Various

“ From Bach and Haydn, nay, from the Gregorian chant, the Greek enharmonic, the Oriental scale, down through every intermediate period and personality to the present day of Stravinsky and Schönberg, every phase of musical history and life has its students and its champions in the new world. America has, in truth, summed up the musical life of the ages and reflects it daily in the multitudinous activities of her musical world. ”

“ In spite of the fact that opera is not and never has been in New York a diversion for the proletariat; in spite of the fact that it has been to a large extent a vehicle for ostentation; in spite of the fact that its conduct has not always been guided by broad artistic ideals—in spite of all these and other drawbacks New York has set for itself a standard of operatic achievement which is scarcely surpassed by any city in the world. The value of this standard in the promotion of musical culture is questionable; that it subserves the best interests of art is not certain. ”

“ Just how much all this has to do with American music we cannot say, any more than we can say just what is American music. National music, we take it, is the composite musical inheritance of a people, molded and colored by their composite characteristics, inherited and acquired. And the music of the South is undoubtedly part of the musical inheritance of the American people. ”

“ I believe that catholicity of education is a thing greatly to be desired.... More than the music of any individual composer; more than the music of any particular school,—the folk-tunes of the world, of all nationalities, races, and peoples, have been to me a never-failing source of delight, wonder, and inspiration. ”

“ It has not yet brought forth the compeers of these in music, since education is required to supply the nurturing musical environment found abroad but hitherto lacking in American life. Had music been permanently established as a part of the curriculum of Dartmouth alone, not to speak of the other colleges, a few young men with a native taste for it would undoubtedly have been found in every class and these would have cherished and transmitted the sacred fire with increasing ardor until the inevitable time arrived when native genius would be kindled into immortal flame. ”

“ Unquestionably as fully equipped master of thematic development in the cyclic forms as America has produced, his loftily conceived chamber music and orchestral works present themselves in a spiritual and technical serenity, artistic authenticity and completeness, which baffle the critical beholder. Indeed, it is with the music-makers who wrote before relentless Beethoven forced the skyey goddess down into the world-struggle that Oldberg has the closest spiritual kinship. ”

“ Over the heavy bog of German harmony and counterpoint his sensitive fancy danced like restless thistledown, following the lightest whimsey of the breeze and the most tremulous maneuverings of shadow-play. In his more powerful tone painting it is the elements, rather than the passions, that command him. The old nature-worship which is so ineradicable an element of the psychic constitution of the Celt, and which leads him to commune with the innumerable and elusive hosts of the land of faery, never forsook the soul of MacDowell, or ceased to direct the course of his genius. ”

“ If, then, the tide of musical appreciation in America has reached a normal level, in accordance with the general civilization of the world of to-day, if the appreciative era, purely as such, is past, the creative epoch has only fairly begun. America, in musical composition, already reckons a historical sequence approaching to a classical, a romantic and an ultra-modern period, exhibiting the strange spectacle of most of the founders of the first period living to see the flowering of the last, during their active lifetime. ”

“ Pity it is that some loyal patron of the college had not provided for the perpetuation of the society, if only as a memorial of Dartmouth's chief glory, even surpassing that of having trained in some measure the classic rhetoric and Olympian accents of the greatest of American orators. Our democracy alone, unaided by college culture, produced Lincoln, in most minds the rival of Webster in perfect phrase and his superior in heart-moving utterance, if not in ear-entrancing tone. ”

“ Inasmuch as the Italian composer in his music unconsciously expresses the peculiar temper and character of the people among whom he has been born and of whom he is a spiritual as well as a physical fragment, so the German composer expresses, likewise unconsciously, the quite different temper and character of the people from whom he sprang.... How can any one fail to recognize these national, or, say, racial characteristics? But there is a school of critics which maintains that the greatest music strikes the universal note, and is free from the taint of nationalism. ”

“ New York is often accused of being peculiarly non-representative of typical American life. The accusation is, in a measure, just and holds good in its application to musical conditions. As the metropolis, where, without doubt, more music than anywhere else in the country is heard, New York lacks a local life of its own; there is no feeling of neighborly companionship among its art workers, and in consequence there hardly exists that which we could term a New York 'group' of composers in the sense to which the term is applied to Boston's community of music-makers. ”

“ The quality of American appreciation has one advantage of the greatest significance over that of any other land, in that it is without national or racial prejudice. Being without history or unity, with respect of race, the American people are without a racial folk-song, and hence are bound by no ancient racial sympathy or habit to a particular fundamental conception of the character of music. German music, French, Russian, Bohemian, Scandinavian, Italian—all are accepted with equal eagerness and sympathy. ”

“ It is to be hoped that there will be a return to the more legitimate forms of lighter operas and that a revival of taste for the more refined forms of stage work may soon offer again to the American composer [Pg 464] opportunities to demonstrate the very suitable field which this branch of the art offers to his talent. An optimistic observer of present conditions may see in the unqualified vulgarity of our popular music to-day only the token of a vitality which, when softened by the refining touch of the next decade, shall result in an expression of individual charm. ”

“ In spite of the undeniable growth of musical culture among the American people of the eighteenth century, it cannot be said that music had a really intimate meaning for them, that they had woven it into the web of their lives, that they had found in it a necessary form of expression. Art is created that way. It may be the folk-song of an ignorant peasant or the symphony of a Mozart or Beethoven. But always it is born of a need for personal expression. Music was not personal to the American colonists ”

“ Except for the rugged originality of the ludicrous Billings, the opening of the nineteenth century had still disclosed nothing of American composition that might be considered other than commonplace. But at least the pioneer work had been done with commendable earnestness and under very real handicaps. The actual achievements of pioneers are never very great, but the value of their work is incalculable. To the pioneers of American composition we can at least tender our respect for the undoubted sincerity of their efforts. ”

“ This flood of sentimentality, completely inundating the Sunday-school, poured into the public school, and almost swamped the ark of juvenile education in music which careful hands had just committed to that great stream of popular culture. When music became recognized as an essential element of education, it was inevitable that the only available juvenile songs, those of the Sunday-school, should be introduced in the public schools. ”

“ The people of the nation have never shown a disposition to receive otherwise than cordially the work of their own composers. From Stephen Foster, through the ranks of popular music composers, to MacDowell, to many song composers of the present, and latterly to the composers of music for popular festivals and pageants—wherever the composer has gone directly to the people and served their needs, whether in the sphere of lesser or greater ideals, he has found a ready welcome and a hearty response. ”

“ What a new world, with new processes and new ideals, will do with the tractable and still unformed art of music; what will arise from the contact of this art with our unprecedented democracy—these are the questions of deepest import in our musical life in the United States. The past has consisted chiefly of a tasting of the musical art and traditions of the old world. The present is divided between imitation of the old and searching for the new, both in quality and application. The fruitage of our national musical life is still for the future. ”

“ It is not unreasonable to suppose that it is from what we generally designate as our 'popular music' that such an art will emanate; from the street, the theatre, the dance hall, and more particularly from the sentimentalities of the popular songs which periodically hold the affections of such a vast public. Ephemeral as is the mass of this music that annually sweeps over our country, each phase of it leaves its mark, some deeper than others, but all contributing to the upbuilding of the national character of our music. ”

“ Here are no blotches or wastes of mere color, such as Poe might easily invite; the work is everywhere thematic. Three themes, of electrical directness and poignant eloquence (two for the raven and one for the 'lost Lenore') , suffice the composer for the entire work, with a subsidiary theme or two, but there is not a spot of tedious or laborious thematic development in the composition; it is everywhere fresh, crystalline and crisp. It is music that lives and speaks at every point. ”

“ While in the early years of New England there was developing a music which, in a way, sprang from the people—a music which really expressed a vital phase of the common life—there were elsewhere springing up the first growths of a more sophisticated art. This art, borrowed from European culture, has served as the real foundation of all that is esoteric in American music to-day, but at the same time its presence has fostered those influences which constitute the barrier to a vital national expression. ”

“ With this widened horizon, the true creative epoch of American music has only now begun. The handful of American composers of serious ideals and noteworthy ability who could be named a few years ago has increased to scores, and new names appear in such rapid succession that the fairly definite knowledge which America had of its chief composers of the 'classical' and 'romantic' epochs can give only the feeblest conception of the present condition of composition in America. ”

“ Meanwhile, by phonograph and player-piano, by newspaper and magazine, by high-class municipal concerts and occasional chance glimpses into the world of greater musical possibilities, the mass of the people have begun to become awakened to the existence of the larger musical world which they do not see and the larger musical life which they do not share, and to crave participation in it. Finally, therefore, we have the spectacle of an American 'musical world' which is no longer true to American conditions and which does not serve the people. ”

“ The plain fact was that the people at large were not enjoying the benefits, the pleasure, recreation, or inspiration, as the case might be, of all that the world prizes as music in any of its forms above that of popular songs and dances. Neither the educational system, on the one hand, nor the cultural system, on the other, provided them with it. One merely gave a little elementary training of the most primitive sort, and for a short time, to children, and the other did not reach beyond the extremely restricted sphere of culture and wealth. ”

“ Has it not a tendency to divert young people, who are most proper to learn, from learning idle, foolish, yea pernicious songs and ballads, and banish all such trash from their minds? Experience proves this. Would it not be proper for school masters in country parishes to teach their scholars? Are not they very unwise who plead against learning to sing by rule, when they can't learn to sing at all unless they learn by rule? Has not the grand enemy of souls a hand in this who prejudices them against the best means of singing? ”

“ It is very difficult at a distance to judge a true from a false artistic life. For aught we know to the contrary, the concerts of the American colonists represented chiefly their ideas of what was socially correct. On the other hand, we are equally justified in assuming that these concerts reflected accurately the musical taste of the people. The truth is that we must accept the record of early concert life in America purely for its historic interest. ”

“ We have in mind such apparently motiveless gatherings as the majority of music festivals. Some of them, of course, have a very definite purpose, and some, such as the Bayreuth Festival and the Mozart Festival at Salzburg, have a very obvious motive. But most of them seem to have no other raison d'être than the instinctive desire of a number of people to gather into a crowd and make a big noise. Festivals of this sort are extraordinarily common in America. It is difficult to say whether the amount of labor involved in the organization of them could not be more profitably expended. ”

“ Music, which their teachers formerly proscribed as a diabolical art, begins to make part of their education. In some houses you hear the forte-piano. This art, it is true, is still in its infancy; but the young novices who exercise it are so gentle, so complaisant and so modest, that the proud perfection of art gives no pleasure equal to what they afford.'
There were at that time very few pianos in New England and we find from the newspaper advertisements that the teacher usually lent his own piano to his pupils for practice. ”

“ Fredericksburg, we know, had a Harmonic Society in 1784, which gave concerts 'the third Wednesday evening in each month,' and it is not improbable that similar societies existed in other towns where there was much social intercourse between people of culture, refinement and exceeding leisure. Among the music-loving, pleasure-loving, gregarious gentlefolk of the old South, unhampered by the fetters of occupation and confronted merely with the task of making life pass as pleasantly as possible, the formation of such societies must have been inevitable. ”

“ No composer in America has so completely arrived at an authentic and mature musical individuality along the line of ultra-modern European developments as Charles Martin Loeffler. Though of Alsatian birth, his long residence in this country has identified him with American musical life. Too much the artist to theorize about his art, he has enunciated no creed, although he has been known to suggest the idea that the composer's musical personality is largely constituted by the assimilation of all that is sympathetic to him in the range of his musical observation. ”