Keynotes

by Hunter J. Moncure

Happy Birthday America

Depending on oneÕs sympathy or lack of it for what you hear in contemporary music, our century might be described as a richly imaginative period offering endless variety, or as one of utter chaos. There is no doubt that our new music is kaleidoscopic. Contemporary music has lost the relative unanimity of purpose, outlook, and ideals that the Romantic period (1820-1910) had. The Baroque period (1600-1750) seemed to be full of confusion and our contemporary music seems to be echoing that period. Many things have been started in our century; some have been abandoned, and others have thrived. Even some of the inherited attitudes of the nineteenth-century are struggling to survive. Characterizing contemporary music is quite baffling, since we see our confusion from within and can only guess its outcome.

During the first forty years of the twentieth century, late romantic composers strove along side startling innovators. We played and listened to the music of Rachmaninoff and found nothing to disturb the romantic vocabulary we had inherited from Chopin and Liszt. We even used the same piano techniques. During the same decades, Debussy had finished his demolition of the old rules of harmony and form, and had invented his own language. Chromaticism, dissolution of tonality, and the twelve-tone system were developed during these same years.

Amid all this wild divergence of esthetic standards and techniques, there appeared the ultimate in revolution; electronic music, sounds produced by electronic means and recorded permanently on tape. In this direct connection between composer and ÒperformanceÓ we were confronted for the first time but what seemed a threat to the very existence of the performer in the traditional sense. Then, as the computer joined this electronic orchestra, we wondered whether the composer himself might not be threatened with elimination.

As the human garden salad of the world, the American composers we are privileged to hear a wide and varied background. Many are influenced by their private music instructors, or their college or university composition class. However, the true joy of American music is found in the compositions of the men and women who choose to use this country and their surroundings as an influence.

George Gershwin was born in Brooklyn, New York, and really had very little interest in music as a boy. However, one day while playing ball, he heard Max Rosen playing the violin. Soon after that, George looked up the violinist and became close friends. Gershwin , at the age of twenty-two, began writing the music for George WhiteÕs Scandals. During the same time, he commissioned Gershwin to write a work for his 1924 concert at Aeolian Hall. This work, now known all over the world, is the famous ÒRhapsody in BlueÓ. Successful scores for many Broadway shows and for the Hollywood screen followed, as well as a piano concerto, an overture and finally the operaÓPorgy and BessÓ.

Gershwin was influenced in all of these works by this surrounding and the everyday activities of living in Brooklyn. The backdrops used in ÒPorgy and BessÓ place the action in the downtown streets and the music used to enhance that drama ÒscreamÓ New York. ÒRhapsody in BlueÓ contains phrase after phrase that is reminiscent of the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple.

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn in 1900. At the age of fourteen, he began lessons on the piano. Two years later he studied the fundamentals of harmony under Rubin Goldmark.

Almost all of his early works were written in a jazz idiom. Later, Copland used American folk themes as a basis for several of his ballets such as ÒRodeoÓ, ÒBilly the KidÓ, and ÒAppalachian SpringÓ. He heard the famous Philadelphia Orchestra, with Charles Rains as narrator, perform his inspiring ÒA Lincoln PortraitÓ. All of these compositions aurally acted out many of CoplandÕs childhood creams and fantasies. The old west, the action heroes he grew up admiring, the vast openness of the west and the ideals of early American life.

Long live the basic fundamentals of American life. The freedom we enjoy and the rights and privileges that go along with our citizenship have helped spawn a breed of composers unlike any during the past centuries. Whether we agree or disagree with everything that is handed to us musically, we have to admit that the music of our time is anything bur boring. Happy Birthday America and congratulations for making it possible for us to enjoy the right to choose whether we listen to a composition from the past or the music of the modern American composer.

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