Commentary: Terry Teachout: Romantics' Return
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To what extent, if any, should the quality of a work of art be judged
by its originality?
The answer to this question is far from obvious. Yet in the course of
the century-long reign of modernism in the arts, it came to be taken
for granted that to be innovative was desirable in and of itself.
Despite the fact that every great artist in every medium has derived
innumerable aspects of his style and technique from the example of his
predecessors, the word "derivative" became one of the most commonly
employed terms of abuse in the critical lexicon.
Even after the collapse of the avant-garde monopoly, many critics have
continued to employ the now-discredited rhetoric of late modernism--in
particular, music critics who object to the growing popularity of the
kind of tonal music they contemptuously dismiss as "neoromantic." For
them, any music written after World War I, be it by Puccini and
Rachmaninoff or by such present-day "new tonalists" as Lowell
Liebermann and Paul Moravec, is unacceptable if it makes use of
expressive devices derived from the composers of the 19th century.^1
It is tempting, and not altogether wrong, to suggest that the last
word about such criticism was pronounced by Fairfield Porter, the
American painter who was also one of the outstanding art critics of
the 20th century:
To say that you cannot paint the figure today is like an architectural
critic saying that you must not use ornament, or as if a literary
critic proscribed reminiscence. In each case the critical remark is
less descriptive of what is going on than it is a call for a
following--a slogan demanding allegiance. In this case criticism is so
much influenced by politics that it imitates the technique of a
totalitarian party on the way to power.
Porter, himself a figurative painter, had in mind here the criticism
of Clement Greenberg, whose belief in the historical inevitability of
abstraction was conditioned by his Marxist politics. Yet Porter might
just as well have been speaking of the composer-conductor Pierre
Boulez, who famously declared in 1952 that "any musician who has not
experienced . . . the necessity for the dodecaphonic [twelve-tone]
language is useless. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of
his epoch."
In the event, history proved Greenberg and Boulez equally wrong. Not
only is figurative painting still alive and well, but the twelve-tone
method of Arnold Schoenberg, which Boulez advocated with a zealousness
bordering on the dictatorial, is no longer practiced by any important
composer anywhere in the world, and no more than a handful of
twelve-tone works has entered the standard concert repertoire.
None of this means, however, that a mature artist simply imitates the
art of the past. The following thought experiment may help to explain
why. Suppose a reputable musicologist were to announce one day that he
has discovered the manuscript of a hitherto unknown Fifth Symphony by
Brahms, and that this symphony is comparable in quality to its four
predecessors. Then, after the work has been performed and recorded by
a prominent conductor and taken up by numerous orchestras, an obscure
musician discloses that he wrote it (and forged a manuscript copy
sufficiently plausible-looking to hoodwink the musicologist) in order
to win recognition for his other compositions, all of which are
similar in style to the music of Brahms. Would we still want to listen
to "Brahms's Fifth," knowing that it is not really by Brahms? And
would the actual quality of the work itself be diminished in any way
by that knowledge?
Obviously, the answer to the first question is yes and to the second
question no. In practice, however, such things simply do not happen.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever successfully faked an
important large-scale work of art by a great artist working in a
medium other than painting. This is not to say that such a thing would
be impossible, but that it seems never to have occurred to anyone.^2
In fact, to anyone capable of composing a symphony as good as those of
Brahms, it would almost certainly not occur to attempt one that
sounded as though it were by Brahms. The minds of great artists do not
work that way, just as the style of a master is peculiarly resistant
to being counterfeited (as opposed to being parodied) by a craftsman
of lesser stature. Imitability is not a trait readily associated with
greatness.
In any case, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, great artists do not imitate,
they steal, and in so doing they transform their stolen goods into
something wholly personal and individual. When a great composer
knowingly evokes the past, he does so in ways other than imitative.
The "neoclassical" compositions of Paul Hindemith and Igor Stravinsky,
for example, do not sound like Bach, Handel, Haydn, or Mozart. Even
though they make use of compositional devices borrowed from the works
of those earlier composers, they employ these devices in their own
highly idiosyncratic ways, with highly individual results. As a
result, the neoclassicism of Hindemith, Stravinsky, and their most
gifted followers is viewed--correctly--as an original style in its own
right.
Neoromanticism, by contrast, has almost always been regarded with
suspicion by critics, even though it has been embraced by at least as
many composers as has neoclassicism. (The second edition of the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians devotes twice as much space to
neoclassicism as to neoromanticism.) Is this because neoromantic music
is inferior in quality? Or is it merely the last gasp of the same
prejudice in favor of innovation for its own sake that once led
avant-garde composers and their critical sympathizers to dismiss all
tonal music as "useless"?
These questions are at the heart of Walter Simmons's Voices in the
Wilderness: Six American Neo-Romantic Composers, the first in a
planned six-volume series of critical studies of modern American
composers who, in the author's words, have "created significant,
artistically meaningful bodies of work without abandoning traditional
principles, forms, and procedures."^3
In Voices in the Wilderness, Simmons contends that the conventional
wisdom regarding modern music is in need of revision. He repudiates
the mistaken notion that "the evolution of the tonal system proceeded
according to a linear progression that led inevitably to the
dissolution of tonality altogether." He further believes that the
avant-garde establishment, as a result of its dominance over the music
departments of influential colleges and universities, was able to
exert undue influence on the postwar classical-music scene in America,
with devastating results:
[Its] attitudes filtered down to journalist-critics, who expressed
them in the press, fostering a division in the public between those
who prided themselves on their sophistication and disparaged new music
that lacked "originality" and those who defiantly rejected "modern
music" altogether. . . . This disparagement and suppression of tonal
music amounted to a de facto blacklisting of composers who failed to
conform to the approved version of music history.
Among those American composers who suffered most from the postwar
intolerance of the avant-garde establishment, Simmons says, were
Samuel Barber, Paul Creston, Nicolas Flagello, Vittorio Giannini,
Howard Hanson, and the Swiss émigré composer Ernest Bloch, who spent
most of his adult life in the U.S. According to Simmons, these men
ranked among "the most conservative of the [American]
traditionalists," and their insistence on embracing "many of the
stylistic features of late-19th-century music" made them anathema to
critics who refused to believe that such an approach could yield
artistically valid results at mid-century. Yet Simmons believes their
best work to have been comparable in quality to that of such European
contemporaries as Arthur Honegger, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri
Shostakovich, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and William Walton, and he
defines the nature of their achievement in unequivocal terms:
Each composer's body of work is characterized by an overall
seriousness of purpose reflected in works of ambitious scope that
attempt to address the fundamental existential and spiritual concerns
of humanity.
My guess is that many readers--even those well disposed to the
revaluation of the music of America's tonal modernists--will find this
argument somewhat suspect, at least at first glance. To be sure, the
music of Samuel Barber has always been popular with concertgoers, and
in recent years it has also come to be viewed favorably by a
generation of critics who do not share the biases of their elders.^4
But none of the other four American composers discussed in Voices in
the Wilderness has achieved anything remotely approaching Barber's
near-universal currency; while Creston and Hanson were once heard
frequently in American concert halls, the music of Flagello and
Giannini has always been more or less obscure. In addition, the
inclusion of Ernest Bloch in a group of American neoromantic composers
deserving of wider recognition, though it may make a kind of sense on
paper, serves in practice merely to render Simmons's argument more
diffuse and less compelling.
No less problematic is that so little of what Simmons believes to be
the best music of Flagello and Giannini is available on CD. To this
end, he has posted on his website, www.walter-simmons.com,
downloadable mp3 digital sound files of excerpts from the music of all
six composers. Upon listening, alas, I conclude that Flagello and
Giannini were competent but essentially academic composers whose
well-made music, putting aside the question of its originality, was
not consistently interesting enough to command attention. Given the
fact that this is the first in a series of volumes, it thus strikes me
that Simmons's cause might have been better served had he chosen
instead to write about such better-known figures as David Diamond,
Bernard Herrmann, or Ned Rorem, all of whom he cites as being
"arguably comparable in stature" to Flagello, Giannini, and the other
composers included in Voices in the Wilderness.
To be sure, Simmons has spent far more time with their music than I
have, and I may be wrong to dismiss Flagello and Giannini as minor
figures. Moreover, his book is useful and admirable for reasons other
than its specific critical judgments. To begin with, his introduction
offers an impressively clear summary of the various ways in which the
history of musical modernism is in need of correction and revision.
His largely non-technical descriptions of the music discussed in
Voices in the Wilderness are models of accessibility. Above all, he is
a thoughtful, balanced critic whose respect for his subjects does not
stop him from admitting their flaws; his analysis of Samuel Barber's
musical style, for example, is exceptionally fair-minded and
insightful.
Outside of the introduction, the most valuable parts of Voices in the
Wilderness are the chapters devoted to Howard Hanson and Paul Creston,
both of whom are prime candidates for revival, albeit to different
degrees and for differing reasons.
Indeed, Hanson (1896-1981) never quite disappeared from the American
musical scene, and for a time he was almost as well known as Aaron
Copland or Virgil Thomson. Like them, too, he was more than merely a
composer. Hanson ran the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New
York from 1924 to 1964, and conducted the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra
in dozens of recordings of his own music and that of many other
American composers. His Second Symphony ("Romantic," 1930) was a
genuine popular success (Arturo Toscanini performed it with the NBC
Symphony) and is still played on occasion by American orchestras,
while his only opera, Merry Mount, was produced in 1934 by the
Metropolitan Opera, though it failed to be taken up elsewhere. Gerard
Schwarz recorded most of his orchestral scores with the Seattle
Symphony in the 80's, and these recordings led to a resurgence of
interest in his music that continues on a limited basis to this day.
Hanson's "Romantic" Symphony offers a near-ideal occasion for a
consideration of the relative importance of innovation and
individuality in art. A tuneful, expansive exercise in traditional
romanticism, couched in an idiom conservative even by the prevailing
standards of 1930, it contains no musical devices that would have
sounded out of place in a symphony written a quarter-century
earlier.^5 Yet it is not "derivative," at least not in the sense of
sounding like someone else's music, nor will listeners familiar with
later works by Hanson have any trouble spotting his distinctive
stylistic fingerprints. Save for an occasional fleeting reminiscence
of Sibelius, the "Romantic" Symphony is a genuinely individual
statement, one whose implications Hanson himself summed up neatly at
the time of its premiere:
The symphony represents for me my escape from the rather bitter type
of modern musical realism which occupies so large a place in
contemporary thought. Much contemporary music seems to me to be
showing a tendency to become entirely too cerebral. . . . I have,
therefore, aimed in this symphony to create a work that was young in
spirit, lyrical and romantic in temperament, and simple and direct in
expression.
It is not, however, an especially memorable statement, for the
thematic material is both undistinguished and poorly argued. This has
nothing to do with the piece's alleged lack of originality. Rather, as
Simmons observes, the "Romantic" Symphony consists of "a sequence of
emotional states, juxtaposed with no apparent sense of progression,
either psychological or purely musical." It is not bad because it is
unoriginal, but because it is musically unsatisfactory, even on its
own conservative terms.
Not until later in life did Hanson abandon the traditional
Austro-German symphonic framework that he so clearly found
unsympathetic. Once he did so, he began to produce more loosely
structured pieces whose freer form was better suited to their romantic
content. The strongest of these works, in particular the Fifth
Symphony ("Sinfonia Sacra") of 1954, are both structurally convincing
and powerfully expressive, and there is no good reason why they should
not be more widely heard today.^6
Why, then, are they not? One possible explanation is put forward by
Simmons, who recalls in the introduction to Voices in the Wilderness
how in the 1980's the tonally based music of such "minimalists" as
Philip Glass and John Adams was greeted with immediate acclaim by
audiences who had grown tired of the hermetic insularities of late
modernism:
The result of force-feeding nontraditional musical styles to a public
that became increasingly uncertain of its own reactions and insecure
in its own tastes was a gradual estrangement of the audience from the
music of its own time. . . . A radical repudiation of the intellectual
complexity of serialism and minimalism aroused an astonishingly
enthusiastic response from audiences. However, most of the composers
who had maintained their commitment to traditional tonality all along
were now largely forgotten.
Even more completely forgotten than Hanson was Paul Creston
(1906-1985), who for a time had ranked alongside Copland as the most
frequently played American composer. The son of poor Italian
immigrants, Creston was a completely self-taught musician who did not
finish his first full-scale work until he was twenty-six--an unusually
late start for a classical composer. Despite his lack of training, he
won immediate recognition, and throughout the 40's and 50's his works
were performed by such world-class artists as Toscanini, Eugene
Ormandy, Pierre Monteux, Fritz Reiner, George Szell, the pianist Earl
Wild, and the Hollywood String Quartet. By the mid-60's, though, his
music had disappeared from the programs of America's major orchestras,
and for the rest of his life he devoted most of his energy to teaching
and writing a series of theoretical works, dying in obscurity in 1985.
Few classical composers have achieved such popularity so quickly,
followed by an equally quick decline in prestige. Part of the problem
may have been that Creston's mature style failed to develop to any
substantial degree--his music was all of a piece, early and late--and
this caused him to become increasingly predictable and repetitious
from the mid-50's onward. In addition, his extroverted, brightly
colored work, redolent of the optimism of the postwar era, clashed
violently with the mounting intellectual sourness of critics of the
50's, who had no use for populists like Creston. As they grew more
influential, he found it harder and harder to get a fair hearing.
Still, it is impossible to see why a beautifully crafted, unfailingly
effective piece like Creston's Second Symphony (1944), perhaps his
best and certainly his most successful composition, should have fallen
out of the standard repertoire. A two-movement work of tremendous
rhythmic vitality in which the expanded language of modern tonality is
used to ingenious effect, it was aptly described by the composer as
"an apotheosis of the two foundations of all music: song and dance."
While the Second Symphony breaks no new musical ground, it is a wholly
personal statement, and Simmons's enthusiastic summing-up of its
considerable virtues is in no way exaggerated:
Perhaps Creston's most remarkable compositional gift was his ability
to create music that sounds spontaneous and natural, but, on closer
inspection, reveals a subtle logic underlying virtually every measure.
. . . In its rich elaboration and thorough integration of a personal
and original aesthetic concept into a cohesive work of great appeal,
Creston's Second stands as a major landmark of American neoromanticism
and one of the most significant American symphonies of the 1940's.^7
The failure of American orchestras to program this piece--or any of a
half-dozen of Creston's other important works--says much about the
continuing effects of the now-defunct avant-garde monopoly on our
musical life.
In his old age, Samuel Barber spoke bitterly of his failure to win the
same acclaim from critics that he had won from American concertgoers:
It's true I've had little success in intellectual circles. I'm not
talked about in the New York Review of Books, and I was never part of
the Stravinsky "inner circle." In Aaron Copland's book, Our American
Music, my name appears in a footnote. . . . In fact, it is said that I
have no style at all, but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as
they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.
It did indeed, and it took even greater courage for those American
composers who became even more isolated than Barber to live with the
uncomprehending hostility of the critics of the 60's and 70's. As late
as 1981, the New York Times was capable of writing in its obituary of
Howard Hanson that he "stood for a tradition that most of his
influential colleagues considered dead." Only a few of Hanson's
younger contemporaries, most notably Ned Rorem, would live long enough
to see the tide turn in favor of tonality. "The Red Queen [of Alice in
Wonderland] said you've got to run fast to stay in one place," Rorem
once said. "I stayed in one place. Now it's clear I've run fast."
Hanson and Paul Creston were not so fortunate, and even now their
music, like that of other American traditionalists like Walter Piston
and William Schuman, is more talked about than played. Fortunately,
the existence of recordings of many (though by no means all) of the
major works of these composers has made it possible for individual
listeners to uncover the lost tradition of tonal modernism.
No less significant is the fact that younger tonal composers like Paul
Moravec are coming at last to be seen as major figures in their own
right. It would be salutary if this development were accompanied by
the discovery by younger performers of those earlier composers who
were wrongly dismissed as "derivative" because they believed in the
enduring validity of tonality. Whatever they may have lacked in
"originality," the best of them lacked nothing in individuality. As
Walter Simmons rightly says, their attractive, accessible music
"had--and still has--the ability to bridge the gap between composer
and audience [and] to enrich a musical repertoire that has become
stagnant with the tried and true."
For all these reasons, their music deserves to be heard, not merely on
record but also in the concert halls and opera houses of America and,
ultimately, the world. I hope that Voices in the Wilderness and its
successors will help make that happen.
[5]Terry Teachout, Commentary's regular music critic and the drama
critic of the Wall Street Journal, also writes about the arts at
[6]http://www.terryteachout.com. A member of the National Council on
the Arts, he is at work on a biography of Louis Armstrong.
1 For more about Liebermann and Moravec, see my essay, "[7]The New
Tonalists" (Commentary, December 1997). Moravec's Tempest Fantasy,
which won the Pulitzer Prize last year, is now available in a "creator
recording" by the clarinetist David Krakauer and the Trio Solisti
(Arabesque Z7691).
2 The Dutch painter Han van Meegeren was able successfully to forge
Vermeers in the 1930's and 40's and sell them for high prices (one was
purchased by Hermann Goering) because Vermeer was at that time a
comparatively obscure artist, whose true style was known only to a
small group of scholars and connoisseurs. Today, van Meegeren's fake
Vermeers, which can be viewed on line at
[8]http://www.tnunn.f2s.com/vm-main.htm, would immediately strike any
art-world professional as anachronistic.
3 Scarecrow Press, 419 pp., $69.95.
4 See my "[9]Samuel Barber's Revenge" (Commentary, October 1996).
5 Simmons points out that Hanson began composing at a time when
Debussy, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Ravel, Sibelius, and Richard Strauss
were all alive and active. He was, in other words, "not reviving a
style from the past" but "evolving along a continuum still very much
alive."
6 The composer's 1958 recording of the "Romantic" Symphony with the
Eastman-Rochester Orchestra is available on Hanson Conducts Hanson
(Mercury 432 008-2). Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony have
recorded the Fifth Symphony (Delos DE 3130).
7 Creston's Second Symphony has been re-corded several times, most
recently (and very effectively) by Theodore Kuchar and the National
Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, coupled with the First and Third
Symphonies (Naxos 8.559034). Of like interest is the Hollywood String
Quartet's 1953 recording of Creston's String Quartet (Testament SBT
1053).
References
4. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Archive/digitalarchive.aspx?st=advanced&By=Terry%20Teachout
5. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Archive/digitalarchive.aspx?st=advanced&By=Terry%20Teachout
6. http://www.terryteachout.com/
7. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V104I6P55-1.htm
8. http://www.tnunn.f2s.com/vm-main.htm
9. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/Summaries/V101I4P57-1.htm
Matthew Fields
Yawn.... Another polemic about the non-issues in polemics about non-issues.
--
Matthew H. Fields http://www.umich.edu/~fields
Music: Splendor in Sound
To be great, do better and better. Don't wait for talent: no such thing.
Brights have a naturalistic world-view. http://www.the-brights.net/
Ian Pace
discriminated-against composer), you might like to look at this (and if you
have any other replies, do send them to the Editor of Musical Pointers):
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/articles/generaltopics/Downie_Masterprize.htm#pace