EMERGING VOICES: The American Sound

This is the seventh in a series of posts I’ve written as part of the Emerging Voices project which is happening at the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society the next two weeks. Specially, it is in relation to the Our Voices concert. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/

The United States underwent a radical cultural shift in 1917 when the nation decided to abandon its neutral stance and enter World War I on the side of Allies. America’s significant population of German immigrants and their descendants, which had been easily able to assimilate into American life while still retaining both the language and culture of their homeland, suddenly felt a new paranoia and suspicion as their loyalties were called into question.

As a result of German-Americans’ successful ability to integrate with American culture while still maintaining strong ties to the old country, much of American musical culture was dominated by German musicians during the years leading up to World War I. German music dominated most concert programs, and the most adored musicians touring America were German or Austrian, such as the violinist Fritz Kreisler and the conductors Gustav Mahler and Karl Muck. If they weren’t German or Austrian citizens, they were Germans who had immigrated and naturalized as American citizens, such as the contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink and conductors Walter Damrosch and Theodore Thomas. Many of these musicians made great efforts to program American music after the U.S. entry into the war to demonstrate their American-ness. Many who didn’t were eventually interned, most notably Muck, the Swiss-German music director of the Boston Symphony.

While interest in all things German became suspect, the interest in improving American musicianship through studies in Europe remained. After American soldiers arrived in France, the commander of the U.S. expeditionary forces on the Western Front, General John J. Pershing, invited Damrosch (then music director of the New York Symphony) to assess the musicianship of the American military ensembles and look for ways of improving it. Out of these efforts and the desire to continue their success after the war, the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau was born, providing a place for Americans to study in France. The establishment of the institution perpetuated the idea that musicians need European study, but the focus shifted from Germany and Austria, where composers of the Second New England School such as Amy Beach had studied, to France. 

Nadia Boulanger

While leading the Société Franco-Américain with her sister, Nadia Boulanger came into contact with many influential American musicians during the war years, including Damrosch. As a result, it was natural that she was invited to join the faculty of the school upon its founding in 1921, where Aaron Copland was one of her first students that summer. The following year, Nadia Boulanger would decide to officially retire from composition and devote herself completely to her teaching and performing as an organist and conductor.

Americans would flock to study with Boulanger, who maintained a high profile on both sides of the Atlantic, often touring the United States to teach and conduct. By mid-century, almost any American composer of note had studied with her at one point or another. Virgil Thomson, who was among the earliest group of Boulanger’s American students in the 1920s, described her as “a one-woman graduate school so powerful and so permeating that legend credits every American town with two things – a five-and-dime and a Boulanger pupil.”

“I have had a lot of American pupils, that’s true.,” Boulanger said in an interview with filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon. “It’s easy to forget that fifty years ago, no one knew of American music, it wasn’t an expression you used. There’s been an enormous change since then. … The term ‘American musician’ is no longer unusual.” 

Boulanger went on to theorize why the idea of an American musician had heretofore been a rare occurrence, echoing Dvorak’s own observations about his work with Henry Burleigh at the turn of the century: “…a number of foreign musicians had settled in America, but no musicians had been trained entirely there. This situation was linked to political, religious and racial questions; the artist culture of America developed relatively late. The amalgam of these elements seems to have been achieved first in America through popular music, supplied by black men who had a particular talent for music. … A tree has roots that establish themselves deep in the earth and the process requires time. The musical heritage of black Americans still constitutes an essential compost. Beginning from that, and little by little, American musicians have created an entirely new concept by using old methods.”

In her teaching, Boulanger stressed the need for her non-French students to retain their unique voice. “If I am faced with a foreigner and I try to make him French, I think that I am bound to fail. … I endeavor to make them recognize their origins and avoid making them – under the pretext of their coming to work in Paris – imitation Parisians. Universality isn’t rootlessness …” 

Boulanger’s American students were faced with the question of how to express their national identity through music while trying to discern what the roots of America were. The result was a widely diversified sense of the “American sound”, as evidenced by the varied output of her students such as Copland, Thomson, Elliott Carter and Howard Swanson. 

The African American composer Margaret Bonds wanted to study with Boulanger, but was turned down, because Boulanger felt that Bonds was already accomplished and needed no further instruction. Bonds was a child prodigy and later became a prominent teacher as well as a composer (including of popular music; one of her songs was in Gone with the Wind). Best-known for her work the poet Langston Hughes (as in Three Dream Portraits), it was after hearing one Bonds’ setting of a Hughes poem that Boulanger decided she had nothing to teach her.

The music of Tania León, Caroline Shaw, and Nico Muhly offer examples of the way the generation of post-Boulanger American composers continue this exploration of a national sound, attempting to address the quandary of her assessment and conclusion: “America has managed to generate a very advanced civilization without roots; it had to create simultaneously the fruit and the root; it has, I believe, succeeded to a very great extent.”