THE SONGS WE CARRIED — Nicholas Phan

CAIC’s broadcasts from the 2021 Collaborative Works Festival continue. This week’s broadcast is of the opening performance: CONCERT III: The Songs We Carried. Below is my program note.

When migrants move from one place to another, there is a messy mix of assimilation and preservation that occurs. The new residents must do their best to learn to swim in their new homes’ stream of social and cultural norms. Balanced against that, they also strive to retain the customs of the old country for comfort, community, and to preserve identity. Different groups of migrants handle these challenges in different ways, but all manage this balancing act in one way or another.

This tension plays out over generations. As migrants birth and raise their children as the first generation born in the new world, they must also grapple with the struggle to maintain and preserve a cultural identity for their children. Despite being two generations removed from my Greek relatives who immigrated to this country, my mother ensured that both my brother and I entered Greek School at our local Greek Orthodox Church, where we studied modern Greek, learned Greek folk dances, performed in Greek traditional costumes, and were made to learn the Greek national anthem. We were not taught these patriotic tidbits because we were expected to swear allegiance to the old country, but rather to ensure that we never forgot the struggles and triumphs of our people: a people who had been subjugated to foreign rule, chafing at the assault on their culture and language by their oppressors, and who rose to liberate themselves and declare independence after four centuries of occupation.

SONG PRESERVATION

From the middle years of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century, rising waves of nationalism fomented a fascination with all sorts of folk art, most especially folk song. As the various nations on the fast-changing map of Europe struggled to define themselves in an age of rapid globalization, composers and musicologists began to collect songs in the field, first by transcribing the songs sung by people living in more rural parts of the continent, and eventually collecting them with early phonograph recording technology. In the early years of the 20th century, both Béla Bartók (1881 – 1945) and Percy Grainger (1882 – 1961) were inspired by this movement and began venturing out into the field to collect folk tunes, Bartók in what was then known as Austria-Hungary, and Grainger throughout the British Isles, where he had settled upon completing his musical studies in Frankfurt, Germany.

Grainger began collecting and transcribing folk songs after attending a lecture in 1905 by one of the leading ethnomusicologists of the day, Lucy Broadbent. His association with the movement, which had already been long underway in England, connected him to many leading British musical figures of the day, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, and Frederick Delius. His arrangements of folk music were instrumental in buttressing his burgeoning reputation as a composer at the time, and they are some of the music for which he is best remembered.

Bartók’s work in this realm intensely challenged ideas of Hungarian national identity, most especially in the years following World War I and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Before World War I, Hungary was a relatively diverse and cosmopolitan country made up of a mix of Slovakians, Croats, Serbs, Germans, Romanians, Jews, Ruthenians, Gypsies and, of course, Hungarians. As the empire faded, the question of who and what was Hungarian became a hot topic of debate. Complicating things was Hungary’s socioeconomic class structure; even after the abolition of feudalism in the middle of the 19th century, the belief persisted that only the vestiges of the Hungarian aristocracy were “true” Hungarians. By the turn of the century, this meant that the gentry forming the middle and upper classes of Hungarian society were considered the “folk” while the working classes and poor (descendants of former serfs) had no designation and were some sort of “other”.

Musically speaking, this meant that the popular gypsy tunes co-opted over the years by composers such as Franz Liszt came to be thought of as Hungarian folk music. But Bartók, who went to the villages and countryside with fellow composer Zoltán Kodály to collect music from the peasants, came to believe that the folk music of Hungary was much more diverse.

Bartók and Kodály discovered that there were many aspects of peasant music that were unique to its culture and unrepresented elsewhere in Hungarian music. The songs Bartok collected from within Hungary’s borders included Romanian, Slovakian, Serbian, and Arabic tunes in addition to the songs from ethnically Hungarian peasants. When they published their first set of folk song arrangements in 1906, the collection was controversial – Bartók and Kodály’s assertions stood in direct opposition to the prevailing ideas of Hungarian national identity.

Bartók’s strong, anti-fascist political views would eventually force him to flee Hungary in the years of World War II. Shortly after Hungary formally allied itself with Nazi Germany in 1940, Bartók emigrated to the United States, where he would naturalize as a US citizen, just months before his death in 1945. His arrangement of the song Elindultam szép hazámból ("I left my beautiful fatherland") has a melancholy poignancy against the backdrop of Bartók’s life and work.

THE POLITICS OF "THE MUSIC OF THE PEOPLE"

Bartók’s use of folk musical elements as form of political protest and advocacy have served as a model for many other composers, including both American composer Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972) and Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916 – 1983). Both composers’ works on this program are original compositions which incorporate folk elements to create newly composed music that has firm roots in a national identity while still managing to maintain a cosmopolitan quality. Ginastera’s Cinco canciones populares argentinas (Five Popular Argentinian Songs) are originally composed pieces that incorporate traditional dance forms, folk texts, and in the case of the song, Arrorro, a folk tune. Ginastera uses modernist techniques to blend these elements into songs that are undeniably Argentinian, yet still sound new and distinct. Written during the years of the rise of Juan Peron, Ginastera composed these songs as he protested for artistic freedom during a period in which the government was highly suppressive and anti-intellectual.

Born in Berkeley, California to an American father of Lithuanian Jewish descent and a Peruvian mother of Chinese descent, Frank’s Cuatro Canciones Andinas (Four Andean Songs) invite a re-examination of Peruvian national identity, not unlike Bartók’s work with Hungarian folk music advocated for a much more diverse understanding around Hungarian national identity. Frank writes that the songs:

“reflect the inspiration of José María Arguedas, a Peruvian folklorist, poet, and Quechua advocate who reminds one in many ways of Bartók. In an attempt to validate the native culture of the Andes, Arguedas collected the tunes, poetry, and folklore of the Quechua Indians, the descendants of the ancient Incas. Of the pro-indigenista writers, he was one of the first to write poetry in Quechua as well as Spanish, and was also a proponent of 'mestizaje,' a vision of a world that can encompass many ultures without oppression. Like Bartók, he spoke of a brotherhood of people, and he proclaimed himself a modern Quechua man in spite of his fair skin and Western education. The text for Cuatro canciones andinas draws on Indian poetry collected and translated by Arguedas from Quechua into Spanish shortly before his suicide in the sixties.”

In his 1941 essay England and the Folk Art Problem, Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976) expressed a wariness of the “folk song revival” that permeated the English musical establishment in the early part of the 20th century. His primary suspicion of his contemporaries’ attraction to the form was a concern about the direction in which various tides of nationalism had swept Europe during the interwar years: what had begun as desires for self-determination and national unity had mutated into disturbing surges of anti-intellectual fascism that had led the world to the throes of a second World War. Nonetheless, it was around this time, when Britten was touring the United States performing recitals with the tenor Peter Pears, that he began composing his own arrangements of folk songs. Britten would continue to compose these arrangements through the end of his life, and they were a permanent feature on his and Pears’ recital programs. Whatever his suspicions about the political traps folk music could pose, it was an important influence on his work, and he (not unlike Bartók and Ginastera) employed his own modernist aesthetic to engage not only his listeners’ collective subconscious, but their critical intellects as well.

THE SPIRITUAL

When Antonín Dvořák came to the United States in 1892 to serve as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, he met a young baritone and composer named Henry Thacker Burleigh. Legend has it that Dvořák took note of the young Burleigh because of his beautiful voice as he sang spirituals, which he sang to himself as he did janitorial work, a side job he took on to support himself while matriculated at the conservatory. It was through Burleigh that Dvořák became acquainted with African American spirituals leading him to publicly proclaim “In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” Some decades later, Nadia Boulanger would make a similar observation, saying:

“…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…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.”

Tonight’s program ends with three spiritual arrangements – two by musical grande dames of Chicago, Margaret Bonds (1913 – 1972) and Florence Price (1887 – 1953), and the third by Julia Perry (1924 – 1979), a onetime pupil of Nadia Boulanger. All three women treat these spirituals in the same manner as all the other composers on this program, buttressing the simple beauty of each spiritual tune with sophisticated, modern accompanimental structures that engage both the heart and the mind so that any listener hears these familiar words and melodies that are a testament to the experiences of their ancestors with fresh ears.