COMPOSING
AMERICA What makes classical music American? Ask any number of people and you’re likely to get an equal number of different responses. Even Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Lukas Foss, and Irving Fine—titans of twentieth-century American composition—couldn’t agree on a defining characteristic. In a boisterous roundtable discussion recorded in 1950,* their attempts to describe it ranged from “digested jazz,” Mixolydian mode, and “down notes” to a certain “unfussiness” or the “open air” quality (sometimes suggested by octave spacing) of works like Copland’s Billy the Kid to a sense of “freshness and naïveté,” drive and optimism, and sometimes even the pessimism of “the young composers” of the time. Nearly sixty years earlier in 1892, Czech composer Antonin Dvořák had come to the United States to direct the National Conservatory of Music in New York. Already well known for the compositions he based on the folk melodies of his native Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic), Dvořák argued that an American school of composition should be based on African American spirituals, Native American melodies and America’s folk music. Inspired by those melodies, Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “From the New World” (July 10) became one of the most recognizable “American” works in the classical music cannon. By the 1920s, America’s rapidly growing jazz tradition had become an important influence for Gershwin, a native New Yorker and son of Russian émigrés, but so was the city he called home. In a 1926 essay for Theatre Magazine titled “Jazz is the Voice of the American Soul,” he wrote that his music came from “old and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties combined in a mighty chorus in my inner ear.”
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IMPROMPTU SUMMER 2019
CLAY MCBRIDE
By Kristin Cleveland
