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A Different Drummer—American Music

From Music, Society, Education

(1977)

It is a characteristic of tonal-harmonic music that it requires a high degree of subordination of the individual elements of the music to the total effect. Not only is the progress of each individual voice required to conform to the progression of chords, but also each individual note or chord is meaningless in itself, gaining significance only within the context of the total design, much as the authoritarian or totalitarian state requires the subordination of the interests of its individual citizens to its purposes. It is therefore interesting to see in the music of those British colonies, which become the United States of America, a disintegration of tonal functional harmony taking place long before such a process became detectable in Europe, and it is not too fanciful to view this as one expression of the ideal of individual liberty on which the United States was founded, an ideal that, however meagerly realized or even betrayed during the course of its history, has never quite disappeared.

The colonists who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century had left behind the last days of a golden age of English musical culture. Many were, in the words of the first Governor of the New England colonies, “very expert in music,” and although the Pilgrims and Puritans favored sacred over secular music, they had no objection to secular instrumental music, and even dance, as long as decorum was preserved. However, the Mayflower and her successors had little room for any but the most essential cargo, and only the smallest and hardiest musical instruments could be accommodated—certainly nothing so bulky and liable to damage as a virginal or organ. So far as is known, the early colonists could and did enjoy only music that was simple and functional, that is, social music and worship music. As far as the former is concerned, we do know that there were instruments around, though what they played is unclear—possibly from English collections like those of Thomas Ravenscroft, and later John Playford. Secular song was not unknown, not only in the Anglo-Celtic ballads, which belonged to the ancient oral rather than to the literate tradition, and which in America proved extremely durable, but also songs from the various collections that had crossed the Atlantic with them. Worship music, on the other hand, meant almost exclusively the singing of the psalms in metrical translation, a practice that was not unknown in England even in the Established Church. This may seem a limited repertoire, but there are after all a hundred and fifty psalms, many of which are very long, and their emotional range is very wide. The version favored by the early colonists was that of Henry Ainsworth, who used a variety of poetic meters and provided no less than thirty-nine different tunes, which were printed at the back of the book in the form of single lines of melody. Dissatisfaction was, however, early expressed by the Puritan divines, who alleged that faithfulness to the literal word of God was too often sacrificed to literary grace, and in 1640 a new metrical translation was made by a committee and published—the first book to be printed in the New England colony.

The translations were made into only six metrical schemes, mostly in four-line stanzas, so that the same tune could be used for several psalms, and the number of tunes that needed to be learnt was kept to a minimum. The new psalm book was adopted, after much disputation, throughout the New England colonies by the end of the seventeenth century; under the name of Bay Psalm Book it ran through innumerable editions over the next century. It was not until the ninth edition, of 1698, that tunes were provided—a mere thirteen—to which the psalms could be sung.

Irving Lowens makes a valuable comment on the American culture of this period:

The story of the arts in seventeenth century New England is the tale of a people trying to plant in the New World the very vines whose fruit they had enjoyed in the Old, while, at the same time, it is the chronicle of the subconscious development of a totally different civilization. The seventeenth-century history of the Bay Psalm Book is a case in point, for although the psalm-tunes may superficially appear nothing more than a parochial utilization of certain music sung in the mother country, a mysterious qualitative change took place when they were sung on different soil. Here, they proved to be the seed from which a new, uniquely American music was later to flower.¹

The first flowers did not appear until late in the eighteenth century, but even within the psalm-singing tradition some very interesting departures from European practice were very soon to appear. There was an inevitable decline in musical literacy after the first generation of the Pilgrims, brought about by the wilderness conditions in which they found themselves; psalm-singing was transformed from a written to a mainly oral tradition, and despite the efforts of the divines and the ‘educated’ musicians to instill what they called “regular singing” (singing, that is, at that neat brisk jogtrot which every church organist still today likes to hear from his congregation), the folk persisted in planting their own fingerprint on the singing of the psalms. It is fascinating to see, at the very beginning of America’s cultural history, the kind of clash between native and imported European tradition that was to recur again and again.

Because it was a folk and an oral tradition and frowned upon by educated people, we have only unsympathetic accounts of what was happening; the people, as usual, had no spokesman. Here is the Reverend Cotton Mather, writing in 1721: “It has been found … in some of our congregations that in length of time their singing has degenerated into an odd noise, that has more of what we want a name for, than any Regular Singing in it.”² And, in the same year, one Thomas Walter: “I have observed in many places, one man is upon this note, while another is on the note before him, which produces something as hideous and disorderly as is beyond expression bad.”³

We can infer from these and other contemporary accounts that what was happening was that the people, singing unaccompanied as was usual, had evolved their own style, slowing up the putative beat almost to immobility (though probably each carrying within himself his own beat), gradually sinking in pitch and then perhaps jumping up an octave or a fifth to regain his own natural compass. Then, within each enormously prolonged note (as written), each would proceed to ornament each note with “turnings and flourishings,” grace notes and arabesques, with arbitrary alterations of melody and time. It must have been an astonishing noise; one would wish to have had a tape recorder in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in the 1690s. And, at least in the country areas, there seemed little that the cultivated musicians could do to prevent it; the people sang in their own way as long as the singing remained unaccompanied and there were not enough trained musicians around to confine their musical devotions to the written note.

Christopher Small at a restaurant in Sitges, Spain, 2008. Photograph by Robert Walser.

This continual clash between those who want to regulate and those who do not want to be regulated recurs time and again throughout America’s history. Thoreau, for example, writing a hundred and thirty years after Cotton Mather, set the matter eloquently: “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured and far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. If the condition of things which we were made for is not yet, what were any reality which we can substitute?”⁴

The validity of this way of singing, reviled and ridiculed as it was by the cultivated musicians of two centuries, was affirmed by the town bandmaster of Danbury, Connecticut, George Ives, and his son Charles. The persistence of the tradition of spontaneous hymn-singing can be appreciated when we realize that what Charles writes of below must have been taking place in the 1880s: “I remember when I was a boy—at the outdoor Camp Meeting services in Redding, all the farmers, their families and field hands for miles around used to come through the trees—when things like Beulah Land, Woodworth, Nearer My God to Thee, The Shining Shore, Nettleton, In the Sweet Bye and Bye and the like were sung by thousands of ‘let out’ souls. The music notes and words on paper were about as much like what they ‘were’ (at those moments) as the monogram on a man’s necktie may be like his face. Father, who led the singing, sometimes with his cornet or his voice, sometimes with both voice and arms, sometimes in the quieter hymns with a French horn or violin, would always encourage the people to sing in their own way. Most of them knew the words and music (theirs) by heart, and sang it that way. If they threw the poet and the composer around a bit, so much the better for the poetry and the music. There was power and exultation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity.”⁵

The proponents of “regular singing” were not slow to take action against what they regarded as the corruption of hymn singing. Innumerable books were published with the intention of schooling singers, and, more important, the institution of singing schools grew up. These were generally run by itinerant musicians, often doubling as peddlers of quack medicines or the like, who would settle in a village or town for a few weeks, announce their intention of instructing those who wished it in regular singing, and conduct classes for all comers in the evenings. This institution prospered for reasons that probably had as much to do with social as with purely musical factors, and became an important part of the life of the New England colonies, right down the eastern seaboard. It was these travelling singing masters who built up a musical community that gave rise in the late eighteenth century to the first group of native American composers.

The group who became known as the First New England School were humble men, who called themselves “tunesmiths” rather than composers, since they regarded themselves as artisans whose function, like that of the blacksmith or wheelwright, was to serve the community. As H. Wiley Hitchcock says:

This was a music completely in tune with the society for which it was written. These journeymen composers had a secure and respected function in Colonial and Federal-era life in general; viewed historically from a point two hundred years later, theirs was a sort of golden age of musical participation in which teachers, composers, singers and populace in general worked together fruitfully. If ever there was a truly popular music, the music of the New Englanders was popular; it arose from the deep, old traditions of early America; it was accessible to all and enjoyed by all; it was a plain-spoken music for plain people, and assessed on its own terms it was a stylistically homogeneous music of great integrity.⁶

These were down-to-earth men, then, and they had down-to-earth names; among them were Justin Morgan, Supply Belcher, Timothy Swan, and, the best-known and most articulate member of the group, William Billings of Boston. Born in 1746, he was a tanner by trade; quite self-taught in music (though doubtless tutored in a singing school), he abandoned his trade and hung a shingle outside his house which read, simply, “Billings—Songs.” He was apparently a remarkable man; a contemporary description says he was “a singular man of moderate size, short of one leg, with one eye, without any address, with an uncommon negligence of person. Still he spake and thought as one above the common abilities.”⁷ He published a number of collections of songs, hymn tunes, and anthems, usually prefacing them with pungently expressed opinions, which give the flavor not only of the man but of the confident young society in which he lived in an intimate relationship that must be the envy of many a contemporary composer. For example:

Perhaps it may be expected that I should say something concerning rules for composition; to those I answer that Nature is the best dictator, for not all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any person to form an air … It must be Nature, Nature who must lay the foundation, Nature must inspire the thought … For my own part, as I don’t think myself confined to any rules of composition, laid down by any that went before me, neither should I think (were I to pretend to lay down rules) that any one who came after me were in any ways obligated to adhere to them, any further than they should think proper; so in fact I think it best for every composer to be his own carver.⁸

Brave words! But Billings has more for us:

Perhaps some may think I mean and intend to throw Art entirely out of the question. I answer, by no means, for the more art is displayed, the more Nature is decorated. And in some sorts of composition there is dry study required, and art very requisite. For instance, in a fuge, where the parts come in after each other with the same notes, but even here, art is subservient to genius, for fancy goes first and strikes out the work roughly, and art comes after and polishes it over.⁹

Billings was fourteen years younger than Haydn, ten years older than Mozart, but his music inhabits another world than that of European classicism. In some ways it seems to hark back to an earlier European style; it is modal rather than tonal, with a folkish flavor, deriving perhaps from the Anglo-Celtic folk tradition. It is to all intents and purposes non-harmonic; certainly tonal functional harmony plays no part in its repertory of expressive means. Any conflict between the needs of chord progression and the shape of an individual melodic line is invariably resolved in favor of the latter, even if this produces a harmonic clash, so that astounding dissonances unknown in contemporary European music are used freely and often without any feeling of need for resolution. Open and parallel fifths, both proscribed by European rules, are heard here so frequently that it is clear that the sound was positively enjoyed by these composers and their congregations. To harmonically attuned ears the music may sound tonally monotonous, the more so as modulation, apart from the occasional perfunctory movement to the dominant, is virtually non-existent, but to feel this is to miss the point of the music, which is concerned with other matters, and pursues its concerns in a remarkably stylish and consistent way. The music is mainly for unaccompanied chorus—at least, no accompaniment is provided, although wind and even string instruments might join in doubling the vocal parts should they happen to be available. Keyboard instruments were rare and played no part in the world of these composers—which may have been a contributing factor to the absence of harmonic device in their works, obliging them to think in terms of lines rather than of chords (the role of the keyboard, with its power of bringing complex textures under the control of a single individual, in the development of tonal harmony has already been remarked on).

A typical New England anthem consists of a number of short sections cunningly put together, with chordal sections alternating with sections in simple imitative counterpoint (“fuging”) and remarkable manipulation of textural effect in which the whole group may be set against one, two or three voices, as well as contrasts of tempo, dynamics and vocal timbre, all used as structural rather than as decorative elements. That the first western non-harmonic music since the Renaissance should have been composed in a society founded on the ideal of individual liberty (Billings was an active supporter of the Colonial cause and wrote not only its principal rallying-song, Chester, but also an eloquent Lament Over Boston on the occasion of the burning of the city by the British) by a musician who believed that “every composer should be his own carver” and that “nature must inspire the thought” should come as no surprise to the reader who has thus far followed the argument of this book.

Billings, like his colleagues, was very concerned for the manner of performance; many of his ideas would have shocked his European contemporaries, and even today show a very cavalier attitude to the demands of traditional tonal-harmonic music, especially the importance it assigns to the real bass. He liked, for example, to have male and female voices on each part, producing an octave, and occasionally a double-octave, doubling—a kind of organ sonority in six or eight parts. His ear was very idiosyncratic, but it is clear that he knew the kind of sound he wanted:

Suppose a company of forty people; twenty of them should sing the bass, and the other twenty should be divided according to the discretion of the company into the upper parts. Six or seven voices should sing the ground bass, which sung together with the upper parts, is most majestic, and so exceeding grand as to cause the floor to tremble, as I myself have often experienced … Much caution should also be used in singing a solo (sic); in my opinion 2 or 3 at most are enough to sing it well. It should be sung soft as an echo, in order to keep the hearers in agreeable suspense till all the parts join together in a full chorus, as sweet and strong as possible.¹⁰

It was also apparently not unusual for these composers to place the various parts at some distance from one another, making use of the spatial separation between them—attesting further to a concern for the individual part, which was virtually unknown in the European music of the time.

Here, then, was the stuff of a new, democratic tradition in music, strong, confident, firmly rooted in the life of the people, and accessible to them, which could match the aspirations of Jeffersonian democracy. Yet it vanished without trace for almost two hundred years, swamped by the movement towards gentility and European-style “correctness” which took place under the leadership of musicians such as Lowell Mason in the early years of the nineteenth century. To Mason, who, appropriately enough, was also the first to bring to music the methods of that typically American institution, Big Business (which was just getting under way in the early nineteenth century), music was principally a commodity. He published an enormous quantity of music, hymns, church music generally, children’s instructional manuals and songbooks, secular songs, some of them his own compositions (From Greenland’s Icy Mountain is his) but mostly taken from the work of lesser European composers and the lesser works of greater, often rearranged to take out their most striking features, leaving a bland and bloodless mixture, not unlike the products of present-day American television, and for much the same reasons. Mason grasped the fact that if music was to be treated as a commodity then clearly it had to appeal to the widest number of people and antagonize the fewest. Good quality, yes—but not so original as to disturb or frighten off a potential customer. (This blandness is still to be found today in many American collections of music for high school orchestras, bands and the like.) In any case the raw but richly alive works of the New England tunesmiths clearly would not do.

It is not too fanciful to see in this betrayal of the ideals of the early composers a parallel of the betrayal of the idea of the rights of man that began to take place in the early nineteenth century as industrialism got under way. America in the nineteenth century produced writers of real greatness who preserved an aggressive stance of independence—Melville, Twain, Whitman, Emerson, for example, and above all Thoreau, while American art music produced only Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Stephen Collins Foster, both interesting figures but scarcely of comparable stature. Could not this be because music, for the very reason that it is less precise in its outward meanings, less conscious of exactly what it is saying, gives even deeper expression than literature to the subconscious motivations of a culture? In any case, the history of nineteenth-century American art music is a dismal affair; one after another, young composers crossed the Atlantic, to Dresden, to Leipzig, Vienna or Weimar, rarely to Paris, coming back with music that was no more than a pale imitation of German romanticism. As David Wooldridge in his recent biography of Charles Ives remarks, the vision of the New England tunesmiths “went forfeit to the competent … Only music malingered dismally, generation over generation of American composers making the pilgrimage to Europe like dowagers to a spa, to fetch back the continuing seed of a foreign culture for the continuing delight of old ladies.”¹¹

It was not, however, the Europeanized American composers who dominated the art-music scene; indeed, they were hard put to it to get a hearing at all. It was European, and especially German, music, its apparatus and standard repertoire—a state of affairs that largely continues even today with the large and socially accepted concert organizations. And precisely because this music had, and has, no organic relationship with indigenous American culture it proved sterile, without roots; it is perhaps for this reason that, while in Europe those who find in themselves no point of contact with classical music (in the popular sense of the word) are content to ignore it and go their own way, in America it seems to arouse positive hostility. A standard plot for the Hollywood musicals of my youth concerned the confrontation between “longhair” musicians and the “regular kids,” as portrayed by the young Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Bonita Granville and Jane Withers, who wanted to “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” There is malice, too, in the Marx Brothers’ hilarious destruction of a performance of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, and in the cutting loose of the floating platform in At the Circus allowing the symphony orchestra under the baton of the outrageously caricatured Italian conductor to float out to sea still energetically playing Wagner—an architypal image if ever there was one. But we must be clear; it was not music that the average American disliked, then as now. His culture was full of it, from minstrel shows to southern hymnody, jazz, cowboy songs, vaudeville, “burleycue” and military marches—all vigorous growths, all indigenously and characteristically American and all popular in the widest sense. It was specifically European art music that was and is rejected by the vast majority.

The triumph of the European tonal-harmonic tradition in the nineteenth century among Americans who considered themselves to be cultured went parallel to that of the post-Renaissance scientific world view, and its cognates the Protestant ethic, capitalism and industrialism. Only for those who lived outside the mainstream of American life did the older traditions survive. We have seen how the tradition of communal hymn singing in the old style persisted in rural areas into the late years of the nineteenth century; even today in the backwoods areas of Kentucky and the Carolinas one comes across thriving groups who sing the old hymns in the old way, using shape-note notation and “fasola” syllables which date back to the days of the eighteenth-century song schools. The survival of modal Anglo-Celtic folksong among the remote rural populations of the Appalachian mountain region is well known; indeed, British folk-song collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles found in the nineteen-twenties that these areas were an altogether richer source of British folk song than anywhere in England.

By far the largest group, which until recently has been excluded from the mainstream of American economic, political, and cultural life, is the Negro population. We have already observed that the collision between the African and the European, notably Anglo-Celtic, traditions, has proved one of the most fruitful in the entire history of music, and although this is not the place for an examination of that collision and its fruits, we may perhaps make some observations on the music and its relation to Negro society.

First, the blues. In its classic form this consists, verbally, of stanzas of two lines of rhyming verse, with the first line repeated, so that the second when it comes forms a kind of punchline. The words are characterized by an unsentimental melancholy tinged with an ironic humor, frequently connected with deprivation of love, such as:

I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep

(I said) I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep,

Just to keep those men from making their early mornin’ creep’

Often the imagery is explicitly sexual:

My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,

(I say) My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,

If your generator ain’t bad, baby, you must be buying bad gasoline.

and is surprisingly little concerned with topics concerning racial discrimination or economic deprivation.

Musically the classic blues consists of twelve bars of music on a very simple and conventional sequence of I-IV-I-V-(IV)-I chords, alternating two sung bars with two bars of instrumental improvisation. Although it would thus seem to be based firmly on European harmonic progressions, the music preserves, as do black singers towards white American society, a very ambiguous relationship towards tonal harmony. Leaving aside the fact that the progression is an unvarying one which can therefore play no part in the actual expressive means, since what is expected, harmonically speaking, always arrives, we find that the favored accompanying instrument, at least in country blues, is the guitar, an instrument that lends itself, especially when played with a sawn-off bottleneck, to bold pitch distortions, and is commonly used that way. We find, too, that the seventh degree of the major scale is frequently flattened, undermining the V-I progression, and that the third degree of the scale is commonly placed somewhere between the major and the minor third thus weakening if not destroying the distinction between major and minor scale so basic to the emotional expressiveness of tonal-harmonic music. The more sophisticated urban blues tends to use the piano, whose pitches are fixed on the tempered scale; the “neutral” third is simulated by playing major and minor third simultaneously (a feature that it shares with jazz) giving the characteristic sound to piano blues and its offshoots, barrelhouse and boogie-woogie, both of which use the blues harmonic framework. In any case, the tremendous proliferation of styles, of melodies and types of texture, which can be heard over that simple, conventional bass, shows that the interest of the music lies elsewhere than in harmony.

Many of the features are undoubtedly related to survivals of African music (the tenaciousness and persistence of African cultural elements in black people through generations of degradation and deliberate disruption is one of the cultural miracles of modern times) but that is not the present point; in the blues we see once again how the attitude to tonal harmony is a clear indicator of the ambiguity of its singers’ position within and their attitude towards white society.

Blues was, and remains, an essentially oral tradition, with strong and close links with the society from which it arose. The blues singer, like his society, was, with a very few exceptions, and those only recently, poor. He was often itinerant, travelling large distances throughout the South, not infrequently blind, led, Tiresias-like, by a boy, and, like Tiresias, often treated by his people as a seer who “saw” more than the sighted. As in many oral traditions, the material comes largely from a common stock, not only of musical phrases but also of verbal expressions and images such as “I woke up this mornin’ …,” or “Just a poor boy, long ways from home,” or “Laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.” This common stock of phrases, which was often shared by poor white, no less than black, musicians, is a universal characteristic of oral poetry (one thinks of Homer’s stock of phrases such as “the wine-dark sea” or “bright-eyed Athene”) and is a great aid to communality of expression. Everyone can play; the modestly talented singer can fall back on the common stock and by selection and permutation can make something that expresses how he feels, while the greatly gifted artist can take the common stock, building on it and creating something new and uniquely expressive, giving voice to feelings that all his hearers can recognize in themselves, thus remaining always in touch with the community as a whole and comprehensible to them.

These blues singers were—and still largely are—the seers and prophets of the black community. There is much cross-fertilization between blues and gospel music; Charles Keil points out that many black blues singers go on to become preachers in later life: “The word ‘ritual’ seems more appropriate than ‘performance’ when the audience is committed rather than appreciative. And from this it follows that perhaps blues singing is more a belief role than a creative role—more priestly than artistic … Bluesmen and preachers both provide models and orientations; both give public expression to privately held emotions; both promote catharsis; both increase feelings of solidarity, boost morale and strengthen the consensus.”¹²

Blues began, and has remained, very much a people’s art. It preserves in its techniques similarly ambiguous attitudes to the European tonal-harmonic tradition to those of the community that gave it birth towards white American society. Jazz, on the other hand, is in its origins and its history much closer to white music and to white society. As Gunther Schuller points out,¹³ the legend of the illiterate jazz musician in New Orleans in the early years of the century is not in general substantiated by the statements of musicians who were around at the time; many were highly trained in the western concert tradition with a wide knowledge of the various kinds of western concert music that New Orleans presented so richly. Many influences went into the shaping of jazz; Wilfrid Mellers, writing about Jelly Roll Morton’s Didn’t He Ramble sums them up thus:

The military march becomes a rag, the hymn becomes a blues and a Latin-American dance-song brings in hints of French or Italian opera and maybe a whiff of Europeanized plantation music in the manner of Stephen Foster also. This melting-pot of a piece gives us an idea of the variety of music that shook New Orleans in the first decades of this century. Parade bands in the streets were so numerous that they were apt to bump into one another. Party bands in the streets and squares might be playing Negro rags or Latin-American tangos or French quadrilles or German waltzes.¹⁴

Jazz shows in its techniques that it is closer to white music. In fact the first jazz musicians to gain popular attention, especially those we know from the record companies, were white (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and their black contemporaries were initially relegated to the “race records” category). From its earliest days until, in the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, it abandoned contact altogether with the idea of the fundamental bass, at about the same time as the post-Webernian revolution in European art music, it has maintained the harmonic progression to a greater or lesser degree as one of its expressive devices. Throughout its history it has maintained a flirtation with European art music (the word is apt; it is the sheer playfulness of jazz that is one of its most enduring features, giving it a personal quality and almost physical presence that the other lacks), and the closeness of its contact with white society at any time can be assessed from the importance of the harmonic element in the music. The swing era, for example, was characterized by complex harmony in elaborate arrangements played from written scores; it was at the time a largely white and perfectly “respectable” art in the eyes of the middle-American majority. The revolt against the over-smooth banalities of swing in the late forties, which became known as bebop, in its origins an entirely black movement, diminished the importance of harmony to a point where its role was associative rather than explicit (much of it was blues-derived), while rhythm regained the central position it had lost. Bop was also, quite explicitly, a music of black social revolt, so it is understandable not only that tonal harmony was the first casualty but also that at the time white people mainly detested it (today, of course, bop is history and thus safe to like).

It is a commonplace that much of the vitality of jazz comes from the tension between the African and the European elements that it incorporates. It is interesting, therefore, to see that the moment when it rejected tonality altogether in favor of a modal or even atonal heterophony in the music of Coleman, Coltrane, Ayler, and others was the point at which it stopped being a popular art and became virtually another branch of art music appealing to a public of cognoscenti rather than to a community. Blues, on the other hand, remains a communal art, and it was blues rather than jazz that became, along with country and western music, the main source of the other major non-harmonic (although still tonal) music of our time, rock’n’roll, and its successors in the sixties and seventies. These will be discussed more fully in the next chapter [Music, Society, Education].

I stated earlier that American culture is full of music, a line of thought that brings us directly to Charles Edward Ives, the one composer who brings together all the threads of specifically American music and links them with the European tradition. He had a wide knowledge of European music and a comfortable mastery of its techniques, yet his relationship to it was highly ambivalent and his commitment was first and foremost to America. I have already remarked on his experience of the outdoor camp meetings at which his father led the singing, and there is a memorable passage in his Memos telling how his father rebuked a smart young Boston musician for ridiculing the out-of-tune hymn singing of an old stonemason: “Watch him closely and reverently, look into his eyes and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”¹⁵

The view of Ives as a cranky amateur who stumbled almost unawares on some of the most revolutionary musical discoveries of the century is now, one hopes, well and truly dead. He was a sophisticated, cultured musician with a powerful mind and an incredibly alert ear, and was very clear about what it was he was doing, as can be seen from his Essays Before a Sonata,¹⁶ and the more recently published Memos. The reason why his music makes so little appeal to so many European academic composers and critics is that it celebrates, not some beautiful, orderly ideal world but the real world, contradictory, untidy, even chaotic as it is. He accepts and glories in the multiplicity of human experience, and the asymmetry and unexpectedness of the music is not the result of incompetence or naivety but arises naturally from his personality, from his belief in the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and above all in the unity that underlies all the variety of nature. There are those who, like David Wooldridge in his biography, and John Cage, blame Ives for abandoning the full-time profession of music and going into business. Cage writes: “I don’t so much admire the way Ives treated his music socially (separating it from his insurance business); it made his life too safe economically and it is in living dangerously economically that one shows bravery socially.”¹⁷ Wooldridge and Cage reveal what is in fact an inappropriately romantic view of the position of a composer in society, which would no doubt have been quickly dismissed by William Billings and his colleagues. Ives’s life in business is an expression of his faith in the unity of life; it was a gesture towards life and against fragmentation and the isolation of the artist. The rightness of his course is shown by the fact that his inspiration dried up as soon as he retired from business.

In considering both his beliefs and his techniques, the idea of Ives held by many Europeans, even among those who are sympathetic to his music, as a great original who sprang from nowhere, dissolves when we become aware of the nature of the American musical tradition, outside that of the Europeanized art music of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he had been thoroughly grounded in the European tradition both by his father (whose own musical training had included the working of Bach chorales and the transcription of opera scenes from Gluck and Mozart as well as of baroque masses, and whose small-town orchestra was capable of turning in excellent performances of Rossini, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Meyerbeer and even Mozart) and by the conventional but expert Horatio Parker at Yale. But his attitude towards the great masters of that tradition remained equivocal; on the one hand he could assert with confidence that “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are the strongest and greatest in all art, and nothing since is stronger than their strongest and greatest,” while at other times he could voice interesting doubts, speaking of “a vague feeling that even the best music we know—Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms—was too cooped up—more so than nature intended it to be—not only in its chord systems and relations, lines, etc, but also in its time, or rather its rhythms and spaces—blows or not blows—all up and down even little compartments, over and over (prime numbers and their multiples) all so even and nice—producing some sense of weakness, even in the great.” And again: “I remember feeling towards Beethoven that he’s a great man—but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key.”¹⁸

His relationship with the indigenous music of the United States, on the other hand, was much more positive. His awareness of the continuity of the outdoor camp meetings with the psalm singing of the early colonists is as obvious as his love of the music. There is little in his compositions that actually suggests the quality of such meetings in a literal way, although the marvelous choral outburst at the end of the Thanksgiving movement of the Holidays Symphony comes near to it. But this wild, highly individualistic quality runs through all of his music. The Second String Quartet is in fact based on it; the four instruments are all characterized (the second violin is cast as Rollo, the type of prissy milksop musician whom Ives so despised), while the three movements are entitled: Four Men Have a Discussion, Arguments and Fight, and They Climb a Mountain and Contemplate. Other examples are to be found in the early scherzo, Over the Pavements, a representation of the different independent walking rhythms that could be heard in a busy street before the advent of the internal combustion engine.

In most of Ives’s work, as in that of the New England tunesmiths, the needs of the individual voice or part take precedence over the neatness or consistency of the over-all effect (one is reminded of Whitman’s bold “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself!”). It is this fact that accounts for the notorious dissonance of his work, as well as for its rhythmic complexity. In allowing each voice to go its own way he was expressing his version of the ideal of individual freedom, but we should notice that while the relationships between the voices are complex in the extreme, often allowing no room for the stately, logical chord progressions of tonal functional harmony, they are not chaotic; Ives has them under control. There are accounts from those who knew him well of his ability to keep a number of rhythmic patterns going simultaneously, and he was well able to play his own music on the piano. His ideal of liberty remained firmly within the law, although the law was to be subtle and flexible to allow for the greatest degree of variety of individual interaction. He could be tolerant when it came to performances of his own music; provided that the music was attempted with sincerity and simplicity of purpose, he did not mind too much if it did not come out exactly as he wrote it—hence his famous comment on an early well-intentioned but botched performance of Three Places in New England—“Just like a town meeting—every man for himself. Wonderful how it came out!” One wonders, in fact, whether he would have liked some of today’s recorded performances by the same kind of superstar conductor and instrumentalist as those who once pronounced the music unplayable, so smoothly and perfectly co-ordinated; in their very technical proficiency they are regressing towards the mean of European music, and the quality of adventure which he treasured is lacking from the experience.

In the multiplicity of his sources, from Beethoven to American folk tunes, gospel hymnody and ragtime, in the protean variety of his musical styles, from straightforward tonal harmony (regarded by him as only one of an infinite number of expressive means) to polytonality, polyrhythm and polymeter, proto-serial music, spatial music, Ives introduced something completely new into western music, which has become an increasingly important factor in it, especially to those Americans who succeeded him. In European music we obtain a hint of this all-embracing quality only in the work of Mahler, and in his famous remark, made to Sibelius, that “A symphony must be like the world; it must contain everything!” In the music of Ives, in fact, the work of art becomes not just an expression of nature or of an attitude to nature; it becomes a part of nature, flowing along in the flux of time as much as a rock or a tree. Like a natural object it contains not one but many meanings; the extraction of meaning requires more work on the part of the hearer, but the music allows the hearer to enter in and find his own meaning, rather than have it presented to him ready-made, depending on the aspects of it on which we concentrate our attention. This, for example, is what he says of the pieces which he calls Tone Roads:

The Tone Roads are roads leading right and left—“F.E. Hartwell & Co., Gents’ Furnishings”—just starting an afternoon’s sport. If horses and wagons can go sometimes on different roads (hill road, muddy road, straight, hilly hard road) at the same time, and get to Main Street eventually—why can’t different instruments on different staffs? The wagons and people and roads are all in the same township—same mud, breathing the same air, same temperature, going to the same place, speaking the same language (sometimes)—but not all going on the same road, all going their own way, each trip different to each driver, different people, different cuds, not all chewing in the key of C—that is, not all in the same key—or same number of steps per mile … Why can’t each one, if he feels like trying to go, go along the staff-highways of music, each hearing the other’s “trip” making its own sound-way, in the same township of fundamental sounds—yet different, when you think of where George is now, down in the swamp, while you are on Tallcot Mountain—then the sun sets and all are on Main Street.¹⁹

And elsewhere in the Memos he discusses the structure of a piece and comments, “This may not be a nice way to write music, but it’s one way!—and who knows the only real nice way?”²⁰

In his multiplicity Ives draws together many threads of American music and brings them to the surface from where they had lain, submerged and neglected, for more than a century. He celebrates the fact that what people play or sing is not necessarily the same as what they think they are playing and singing, and acknowledges their right to sing or play as they wish; indeed, given the right attitude in the listener, the result can be just as beautiful as more accurate or more formally disciplined music making.

Ives seems never to have seriously considered studying in Europe; those who did go to Europe either before or after him came back imbued with European attitudes, no matter how “American” they believed themselves to be. The music of Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, even of Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, remains European-style concert music with an American accent, not unlike the nationalist concert music of such nineteenth-century composers as Smetana, Dvorak, Greig, whose national accents (this is not to deny their many virtues or even genius) remain mere dialects of the prevailing European polyglot. Of the generation following Ives, only Henry Cowell showed anything of Ives’s bent for uninhibited experimentation with sound, free from harmonic preconceptions. Cowell’s early pieces for piano, using tone-clusters (a term which was in fact invented by him) and plucked and rubbed strings may have been naïf (some were published while he was still in his teens) but their spirit was the same as had animated the eighteenth-century tunesmiths, and is directed towards liberating the inner nature of the sounds themselves. If his later work falls back into the European concert-music manner, albeit with an exotic seasoning, he had opened up some important new resources, and, as editor of the journal New Music, he became, in the words of John Cage, “the open sesame for new music in America … From him, as from an efficient telephone booth, you could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone working in a lively way with music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction from him as to what anyone was doing. He was not attached (as Varèse also was not attached) to what seemed to many the important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky.”²¹ The last is an important point; to be aware of the essential irrelevance of both Schoenberg and Stravinsky (obscured by the fact that both composers were resident in the United States, Schoenberg since 1934 and Stravinsky since the 1940s) to the growth of a genuinely American tradition was a state which Cage himself reached only in later life.

It is in fact in the music and the writings of Cage that the tendencies we have been observing over the three-hundred-and-fifty-year history of American music finally become explicit. His first confrontation with European concepts of harmony seems to have occurred when he was studying with Schoenberg, that most committedly European of all twentieth-century composers. He tells the story as if he were unaware of its significance, a fact that testifies to the depth, albeit perhaps unconscious, of his feeling. When he had been with Schoenberg for five years the master said that to write music one must have a feeling for harmony. “I told him,” says Cage, “that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’”²² Schoenberg, from his own point of view and that of the European tradition was of course right, but in fact Cage has felt no such necessity; going ahead as if western concepts of harmony and the associated ideas of linear time and climax had never existed, he has found in rhythm the organizing principle for which harmony served in traditional western music. “Sounds, including noises, it seemed to me, had four characteristics (pitch, loudness, timbre, and duration) while silence had only one (duration). I therefore devised a rhythmic structure based on the duration, not of notes, but of spaces in time … It is analogous to Indian Tala (rhythmic method) but it has the Western characteristic of a beginning and an ending.”²³ The first sentence here seems to take Cage close to the position of Webern in the thirties; the last two emphasize how far from that position he actually was.

A piece by Cage, in fact, rarely develops, rarely works towards any kind of climax or apotheosis, but deals in what is known in Indian aesthetic theory as “permanent emotion” (one ancient work of theory lists these as Heroic, Erotic, Wondrous, Mirthful, Odious, Fearful, Angry and Sorrowful)—a single emotional state that persists through the piece. The music may thus be boring to some; once it has made its point, many feel, there seems little purpose in continuing it. Virgil Thomson, for example, says, “The Cage works have some intrinsic interest and much charm, but after a few minutes very little urgency. They do not seem to be designed for holding the attention and generally speaking they do not hold it.”²⁴ This is the verdict of a western composer accustomed to the concept of music as drama, but it may also be a just criticism; it could be, as used to be said of Berlioz, that Cage just has not enough talent for his genius.

He has taken the denial of the European spirit even further than the simple rejection of harmony, and has attempted to eliminate as completely as possible the imposition of the composer’s will upon the sounds, finding justification for this in his studies of Zen Buddhism. His renunciation of harmony “and its effect of fusing sounds in a fixed relationship,” his desire to allow sounds simply to “be themselves,” to refrain from imposing any outside order on them, is clearly anarchistic (we remind ourselves that the word “anarchism” is not a synonym for “chaos” but indicates rather a state in which men need no externally imposed laws), a metaphor for a potential society, which few Europeans have so far dared to imagine. His refusal to impose his will on the sounds has led him to his well-known use of chance operations, by the throwing of dice, the consultation of the Chinese Book of Changes, the I-Ching, or, more recently, the use of computers; he tries “to arrange my composing means so that I won’t have any knowledge of what might happen…. I like to think that I’m outside the circle of a known universe and dealing with things I literally don’t know anything about.”²⁵ Boulez’ criticism, made from his echt-European viewpoint, that such procedures merely cover “weaknesses in the compositional methods involved,”²⁶ is regarded by Cage as irrelevant, since if compositional methods are designed to assist the composer to submit the sound materials to his will, the absence of any desire to do so renders all such methods superfluous.

The use of chance operations has a further consequence: that one accepts the validity of whatever sound chance turns up, without making any kind of value judgment on it. “Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness. How are you going to use this situation if you are there? That is the question,”²⁷ he says, and quotes the Hindu aphorism, “Imitate the sands of the Ganges who are not pleased by perfume and who are not disgusted by filth.” And again: “Why do you waste your time and mine by trying to get value judgments? Don’t you know that when you get a value judgment that’s all you have?”²⁸

It is true that the European habit of placing value judgments on everything pervades our thinking to a degree that we hardly realize. Our minds are full of hierarchies; among composers, for example, we are accustomed to think of Bach and Beethoven, perhaps of Mozart (the hierarchy differs in detail between individuals but the main outlines are clear), with Brahms and Haydn perhaps a little below them, and so on down through Tchaikowsky, Schumann, Delibes, to Chaminade and Ketèlby to the lady next door who makes up little songs. This habit of thought is a cognate of the value placed on the art object rather than the creative process, since once a value is placed on the art object the natural question is, what value? Part of the reasoning behind Cage’s frequent refusal to fix his works in final form, behind his use of chance and indeterminacy, is the desire to preserve as much of the art process as is possible for the performer and even the listener; “Art instead of being an object made by one person is a process set in motion by a group of people. Art’s socialized. It isn’t someone saying something but people doing things, giving everyone (including those involved) the opportunity to have experiences they would not otherwise have had.”²⁹ So, at least in many later works, he provides the structure leaving the performer to fill in the actual material in his own way. So, too, the apparent chaos of vast multi-media works such as HPSCHD is intended to allow the listener to put his own meaning on the piece, rather than to present him with a ready-made meaning. He makes an interesting antitheses between “emerging” and “entering in”; “Everybody,” he says, “hears the same thing if it emerges. Everybody hears what he alone hears if he enters in.”³⁰ Again, to an interviewer who claimed to hear a sense of logic and cohesion in one of his indeterminate pieces, he replied, sharply, “This logic was not put there by me, but was the result of chance operations. The thought that it is logical grows up in you.”³¹

With Cage, then, it would appear as if the emancipation from the drama, tension and domination of the will of European music is complete. And yet a doubt remains; the simple refusal to make any kind of value judgement, the unquestioning acceptance of any sound that happens along (which obliges us, it must be said, to accept at times some pretty excruciating sounds), is based on perhaps too facile an interpretation of Zen doctrines of art. Alan Watts points out, “Even in painting, the work of art is considered not as representing nature but as being itself a work of nature.” So far so good, but he goes on, “This does not mean that the art forms of Zen are left to mere chance … The point is rather that for Zen there is no duality, no conflict between the natural element of chance and the human element of control. The constructive powers of the human mind are no more artificial than the formative action of plants or bees, so that from the standpoint of Zen it is no contradiction to say that artistic technique is discipline in spontaneity and spontaneity in discipline.”³² Not even his worst enemies would accuse Cage of lack of discipline; nevertheless, to deny the reality of value is simply to continue the discourse on value on the same level as it has been conducted since the time of Aristotle. What is needed is a new concept of value that transcends western hierarchical thinking, and this Cage, for all the magnitude of his achievement, for all the new freedom he has brought into ways of musical thinking, has not succeeded in establishing.

Since Cage, however, tonal harmony has no longer been a concern to those American musicians whose thinking does not follow that of Europe. American music no longer needs to protest its independence; that can now be taken for granted as American musicians compose their own models of the potential society that owe little to European precedents. I must emphasize again that this chapter makes no claim to being a comprehensive survey of American music, but simply attempts to offer an interpretation of certain aspects of that music in the light of the ideas presented in the earlier chapters, and in particular in the light of the ideal of individual liberty upon which the Republic was founded. With this in mind, let us consider only four of those musicians whose work is making the American scene today so much more lively than its European counterpart. The language may have changed, but the vision of the potential society remains as pervasive as ever.

The principal concern of these musicians seems to be the projection of sounds into time, the loving exploration of the inner nature of sounds, in a world where the structures that contain the sounds are relatively unimportant—a complete reversal, in fact, of the classical European aesthetic of music. The antithesis is summed up neatly in an exchange, reported by the pianist John Tilbury, which is supposed to have taken place between Morton Feldman and Stockhausen:

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Morton, I know you have no system, but what’s your secret?

MORTON FELDMAN: Leave the sounds alone, Karlheinz, don’t push them around.

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN: Not even just a little bit?³³

Feldman, who acknowledges Cage as having given him “early permissions to have confidence in my instincts,” takes sounds, as it were, and holds them up for our pleasure and admiration. The sounds he presents to us are generally quiet and unobtrusive, changing gently, creating stillness and peacefulness. The temporal order of the sounds scarcely matters, so that conventional concepts of musical time have no meaning; one feels that if it were possible to project the entire piece simultaneously Feldman would do so.

La Monte Young is concerned also in the exploration of the inner nature of sounds. He recalls from childhood his fascination with the sound of the wind in telephone wires and says, “I noticed about 1956 that I seemed more interested in listening to chords than in listening to melodies. In other words, I was more interested in concurrency or simultaneity than in sequence.”³⁴ The result of this concern was, for example, Composition 1960 No 7, which consists of the instruction “B and F sharp. To be held for a long time,” and the very long composition The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, in which “Young and three associates chant an open chord of intrinsically infinite duration, amplified to the point of aural pain. Public performances usually consist of two sessions, each nearly two hours in length, within a darkened room illuminated only by projections of pattern-art.”³⁵ Young’s music, then, has little to do with listening in the traditional western sense, and much with absorption in the timeless rituals of Buddhism and Lamaism. The extreme length of time each sound lasts is vital to the awareness of each nuance of its nature; just as the ethologist must sit and wait for a long time for the living community to reveal itself, so Young’s music can be regarded as a kind of ethology of sound, as an observation of sounds when they are allowed to be themselves, not fashioned into shapes determined by human will.

Steve Reich, for long an associate and friend of Young, is also an observer of the behavior of sounds, but sounds not stationary but gradually changing from within, following their own natural evolution. His compositions are, as he himself says, literally processes, which happen extremely gradually, much as a plant unfolds. One often fails to perceive the process happening, but only becomes aware that a change has taken place. Reich compares such processes to “pulling back a swing, releasing it, and observing it gradually come to rest; turning over an hour glass and watching the sand slowly run through to the bottom; placing your feet in the sand by the ocean’s edge and watching, feeling and listening to the waves gradually bury them.”³⁶ Such processes, though fascinating to the mind that is prepared to sit and let them happen, are essentially undramatic; so is Reich’s music, which might be dismissed as monotonous by minds attuned to the violent and dramatic contrasts of classical music. A piece tends to consist of an extremely small amount of material, both rhythmic and melodic, played by several performers (or, in the earlier pieces, on several tape recorders) who are slightly out of phase with one another, so that material is constantly being revealed in new, gradually changing relationships with itself; fascinating and beautiful new melodic and rhythmic patterns are constantly being created. The music is not difficult to play in terms of the actual notes, which tend to be simple repetitions of melodic patterns, but the task of playing the same pattern as one’s neighbor at a slightly different but perfectly controlled speed requires intense discipline and months of rehearsal for each piece. Reich has collected around him a group of musicians who have developed the kind of social rather than individual virtuosity, which is perhaps the most important fruit of his period of study under a master drummer in Ghana. The nature of the processes at work is always perfectly clear to the listener; unlike tonal-harmonic or serial music it keeps no secrets. As Reich says, in the same article, “We all listen to the process together since it’s quite audible, and one of the reasons why it’s quite audible is because it’s happening extremely gradually. The use of hidden structural devices has never appealed to me. Even when all the cards are on the table and everyone hears what is happening in a musical process there are still enough mysteries to satisfy all. These mysteries are the impersonal, unintended, psycho-acoustic byproducts of the intended process. These might include sub-melodies heard within repeated melodic patterns, stereophonic effects due to listener location, slight irregularities in performance, harmonics, difference tones, etc.”³⁷

Reich’s largest and most ambitious work to date is Drumming, a work for tuned tomtoms, glockenspiels and marimbas, with singers, whistlers and piccolo to outline the melodic patterns that are implied as the highly disciplined performers move in and out of phase with one another; it was for me a musical experience of great beauty and joy when it was first performed in London in 1972. Reich’s gift is the ability to set up situations in which, as the sounds unfold according to the rules of their own evolution, they make continuously beautiful and interesting patterns without the apparent intervention of the composer’s will. There is an openness and a complex simplicity about this exploration of sounds that parallels the workings of nature herself.

The music of Terry Riley, a Californian and friend of both Young and Reich, takes place in a similar area of musical sound; it first struck a wide public at least, in this country with In C, where some fifty short melodic fragments, all diatonic on the scale of C, are played by as many instrumentalists as desired; each player plays each fragment as many times as he wishes before moving on to the next, the performance being held together rhythmically by a rapidly repeated high C on the piano. The result is an extremely pleasing music, not unlike Reich’s in sound, but governed more by the whims of the performers than by the internal logic of the sounds; it is a less rigorous, more engaging, perhaps finally less satisfying music than Reich’s. Later works have included tape loops and feedback systems, sometimes with delays built in; the sound is relaxed and slow-changing, and takes the listener again far into the awareness of the sounds themselves.

In these and other ways the ideas of Cage have been taken forward, ways which in the purely musical results are perhaps more sympathetic to the uncommitted ear than those of Cage himself. There has always been a strong didactic, even dogmatic, streak in Cage; one sometimes has the impression that certain pieces were composed more to prove a point than from any genuine aesthetic impulse in any traditionally comprehensible sense of the word, and having heard the piece, one frequently has no real desire to hear it again; the point has been made, the idea got across, and there seems no need to repeat the experience.

There is perhaps a parallel here with the modern movement in American painting, discussed wittily in a recent magazine article by Tom Wolfe, who sees it not as the consequence of an aesthetic impulse but as a response to a theory of art, usually propounded by a critic. He says, “Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it I can’t see a painting,”³⁸ and suggests, tongue only half in cheek, that when the final great retrospective exhibition of American art 1945–75 is presented at the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2000 the exhibits will consist of blow-ups of the writings of critics with, by way of illustration, tiny reproductions of the paintings themselves. Cage does not always avoid the trap of the piece written to illustrate a point about perception, sound, silence or society. If music is to be alive, however, Art, to parody Billings, must go first and strike out the work, then Theory comes after and polishes it over.

For this reason, it could be that despite the power of Cage’s ideas to shock and disturb our preconceptions, a much more seminal figure will in time prove to be Harry Partch, who, born in 1901, was vouchsafed a mere four lines in a recently published history of music in the United States; his death at the end of 1974 passed almost unnoticed in the musical, not to say the general, press. If we compare Cage with the African and Balinese musicians discussed in chapter 2 [Music, Society, Education], it will be clear that he remains, for all his invaluable study of non-European ways, very much tied to western urban culture, and that his discourse is still carried on within the conditions of the western concert tradition. It is Partch, more than any other twentieth-century western musician, who represents a real challenge to that tradition, a challenge which stems not from the “Tomorrow’s World” optimism of Cage, who is still, it seems, hung up on the engaging technological lunacy of Buckminster Fuller and the behaviorist nightmares of B. F. Skinner, but from the old, universal and forever new ways of ritual theatre. “The work that I have been doing these many years,” says Partch, “parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found soundmagic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he evolved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”³⁹

Partch, in fact, may be the first musician of the west to have transcended the limitations of its concert tradition—or at least to have pointed a way in which this can be done. He is unique, not only in the thoroughness and explicitness of his rejection of European classical music, a rejection more complete than that of Cage or indeed of anyone since Billings and the New England tunesmiths, but also in the fact that he has succeeded in erecting a living alternative to it, growing not out of theory (though well supported by theory, coming after the creative fact) but out of “an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”⁴⁰—out of the fundamental creative impulse. In a single robustly-written chapter in his book Genesis of a Music, he surveys the whole of western music from Terpander in 700 BC to the present and finds it wanting in what he calls corporeality, that quality of being “vital to a time and a place, a here and now,”⁴¹ of being “emotionally tactile.” To him, the overwhelming majority of western musical compositions, including almost all of the post-Renaissance tradition (he has an interesting list of honorable exceptions, which includes the Florentine Camerata and Monteverdi, Berlioz, Mussorgski, the Mahler of Das Lied von der Erde, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg—but nothing else by him—and Satie) is irretrievably lost in abstraction, in the denial of the physical being of man. In its place “We are reduced to specialisms—a theatre of dialogue, for example, and a concert of music without drama—basic mutilations of ancient concept. My music is visual—it is corporeal, aural and visual …”⁴² The development of polyphony, of tonal harmony, and of the large abstract forms based on them, he sees as a distortion of the essential reality of music, which is the making of magic; and the principal bearer of that magic, as he sees it, is the human voice bringing the word.

So his music is composed around the human voice and the word—which of course means the theatre. His works are almost exclusively large music dramas, a theatre of mime, of farce and dance, of shouting and vocalizing, relating clearly to the great traditional dramas of Japan, of Ancient Greece, of Java and Bali—wherever in fact men have not forgotten how to act out ritually the myths that sustain their lives. Were this all, Partch would have little claim to uniqueness; many western musicians have looked in this direction for fresh inspiration. But he has gone further. Wishing to transcend the, to him, wholly artificial and unacceptable tempered scale, with its twelve equal out-of-tune intervals to the octave, he developed a different scale based on just intonation with natural acoustic intervals, comprising no less than forty-three tones to the octave, all of whose intervals are derived from the perfect fifth and perfect third, permitting not only an enriched concept of harmony owing little to European tonal-harmonic music but also a tremendously enriched source of melody which can approach the subtlety of speech inflection. As Peter Yates says:

With a scale of intervals so finely divided, one is able to speak to exact pitches as easily as to sing. The artificiality of recitative is done away with … Instead there is by the use of the forty-three-tone scale a continuous field of melodic and harmonic relationship among the degree of spoken, intoned, chanted, sung, melismatic and shouted vocal utterance, a tonal spectrum filling the gap between the vocal coloration of opera and the spoken drama. Spoken drama can be taken over by the instruments and translated back into change and song.⁴³

But how can spoken melody of forty-three tones to the octave—feasible for sensitive singers—be taken over by instruments, when all the instruments of the western tradition are built to a specification of only twelve? This was the problem Partch faced and solved with the simplicity of genius; he invented and built his own instruments. Over a period of more than forty years he designed and built nearly thirty new instruments, with an eye no less for visual than an ear for aural beauty, not to mention a considerable verbal flair in naming them. He has been responsible for inventing possibly more new instruments than Adolph Sax, yet he described himself modestly as “not an instrument builder but a philosophical music-man seduced into carpentry.”⁴⁴ The instruments are mainly plucked and plectrum stringed instruments, often with the strings arranged three-dimensionally, as well as variations of the marimba and xylophone, with adaptations of more conventional instruments such as harmonium and viola (he was later to find wind players who could realize his scale on their instruments), and, apart from the beauty and expressiveness of their sounds, they represent as important a conceptual challenge as does the music itself. In the first place, they are hand-built by the composer to his own purposes, not mass-produced to a conventional specification; there is in existence only one set of instruments, and if one wants to hear Partch’s music and see his dramas one has to go to them. Secondly, the instruments are as important a part of the musico-dramatic work as the actors; Partch specified that they be placed in full view of the spectators as part of the set, and that the musicians playing them take a full part in the dramatic action.

And, further, the construction of the instruments is regarded, not as a necessary task to be carried out before the real job of music making can be got on with, but as an essential part of the musical process, just as with any African musician; his music requires his instruments. While many of the instruments, built in that most beautiful of all materials, wood, are triumphs of the woodworker’s skill, being beautiful and dramatic in appearance as well as sound, others equally are triumphs of bricolage, being made from old shell cases (“Better to have them here than shredding young boys’ skins on the battlefield”⁴⁵), light bulbs, Pyrex glass jars, hub caps and other cast-offs of technological society, materials available to anyone with the imagination to perceive their possibilities. Partch was not anti-technology; years of working with his own hands made him too wise to fall into that trap. His attitude towards the instruments of music resembles that of Robert Persig towards the art of motorcycle maintenance: He says,

Musicians who are generally awkward with common tools, nevertheless expect faultless perfection from their instruments. These are mechanical contrivances, however, and it would be salutary if musicians developed the elementary skills needed to maintain them. In particular, the elementary skill of tuning is of supreme importance to musicianship, and a deeper understanding would certainly ensue if it were developed … The instruments do not maintain themselves, especially under the wear and tear and sometimes violent treatment (which I myself stipulate) of daily playing. And not a small part of the element of good condition is the visual; the instruments must be kept looking well, since they are almost always on stage as part of the set.⁴⁶

In Partch’s music, writings, and above all in his instruments, we see a vision of a communal musical art, and of a technology made human by the element of commitment, of care. Here the composer—or any other maker—is not merely the producer of a commodity for others to consume but the leader and pacemaker in the common activity. From the music of Partch, western music could learn to take a large step towards rejoining the musical community of the human race.

He was fond of quoting some lines written by a child:

Once upon a time There was a little boy And he went outside.⁴⁷

This childlike (not to be confused with childish) ability to “go outside” has been a recurring feature of American music, indeed of American culture, since the earliest days, and it remains no less a feature, despite recent disasters and betrayals, of the contemporary scene. This is not to deny that there flows, and has always flowed, a strong counter-current in the direction of Europe and of conformity to European rules, a music of academic formalism as strict as or stricter than anything practiced in Europe. That this is so should not be surprising; America has always been a country of extremes of conformism and non-conformism. Of the latter group no one, not even Cage, has shown such integrity, such humor, such staying power, and such sheer, beautiful musicality as has Partch, such ability to “go outside” (where, as far as the American and European musical establishments are concerned he still largely remains), and, naturally and unselfconsciously, to propose new relationships in society as in music, to work untrammelled by “all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed.” If American music contains within it the possibility of becoming a force for the regeneration of western music in its society, a state which, however long heralded on both sides of the Atlantic, and however wished for, is still to come about, the music and the simple, complex, eloquent, and loving personality of Harry Partch will prove an important factor in bringing about such an event.

NOTES

1. Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), 37.

2. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, 2nd edn. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 23–24.

3. Ibid.

4. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) (Everyman Edition, n.d.), 287.

5. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 132.

6. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 20.

7. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, op. cit., pp. 129–30.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid.

11. David Wooldridge, From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives (New York: Knopf, 1974), 6.

12. Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 64.

13. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 56ff.

14. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1964), 283.

15. Charles E. Ives, op. cit., p. 132.

16. Charles E. Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969).

17. John Cage, “Two Statements on Ives,” A Year From Monday (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 40.

18. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 973), 100, 135, 44.

19. Ibid., 63–64.

20. Ibid.

21. John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961) (London: Calder and Boyars), 71.

22. John Cage, op. cit., p. 261.

23. John Cage, “On Earlier Pieces,” John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p.127 (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1971).

24. Virgil Thomson, Twentieth-Century Composers 1: American Composers Since 1910 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970), 76.

25. Cage, John; op. cit., p. 146.