can be inherently powerful even when there are no melodies to hold onto.

But much of American music was written for audiences who did understand its basic elements. William Billings wrote his choral works for his singing school, created so that all parishioners knew how to read and hear music well enough so that they could sing hymns in four-part harmony. American composers drew on folk elements well before Dvořák told them to and continue to do so to this day. Aaron Copland began his “accessible” phase by writing for high school students in An Outdoor Overture and his opera The Second Hurricane. And there’s a rich subgenre of music for school choirs and concert bands, which began when the U.S. government decided in the early days of the Cold War that Americans had to excel culturally as well as militarily.

For those who despair of the future of America’s cultural institutions, that’s what should give us hope. Singers all over the country continue to join choruses where they can sing Eric Whitacre’s latest offerings and Harry Burleigh’s spirituals. They play in marching bands and orchestras. They take ballet classes. (Not to mention how many people listen to classical music on the radio when a local station broadcasts it 24 hours a day…)

Classical music in the United States has a mixed record as a commodity - the fortunes of individual arts institutions can be fickle, as is the arts marketplace - but it has always been a successful activity. Thomas Jefferson manifested his love for classical music by playing it in his home with a few friends. The Stoughton Musical Society, a chorus founded in 1786, is still here and still singing. The same goes for the Handel and Haydn Society, founded in 1815, and the Bach Choir of Bethlehem (PA), founded in 1898. 

As someone who spent a lot of my life teaching in inner-city neighborhoods, I can attest to how much American kids of all backgrounds eagerly embrace classical music when they are provided with instruments and instruction and free concert tickets to the symphony and opera. I have seen the effect music has had on kids from troubled backgrounds. I have seen how access to classical music has helped strengthen families and communities. And it’s a peculiarly American relationship: while this music is seen as a birthright in Europe, no one plays or listens to classical music in the U.S. out of habit. It’s always a choice. It’s a choice that Americans have joyfully made since the beginning of the country – and there’s no indication that they’ll stop now.

And from all of us here at your local classical radio station – Happy 250.