What is American Music?

Why I Don't Like Leonard Bernstein

My post about national identity must have struck a chord. I’ve received far more e-mails about it than any of my other posts. Keep them coming! (It even got a shout-out on the #MusicColloq Zoom session that afternoon. Thanks, Paula!)

My main argument was that national identity is a complex social phenomenon with rich potential for exploration—both in the concert hall and in the classroom.

Some people asked if I think national identity is a taboo subject for the public. Not at all! It can be touchy sometimes, but that’s no reason to avoid it. In fact, I hoped to encourage artists and performing organizations to lean into the topic by treating it with some deliberation and care. It’s a part of the human story. A “Russian Connection” or “French Romance” concert can be awesome. Just don’t rely on stereotypes or tired clichés to frame it. Do some research first—and be creative!

A topic that can be extra touchy, though, is American national identity. It’s no secret that the USA—and the rest of America—has a brutally violent history of racism and economic exploitation tied to the precise question of who “belongs” as a fellow-national and who doesn’t. This history shouldn’t be an elephant in the room—a topic, I might add, that Dr. Philip Ewell has pointedly addressed in music theory.

Delivering on the promise that my newsletter will introduce “stories about classical music you don’t know but should,” I’m going to segue into some nitty-gritty historical work, including some “never-before-seen” original research. Since my main area of expertise is music in the United States, I thought we might as well start there!

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An American Musical Genome?

I’m not a Leonard Bernstein fan. His tempos are too slow for my taste, and his compositions don’t do much for me. Many people have gushed about his ability to communicate with the public, but they may not know that he expressed attitudes about American music that conspicuously papered over the country’s racist past.

(For a long time, I was afraid to say these things about such a titanic figure. But I felt vindicated when Anne Midgette found a way to articulate some of my thoughts in a far better way than I ever could!)

As I explained in my last post, a national “sound,” especially in Western classical music, is a chimera. Finding one would require the equivalent of musical genomics research, “in which we’d backtrace musically persistent elements while discarding those that seem to come from outside sources.” Not only is this practically impossible, but the entire purpose is to use national identity for one of its more disquieting ends—to exclude. That’s precisely how Bernstein approached the issue.

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Bernstein’s Timeline of American Music

I don't think there's anybody in this hall, or anywhere in the country watching this program for that matter, or anyone in the civilized world who wouldn't know right away that that music we just played is American music. It's got “America” written all over it—not just in the title, which is, you know, An American in Paris, and not just because the composer, Gershwin, was American, but it's in the music itself: it sounds American, smells American—makes you feel American when you hear it.

— Leonard Bernstein, “What is American Music?” (1958)

In this rest of this post, I’ve provided a generous helping of Bernstein’s own words without much additional commentary. You might want to sit on them for a while and come to your own conclusions before I offer more context later. In fact, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section.

Thanks to scholars Geoffrey Block and Alicia Kopfstein, we know that Bernstein’s conception of American music remained remarkably consistent from 1939, the year he wrote his senior thesis at Harvard (“The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music”) to 1958, when he delivered his Young People’s Concert called “What is American Music?”

(Note on sources: Typewritten images are from Bernstein’s thesis. Pull quotes come from the transcript of the Young People’s Concert.)

The two texts had an identical purpose: to demonstrate the “evolution” of an American national style. From a letter to Aaron Copland dated 19 Nov. 1938 (quoted in Block, 54):

The problem with American music in the first place, he argued, was that the United States was a relatively young country and hadn’t developed what he thought was an essential ingredient of a national “sound”: folk music derived from centuries of ancestral lineage—

So you can understand that when this kind of music is played in the country it belongs to, all the people listening to it feel that it belongs to them, and that they belong to it—it's their music. Because in most countries, the people who live there are descended for hundreds of years from their forefathers, and their forefathers’ forefathers, who all sang the same little tunes and sort of own them; so when the Russians hear a Tchaikovsky symphony, they feel closer to it than say, a Frenchman does, or than we do.

In the United States, however, the drive to develop an authentic national music had really only begun in earnest by the late nineteenth century—

Actually, our real serious American music didn't even begin until about seventy-five years ago [DS: around 1880]. At that time, the few American composers we did have were imitating European composers, like Brahms and Liszt and Wagner and all those. We might call that the kindergarten period of American music; our composers then were like happy, innocent little kids in kindergarten. For instance, we had a very fine composer named George W. Chadwick, who wrote expert music, and also deeply felt music, but you could almost not tell it apart from the music of Brahms, Wagner, or other Europeans.

(As I suggested in my book Orchestrating the Nation, if Chadwick’s music really sounded like Brahms or Wagner, why didn’t Bernstein program more of it?!)

In any case, Bernstein’s point was that imitation inhibited the development of a national sound. Then came a guest from abroad—

But around the beginning of our twentieth century, American composers were beginning to feel funny about not writing American sounding music. And it took a foreigner to point this out to them—a Czechoslovakian composer named Dvorak, who came here on a visit and was amazed to find all the American composers writing the same kind of music he wrote. So he said to the American composers: "Look, why don't you use your own folk stuff in your own music, when you write? You've got marvelous stuff here—Indian music, which is, who are, the Indians are the real native Americans, he said. After all, they were here before you were so, use their music. But he was forgetting the important thing—that Indian music has nothing to do with most of us; our forefathers were not Indians, and so their music is not our music. We didn't grow up ourselves banging on primitive drums and yelling war whoops. But Dvorak didn't worry about all that, and he got so excited that he decided to write an American symphony himself, and show us how it could be done. So he made up some Indian themes and some Negro themes (because he also decided that Negro folk music was part of American history) and he wrote a whole “New World Symphony” around those themes. But the trouble is that the Symphony doesn't sound American at all; it sounds Czech, which is what it should sound, and very pretty it is, too.

From here, he introduced the common narrative (which I’ve refuted) that Dvořák sparked a revolution in composition. But Bernstein thought that the revolution had ultimately failed—

Dvorak made a big impression on the American composers of his time; and they all got excited too, and began to write hundreds of so-called American pieces with Indian and Negro melodies in them. It became a disease, almost an epidemic; everyone was doing it. And most of those Montezuma Operas and Minnehaha Symphonies and Cotton-Pickin’ Suites are all dead and forgotten, and gathering dust in second-hand book stores. Why? Because you can't just decide to be American; you can't just sit down and say, “I'm going to write American music, if it kills me.” You can't be nationalistic on purpose. That was the mistake.

Here he was referring to composers like Edward MacDowell and Henry Gilbert. In his thesis, Bernstein called Gilbert “perhaps the most noteworthy composer from those who used Negro material at all extensively.”

(Copland had told Bernstein earlier that Gilbert’s music “might have an ‘American’ quality despite its material.” This idea will come back later.)

What followed this failed revolution, however, was truly transformational—

Jazz had been born, and that changed everything. Because at last there was something like an American folk music that belonged to all Americans. Jazz was everybody's music. Everybody danced the fox trot back in the twenties, everybody knew how to sing Alexander's Rag Time Band, whether he came from North Dakota or West Virginia or South Carolina. So any serious composer growing up in America couldn’t keep jazz out of his ears or out of his music. It was part of him, it was in the air he breathed. A composer like Aaron Copland began to write pieces such as Music for the Theatre, which is filled with jazz ideas.

And finally!—

You see at last there was something like an American folk music that everybody understood: a real natural folk influence, jazz, much more real and natural than any Indian love calls or Negro spirituals could ever be. But, our composers were still in high school and were still being American on purpose. Only instead of Indian and Negro stuff, now they began to use jazz to be American. And just to be able to say “Look, I’m writing American music!” That wasn't very natural. But by the time we got to the thirties, in the thirties, the jazz influence became a part of their living and breathing, became a habit, and the composers didn't even have to think twice about using jazz; they just wrote music, and it came out American, all by itself. That was much better.

In the rest of both texts, Bernstein explained that jazz was necessary for an American style, but not sufficient. He argued that youth, optimism, vitality, loneliness, and sentimentality all provided an “American accent” to music. In fact, he said—

There's a little Mexican accent in the Texas accents, and a little Swedish to be heard in our Minnesota accent, and there’s a little Slavic in the Brooklyn, and a there's a little Irish in the Boston accent. But they’re all American accents. They've been absorbed.

Classic melting pot metaphor. But what about African ancestry—the real elephant in the room in this entire discussion? In his thesis, he explained,

And how did this “confluence” actually happen in practice? As Bernstein put it earlier in the thesis,

We have a genetics term for that, too: eugenics.

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Music City Spotlight: Check out this conversation between Gabriela Lena Frank, Giancarlo Guerrero, and the inaugural 91Classical Student Composer Fellows—a program for high school students I’d love to see replicated throughout the country!

In the queue: More on Bernstein and national musical identity in the USA

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