American classical music

From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.

"American classical music", insofar as it has meaning, refers to music written in the European tradition but greatly influenced by American folk, jazz, blues, and pop styles.

If "classical" can be taken to mean what it often in fact means, "serious", then the earliest American classical music consists of part-songs used in religious services during Colonial times, and imitations of the European tradition in the 19th century. Nearly all American composers of this period worked (like Benjamin West and the young Samuel Morse in painting) exclusively with European models.

The first self-defined American classical composer, whose self-definition has been confirmed by time, was the African-American composer Scott Joplin. Although first revived after the end of the Jim Crow era by William Bolcolm as the inventor of the popular genre ragtime, it is clear from Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag and his opera Treemonisha, that he intended to join a classical tradition.

A "popular" song maintains consistency, but the Maple Leaf rag explores tonality and pacing, and Treemonisha set itself to a serious subject, which for Joplin was the betterment of his people as a nation.

In the early 20th century, George Gershwin was greatly influenced by African American music; however, this was during an era of legally enforced "Jim Crow" segregation during which his copies perhaps enjoyed undue fame owing to the refusal of white listeners to listen to music that formed Gershwin's sources.

Aaron Copland's music was influenced more by white and folk traditions.

In the 1980s, after a period during which self-defined American "classical" composers like John Cage adopted atonal structures and thought of themselves less American than Modern composers, Phillip Glass revived tonality and traditional genres including the opera in works like Nixon in China. Glass re-created a semi-mass market for "classical" music, made in America because audiences outside of an avant-garde had simply refused to sit still for Modernist, atonal music, whether from America or Europe.

A pessimist model, shared by Aldous Huxley and Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno, of the classical tradition in Europe was that it peaked with Beethoven. Aldous Huxley believed that subsequent classical music was vulgarized with the re-entry of the unsublimated erotic, and Adorno believed that commodification entered with Wagner.

The problem for "American classical music" is that it flourished much after Beethoven and was informed by a declining tradition. Gershwin and Copland gave it new life in a similar fashion to the "national" classical composers of Europe like Sibelius and Bartok, by injecting folk themes.

But by Glass' time, American folk had ceased to be a viable option since the "folk" listened to electronically based music. Glass, in order to gain a mass audience, used a stratagem of "prettification" very similar to that of Ygor Stravinsky, who while he adopted some Modernist practices, sugar-coated its severity.

A Time magazine article of the 1980s describes "happy sighs" of the American audience during the first notes of a Glass concert, for in the 1980s it was no longer quite fashionable to be patient with atonality, and it had become fashionable in classical circles to demand more immediate gratification.

"American classical music" is a problematic in itself, because classical listening has been for some time in rapid decline.

However, if it is accepted that real, American culture is primarily Afro-Caribbean, then the picture brightens considerably. The greatest American classical composer, Scott Joplin, explores both harmonies and rythyms that appeared in Beethoven (who may himself have been of African ancestry by way of the Turks). In Joplin, in fact, the stream of European classical music may have joined the rest of the world, leaving Glass isolated despite all the happy, contented, and Philistine sighs.