EMERGING VOICES: Searching for a National Aesthetic

This is the sixth 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 Second Salon Concert. For more information about the project, please visit: https://www.pcmsconcerts.org/projects/emerging-voices/

The private salons of the Belle Époque presented important and serious music on a par with what could be heard at the larger public venues in Paris. These salon programs were not restricted to chamber music: they often included pieces on a much grander scale, at times with full orchestras and choirs and even operas. In some cases, the hosts would commission new works, often with quite specific parameters tailored to the quirks of their music rooms, leading to unusual combinations of voices and instruments. Because of this, unusually orchestrated pieces such as Igor Stravinsky’s one-act chamber opera-ballet Renard and Manuel de Falla’s one-act puppet opera El retablo de Maese Pedro were born. 

The trend of incorporating folk elements into music as part of establishing a modern and nationalistic aesthetic was not limited to Eastern Europe during the first quarter of the 20th century. English composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, and Gustav Holst were weaving elements of folk song into their music, making the modern British aesthetic one that broke away from the Germanic influence that had previously dominated. Their contemporary, Rebecca Clarke, also experimented with folk song, as in her arrangements of Three Irish Country Songs, which she composed in 1926. Clarke, facing prejudice as a woman composer, primarily supported herself as a virtuoso violist. While many now view her as one Britain’s most important composers in the years following World War I, the majority of her compositions remain unpublished.

This turn to folk elements marked a radical and complicated shift for composers in the Americas, where European-descended composers had largely been modeling their compositional techniques after those of their ancestors across the Atlantic.

In Brazil, the most prominent composers of the 19th century included Carlos Gomes, who achieved notoriety for his operas heavily influenced by the works of Giuseppe Verdi, or Alberto Nepomuceno, who spent much time studying in Italy, Germany, and Norway. Nepomuceno composed almost as many songs in German and Norwegian as he did in Portuguese. It was one of Nepomuceno’s students, Heitor Villa-Lobos, who began to use elements of Brazilian folk and popular music to define a nationalist style. He composed his Suite for Violin and Voice shortly after arriving in Paris for the first time, and it is one of his first pieces to incorporate folk and popular rhythms and tonalities. For the text of this piece, he chose fragments of poetry by Mario de Andrade, one of the central figures in forging a Brazilian modern aesthetic in almost every medium. A poet, novelist, musician, photographer, and ethnomusicologist, de Andrade spent most of his life traveling throughout Brazil, documenting the folklore and music of the country. 

In the United States, where German immigrants had very successfully integrated into American society, the most widely performed American composers during this period were those of the Second New England School, the best-remembered of whom is Amy Beach. The composers of this group were heavily influenced by the German Romantics.  

A notable exception to this trend was the composer Henry Burleigh. Burleigh is now best remembered for having come into contact with Antonin Dvorak while he was a student at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, one of the only institutions at the time that prioritized offering affordable access to a quality music education for African American musicians. Dvorak, who was the director of the conservatory, took notice of Burleigh, who had taken on janitorial duties to support himself through school and would sing spirituals to himself to pass the time as he mopped the floors. Dvorak became curious about the spiritual tunes Burleigh sang, and through this inquisitiveness the two struck up a relationship, with Burleigh eventually becoming Dvorak’s assistant and copyist. Through his work with Burleigh, Dvorak came to believe that it was in the music of African American spirituals where the true American sound would be found. Both of his “American” works are said to have been greatly influenced by the music he was exposed to through Burleigh.

While Burleigh is now best remembered for his arrangements of spirituals, he was America’s most renowned composer of art song during the early parts of the 20th century. His songs and arrangements were championed by the most famous singers of the day, including the tenor John McCormack, who frequently featured his songs in his recital programs. Burleigh’s arrangements of spirituals were pivotal, as they brought them into the standard repertoire of concert singers for the first time, popularizing them as art music. A prolific composer, with an output of well over 300 compositions, Burleigh was one of the most important American composers of the first half of the 20th century.

Nadia Boulanger became the 20th century’s most influential teacher of music in the years after she retired from composition in 1922, and Americans flocked to study with her in droves until her death in 1979. An exacting and demanding pedagogue, Boulanger was famous for her tireless work ethic as a teacher and incredible devotion to her students. A self-described “ruthless” disciplinarian, she worked to give her students a strong and fluent technical foundation to empower them with all the tools necessary to express themselves fully. In their studies with Boulanger, her American students would find themselves faced with the questions: What makes music American? What are the roots of American music?

Boulanger’s American students were numerous. Leonard Bernstein, Marc Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Philip Glass, and Ned Rorem are among the most well-known of the many American composers who studied with Boulanger, and as their diverse careers and the varying styles in which they composed attest: the answer to the American musical question is very complex and multi-faceted.