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Seth Montfort |
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The Seven Sermons of the Dead Exploring Skull – 4 Antonin Dvorak
– “You’re Mediocre and Racist too”
“Never Underestimate Your Public”
Lawrence Welk |
3/21/07 |
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Seth Montfort |
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The Seven Sermons of the Dead Exploring Skull – 4 Antonin Dvorak
– “You’re Mediocre and Racist too”
“Never Underestimate Your Public”
Lawrence Welk |
3/21/07 |
OK, so advanced Civilizations and Genius communicate mysteriously beyond time, space and cyberspace in never current currents. They currently unalterably mistrust our cults and churches, our network TV, our textbooks and schools, our mental health industry, our trained monkey high IQs and professionals, and our Maverick’s clubs. But through all the eternally layered quietly to explosively beyond our diagnosis and grasp: In miraculous, yes, genius, genius, genius, genius, genius, ad infinitum throughout history we trust.
“Never Underestimate Your Public” Lawrence Welk
We all know “the real classics” were always composed by dead people, way over there in Europe. But Lawrence Welk knew how to connect with our own vast educated living. Any American musician worth hearing would automatically communicate with each and every one of you out in TV land. Presenting only our best and brightest musical comets, his adventurous daring programming was destined for success not only in America, but everywhere through space and time for eternity. In his own words, the music he presented was “very pleasant.” Unpleasant times lead Americans to wax nostalgic for families once gathered together around pleasantries. No sick cultures will be grown here in OUR midst.
But
believe in living cultures with pure potential to reach all through healthy
emotional range. Perfectly positioned to remind us of important family
members cast aside, they send you their neglected best wishes through cyberspace
possessed fingers automatically typing straight to your eternally loving,
heartfelt American family values. With your eagerness to explore the music
from our own family, especially our children, slaves and our neighbors to the
South,
assure that many composers’ time has finally come. Compared to what you
already know, THEIR petty little geniuses, particularly Latin American ones, are
welcome tune-ins to endless concerts permanently traveling everywhere repeating
ad infinitum through time and space for the benefit of all.
Since acquiring information and strengthening inspiration can be mutually exclusive activities, our concepts of “right and wrong” get lost in music. But Dvorak did come to America because of the vision and persistence of one Jeannette Thurber. She founded the National Conservatory in New York and was determined to find a European musical genius to help her clue in Americans to the irrefutably high level of talent African Americans had to offer our country. She believed that African American and Native American traditions would become an important element of a great American music independent from European traditions. Dvorak would not have come here otherwise. He believed her mission was worth getting behind. Many European masters before and since were in agreement believing that Americans should develop our own culture and not come flocking to them to better ourselves. But, basically descendants of rejects from “superior” cultures, we inherit incurable inferiority complexes. That is why it takes famous Europeans to set us straight. But unfortunately sometimes they cause a backlash.
His pronouncements in the American press that American composers should “quit being second rate Europeans and strive to develop independence from Europe through using Native American and African American traditions” were taken in the only way they could have been in 1893. It was as if he was saying “you’re racist and mediocre too!” Well, especially since that is just what many Europeans eternally believe. His student Goldmark taught Gershwin and Copland. Gershwin more than hints in his letters that Goldmark convinced him to mistrust and avoid American music schools and teach himself in order to avoid becoming strangled by Germanic traditions that could not help him to develop a serious body of work influenced by Jazz. Thus Dvorak is directly responsible for Gershwin’s purity and for Copland’s eventual strivings to develop a less “ivory tower” more “populist” style. Copland wasn’t strong enough to go it alone. He studied abroad, made all the “right” moves only to later abandon composing altogether.
Dvorak read Nietzsche’s essays against Wagner just before coming to America. In them Nietzsche holds even more esteem for African fate, Latin dances, France of the spirit, and Bizet’s Carmen than he does for the swampy overbearing German idealist genius of Wagner. Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” was and will always be a much bigger issue than mere American Nationalism. Bizet played Gottschalk’s Creole inspired piano work, Le Bananier (The Banana Tree) and Offenbach arranged that work for cello. It was all the rage in France of the spirit. Once being performed at 17 concerts by 17 different pianists on the same day in Paris! “Americana” was always better received in Europe.
Most of Earliest America’s composers able to obtain professional music posts were immigrants. Few of their works sounded particularly American though the most famous influential work, James Hewitt’s Battle of Trenton, dedicated to Washington, is one of the earliest examples of “crude Americana.” It took Europe “by storm” even influencing Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory. It ends with Yankee Doodle, once by far America’s most famous folk tune, though it didn’t actually originate in America. This work is only one of a many early American battle pieces on Yankee Doodle and other patriotic tunes.
But in the 19th Century, America’s music scene started to grow. The first successful and still performed native born “classical” composers were Stephen Foster and Louis Moreau Gottschalk. They wrote mostly “lighter” unpretentious music that still has a naïve (African) American charm, influenced but not overtly dominated by European masters. To gain culture and success one ought better oneself in Europe. So at age 13, Gottschalk traveled from Louisiana to Paris only to be refused an entrance exam at the Paris Conservatory. They thought that at age 13 it was too late to make up for having grown up in the crude “land of steam engines.” But within a few years every pianist at the Paris Conservatory had to perform Gottschalk’s exotic Creole inspired composition, Bamboula, in order to graduate! With his exotic tropical compositions, virtuosity, pianistic flair, good looks and charm, Gottschalk quickly became America’s first international matinee idol, admired by Chopin, Berlioz and many other famous thinkers.
Back home Gottschalk and Foster’s American charm and innocence were viewed as a threat to the future of serious music in America. A Bostonian named John Sullivan Dwight, though not a well-trained musician, was bold enough to appoint himself the arbiter of musical taste for 19th Century America’s classical music world. He set out to raise the standards of musical excellence in America and promote professionalism in music. By founding Dwight’s Journal of Music, published weekly for 26 years and bi-monthly for three more years, he was able to have enormous influence against Gottschalk and Foster and towards our more Germanic dominated future. He preferred John Knowles Paine, a more “serious” composer who was writing second rate works in the style of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, etc. Never mind that Gottschalk was actually the foremost American interpreter of Beethoven. Paine also had an enormous reach through starting the first Music program in America at Harvard. That set in motion a movement away from developing New World traditions with colorful, youthful American charm and the towards the more “cultivated” Germanic and academic chokehold still “living” today.
This movement exactly kept Gottschalk and most since from living up to HIS potential.
After the overwhelming accomplishments and “advancements” of Wagner, many European composers felt lost. Toscanini decided not to become a composer after hearing Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan. Impressionist composers somehow found new directions even including Ragtime of Debussy and Cyril Scott. But Impressionist composers didn’t usually consider themselves impressionists and impressionism seemed to fade somewhat after World War I. European composers were disillusioned and turned to all kinds of “isms” to escape feeling lost. Many also turned to other rare and inspired, relatively recent New World traditions and Jazz. Stravinsky, Milhaud, and Hindemith, et al., wrote Tangos, rags and other Jazz for the classical concert hall. While Europe was waiting for an American to write immortal works inspired by Jazz, Americans held racist beliefs that Jazz was the music of The Devil. Gershwin and his presenters knew this when they brought Jazz to the classical concert hall in New York in 1923 at the historic concert of American Jazz for the concert hall, which ended with the premiere of Rhapsody in Blue.
Experts have somehow managed to forget that Gershwin was intimately familiar with all of the modernist trends of his time. Most interested in noise music and the “machine age, his Rhapsody in Blue and his Second Rhapsody were both inspired in part by the sounds of city life, particularly by riveting jackhammers. He liked sharply etched contours and electricity and preferred his music stenciled, playful and handsome. Romance is only deeply present as an undercurrent. His genius may be harmony and rhythm. But just try to find a recording of America’s famed composer’s own piano vocal arrangements of his Songbook. I say arrangements because instead of viewing the music as he stenciled it, it is viewed as something that any singer or arranger can improve on through our own free improvisations. That MIGHT be OK if we were even aware that he forged a style that is inimitable and almost never captured in public performances. The day when American musicians respect Gershwin’s pen, will be the day our massive inferiority complex ends. Then American musicians may also interpret European classics with more authenticity.
Gershwin became America’s most famous composer by entering through the “back door” of Tin Pan Alley. Naturally he believed his enormous fame and celebrity gave him enough power to succeed with an Opera starring an all-black cast. But his Porgy and Bess did in fact not get produced in a major opera company until many decades after his death. No amount of power of positive thinking and personal magic could triumph over racist and mediocre mindsets. Especially since there was an enormous firmly rooted, insidious propaganda system in place ready to denounce everything Gershwin stood for. Watch out for it. It is still very much alive and often very subtle. The people within that system had to face their worst nightmare when Gershwin took Milhaud and Ravel to Harlem to hear Jazz and the Ragtime of James P. Johnson. Ravel composed his two irrefutably great Piano Concerti just afterwards. Time has gradually led many great musicians to view Gershwin’s Concerto in F as the greatest American Concerto and Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand as the Greatest Concerto of the 20th century. But the possibility of ultimate inspiration being renewed through Harlem was deeply threatening not only to the Klu Klux Klan but to the deeply rooted structure of our German dominated “American” classical concert hall as well as “our” entire musical education system. That is why many were eager to label inspiration from Harlem a “dead end.” MAYBE no composer was yet great enough to surpass Gershwin and Ravel? Through the right hands inspired Jazz time may yet come again, back to the future of the world of gifted living Classical composers.
South America’s most famous composer, Villa-Lobos, was also mostly self-taught, though he came from a family of street musicians and played almost every instrument besides oboe. As a teenager he traveled through the Amazon to absorb the sounds and influences of the nature, people and music of his country. Like Liszt, Stravinsky and many before them, Villa-Lobos was interested in the recurring idea throughout history that primitive man possessed superior qualities to civilized man. Returning to “civilized” Brazilian society, like Gershwin, Villa-Lobos encountered much resistance from the Euro-centric Brazilian classical music world. But while he was performing his music at the Odeon Silent Movie House in Rio, the legendary Polish pianist, Artur Rubinstein, heard the young “genius.” Rubinstein arranged to meet him and hear more of his works.
Once Rubinstein played Villa-Lobos’ piano works and helped get his other works heard in Paris, Villa-lobos became a permanent folk legend. He wrote well over 1,000 works.
Someone once asked him why so many scores stacked in his room remained unpublished. He replied, “I am afraid if they were published people would find out that I was the World’s greatest composer!” Professional musicians rarely escape being molded by conservatory values. But pure inspiration rarely originates from the conservatory. And today, most professional musical values are incurably formed through training. Without overwhelming respect and devotion to all sides of Gershwin and Villa-Lobos, musicians will never allow themselves the freedom and knowledge to understand or perform them adequately. Both Gershwin and Villa-Lobos taught themselves, learning plenty from the inspiration of the great European composers. But it was their respect for Harlem, the Amazon and the very origins of music itself that gave them their superior inspired edge.
The New World has plenty of music that is clearly our own and it is not obscure. In fact it was once famous or still is in other countries. But musicians have run interference. More often than not musicians to this day view themselves as superior to any music that could be written by any mere American. During the time of the favored European composers Americans perform most, Europeans very much thought of these composers as reflecting their culture. American musicians have allowed very little of the music with potential to reflect our world and our culture to reach our public. The public needed to be protected from their lowly tastes and lack of cultivation. That is the exact reason why we do not have our own cultivation. Not because we don’t have plenty of composers our audiences would identify with. Just that we did our best to nip them in the bud. That is the root of the desperately motivated word “Americana.” Much of what gets classified in that category is actually ethnic with genuine natural appeal and potential to lead ever towards the exceptional. The idea that we should only give our students the very finest music and that that excludes “Americana” is merely a guise for VERY contemptible lack of vision.
So what if Beethoven is greater by far than the youthful Gottschalk? This blanket stupidity of Americans leads to greatly reduced potential and we are seen by the rest of the world as an inferior race that treats its best and its youth contemptibly. Thus classical musicians in America SHOULD be and ARE viewed with mistrust and suspicion. This is bad for the whole world and could even help lead towards strengthening the rest of the world’s prevailing anti-American attitudes and even the end of our World as we know it.
Tradition works. European traditions dominated composers like Amy Beach, MacDowell, Griffes, Ponce, Barber, Menotti and Guastavino and others have written some of the New world’s best music, much of it still left to be discovered in the concert hall. All of these composers had authentic talent, inspiration and rigorous training. But the European masters are hard to compete with. The more Latin American sounding works of Ponce and Guastavino may end up being what they are remembered for most. We also have giant American traditions like Broadway (covered best by those who know and love it), and Ragtime (covered below). In the Dvorak American independence vein, two traditional composers stand out. African American Nathaniel Dett was very successful at writing music inspired by Negro Spirituals. His church believed that jazz was the “music of the Devil” and so he has not yet become as famous as he deserves. When he was alive, his piano works were performed by many celebrated pianists, including Percy Grainger. Everyone knows Copland deliberately reached out to the common man with success.
The secret to Ragtime and Latin American Dance music concerts and festivals is variety. Endless performances of little works with similar form and content always sound endless. In Bizet’s Carmen, Latin dances found their place in context of a giant masterpiece full of touching authenticity and inspired variety. Any American who could do the same could be immortal. The French composer Darius Milhaud was quite successful in his Brazilian Tango filled Le boeuf sur le toit. But singing and dancing are the roots of music and Ragtime and Latin dances will always stay alive. The most interesting phenomena within this genre? “Predestined” public selection of Joplin and others here, Rosas in Mexico, Lecuona in Cuba, Nazareth in Brazil, Piazzolla in Argentina, and Mayerl in England.
Very undeservedly maligned in most history books, Farwell, Cadman, Loomis, Troyer, Gilbert and others are much more accomplished than they are given credit and more interesting and historic than any other turn of the Century American composers. And their contemporaries, MacDowell and Amy Beach were pretty accomplished. They too each wrote a few Indianist works but fared better in other genres. The key to the Indianist genre is selection as there is a huge body of work left, the best of which deserves to become standard repertoire of the period. Sometimes harmonically European it is important to treat this music with enough respect to find its Native American content.
American Mavericks were once really just that. Every musician knows that Ives wrote some of America’s greatest music. Other Mavericks like Cowell were at their best when writing in folk veins. Any ape could use Cowell’s fist on keyboard to effect. But the blind African American Slave, Blind Tom, remains ever an enigma as he had to play the part of the “Idiot Savant” in order to stay alive as the most astoundingly unexplainably gifted black musician of the Civil War America. No one imitated sounds at the keyboard like he did. He used cluster chords and whistling long before Ives and Cowell and to much greater effect. Once by far America’s most famous musician he “made” more money than any other musician in 19th Century America, but never benefited from “his” money as it all went first to his original slave owner, and later to manager P.T. Barnum who treated him like a circus freak. But many “Mavericks” are just limited talents who gained fame through making sure the world would view them as “the first” of many unimpressive trends - making noise, chance, covering themselves with whipped cream on stage, etc.
Dvorak’s advice to “quit being second rate Europeans and strive to develop independence from Europe through using Native American and African American traditions” is irrefutable. Americans waste space unless they write first-rate European music or music independent from European traditions. By being natural and authentic, of course! My solution is to revive 20 hours of New World piano repertoire and never lose complete devotion to performing the great European masters. As a composer my most ambitious goal to date is to finish my hour long Old World Piano Symphony and my 2 hour long Aztec Piano Symphony. I also compose many other works just as they naturally emerge.
Unfortunately one exceedingly shallow and incurable side of human nature holds an enormous mistrust of anything that is not currently endorsed either by a consensus of experts or by the great masses. The consensus composers seek is often no more “valuable” than consensus in politics but obviously very essential towards building fame. Everyone knows this is why the test of time is the only real test. Fame fades. One of the simplest reasons is that experts often react immediately without actually taking time. They don’t need to because they are experts. The most irrefutably undeniable test anyone can give to a work is to live in it without judgment for long enough to know it inside out. Then it will have at least taken your own test of time. But time is one thing few still have. Duh, that’s what Aliens are for. Speeding up the test of time through automatic writing.
You’re Welcome,