Classical Principle Weekly
Feb 14, 2023–Happy Valentine's Day!! ♥️
Let us celebrate this Valentine's Day, not just with chocolates and flowers, but something more substantive and lasting, including the contributions of three great, yet relatively unknown women to American music.
Great classical art (as opposed to self-centred romantic feeling-states), has always been on the forefront of mankind’s fight for human rights and equality, and perhaps no other story is more compelling than the visit of Antonin Dvorak to the United States (1892-1895). Down the road, we will offer many postings about his mission, but on this day, February 14th, we will focus on this specific aspect.
The first of these great women is Jeanette Thurber (January 29, 1850– January 2, 1946), founder of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, who brought Dvorak to the US to head her composition department. She saw education in classical music as a way to stop the erosion of the newly won freedoms of African Americans. Sharecropping, prison labor, and Jim Crow laws all threatened the freedom they had won after a bloody civil war. Scholarships were offered for the children and grandchildren of slaves. She also extended her hand to Native Americans, and to women, including blind women. She personally guided Dvorak in his exposure to American culture and music. Dvorak spent hours at night listening to Harry Burleigh sing to him the negro spirituals (plantation songs).
Dvorak adopted Thurber's mission sense, and shocked America when he stated, in an interview with James Creelman in the New York Herald, printed on May 21st, 1893:
“In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, bold, religious, merry, gay, or what you will...There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source. The American musician understands these tunes, and they move sentiment in him...”
One should not be too surprised to find that the interview occasioned a freakout among hard-core racists. One of them was Boston's chief music critic Phillip Hale, who was livid about Thurber and Dvorak's idea. He wrote:
“…while the negro is fond of music, he is inherently unmusical...and founded his "folk-songs" on sentimental ballads sung by the white women. ... he brought no original songs with him from Africa.”
Hale organized eight American musicial authorities, including the composers, John Knowles Paine (Dean of Music at Harvard), George Whitefield Chadwick, and Amy Beach, as well as leading European musicians, to denounce Dvorak's theory about "negro spirituals". Comments were solicited from them in the May 28th, 1893 edition of the Boston Herald. The responses were very different:
Harvard's Paine shared Hale's racist view. To him the negroes were an underdeveloped race, and he wrote:
“individuality of style is not a matter of imitation, whether of the Heathen Chinese, or Digger Indians.”
George Chadwick dodged the controversy, and wrote:
“I am not sufficiently familiar with the real negro melodies as to be able to offer any opinion on the subject. Such negro melodies as I have heard however, I should be sorry to see become the basis of an American Shool of musical Composition.”
Amy Beach took a different approach, and wrote:
“Without the slighest desire to question the beauty of those negro spirituals, of which he speaks so highly, or to disparage them because of their source, I cannot help feeling justified that they are not fully typical of our country.”
The reaction of composers all over the globe ranged from hostile, to hesitatingly supportive, but mostly confused. What Thurber and friends were proposing, could not really have taken place anywhere else but the American Republic. True classical art had always fought for equality and justice, but this was perhaps an idea of replacing a "Laissez-Faire" approach to the subject, with the equivalent of Colbert's, and Alexander Hamilton's "directed economy."
Dvorak's intervention seems to have invigorated many of them. The next year, 1894, Amy Beach wrote a “Gaelic Symphony”. Chadwick, on hearing it, cheerfully pronounced her "One of the boys." His own “Fourth String Quartet”, composed in 1896, shows the influence of Dvorak's 1893 "American String Quartet." If you listen to the first couple of minutes, you will find that influence.
Later, Chadwick became the teacher of leading African-American composers, William Grant Still, and Florence Price. Hale accused Chadwick of becoming a follower of the "negrophile" Dvorak.
Sometimes though, even men who dedicate themselves to the fight against discrimination, and for equality, discriminate against women without seeming to be aware of what they are doing. Even Dvorak, who came to America to help change it, and defended both African-American and Native-American music, a daunting challenge for a Czech from a peasant background, was not free of the problem. He made a casual remark in front of the Boston press, in regard to the challenge he was accepting:
“Here all the ladies play. It is well; it is nice. But I am afraid the ladies cannot help us much. They have not the creative power.”
The worst kind of discrimination, to any group of human beings, is the denial of a cognitive identity. Amy Beach answered Dvorak within ten days.
From the year 1675 to the year 1885, women have composed 153 works, including 55 serious operas, 6 cantatas, 53 comic operas, 17 operettas, 6 sing-spiele, 4 ballets, 4 vaudevilles, 2 oratorios, one each of fares, pastorales, masques, ballads, and buffas.
THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION
The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Columbus' mission, was a battleground. It proposed to present American advances in science and technology, but was limited to the accomplishments of the supposed "White Race." Civil rights activists protested. The great Frederick Douglas, and several others, wrote a pamphlet called "The Reason Why the Colored American is not in the World's Columbian Exposition –The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature". The pamphlet was distributed by hand, a tradition some of our readers may know. Douglas and the young poet, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, manned the Haitian pavilion. The white organizers of the fair, under pressure, allowed several African-American exhibits, including the paintings of George Washington Carver, whose work with peanuts and sweet potatoes constituted a scientific study of how to revive a deplenished southern agriculture.
Dvorak conducted Czech music at that same World's Fair. Amy Beach, presented, with a friend, Maud Powell, her wonderful “Romance for Violin and Piano”. We present here, a rendition on Contrabass, which eschews much of the usual Romantic exaggeration.
The second movement of her 1894 “Gaelic Symphony”, is based on an Irish tune, "The Little Field of Barley." If the music seems to get a bit arbitrary about two minutes in, listen closely, and you will hear that it is a sped-up variation on the main theme. (Ft 1)
Dvorak had unleashed something powerful, and it presented Hale et. al. with a problem. Dvorak did not try to evoke the American spirit through a lot of direct quotes, even from the spirituals that he came to love after hearing them sung by Burleigh. Instead, he sought out the universal principles that existed in both African-American and Native-American (as well as Scottish) music, which he studied intensely.
How could the racists battle that? They had to broaden their field! Paine and Hale joined forces in denouncing "Slavic" music as inferior to German.
One of their cohorts, William F. Apthorp wrote in the Boston Transcript:
“The general rhythmic and melodic character of the German, Italian and French songs stamps them as a higher stage in musical evolution...the great bane of the present Slavic and Scandinavian schools is...the attempt to make civilized music...out of essentially barbaric material....Our negro music has every element of barbarism to be found in the Slavic or Scandivavian folk songs; it is essentially barbarous music.”
Years later, Hale wrote this incredible diatribe against Dvorak:
“The uncultivated Czech is a born musician, a master of his trade. He is interested only in traces of music that he finds in America. Negro airs, not copied, adapted, imitated, tint slightly two or three passages of the symphony without injury to its Czech character. The symphony leaped, Minerva-like, from the head of this uncultured genius. As with nearly all his other compositions, except the operas, it was not stimulated by any foreign assistance, by any consultation of authors, or by quotations, reading, etc., as was especially the case with Brahms.”
So, for Hale, blacks are not cognitive, women are not cognitive, except when they are teaching slaves how to sing. Native Americans are not cognitive, and Slavs are certainly not cognitive, even Slavs who compose works of genius! Music just leaps into their heads. Who is cognitive? He cites Brahms. What a fraud! Two facts:
1. For most of his life, Hale attacked Brahms mercilessly. He only supported him as part of his attack on Dvorak.
2. Brahms was Dvorak's greatest supporter in this mission. At the Vienna Premiere of Dvorak’s “New World Symphony”, Brahms sat in the same box as Dvorak. When questioned as to how well he knew the “New World Symphony”, Brahms answered that he had it memorized.
It begins to emerge that the real enemy for Hale et. al., is not any particular subcategory of humanity (though they are equal-opportunity haters), but everything that threatens to overcome human inequality!
Our third lady, Florence Price (April 9, 1887 – June 3, 1953 ), was born in Arkansas, and faced adversity all of her life. When performing music, she had to pass herself off as Mexican, in order to avoid discrimination against blacks! She aspired to compose symphonies though, and succeeded. She was the first African-American woman to have a symphony of hers produced. She was an inheritor of Dvorak's mission, and you can hear Dvorak's influence in her music. Such things are seldom linear. She was not taught by a student of Dvorak. Her mentor was George Whitefield Chadwick, one of the people solicited by Hale to denounce Dvorak. Chadwick encouraged her to include "Negro" melodies into her work. No wonder Hale saw him as a traitor and follower of the “negrophile" Dvorak!
It can be difficult to find a good performance of Ms. Price’s work. Her 1951 "Adoration" is usually played on stage on piano, or by strings, in a sentimental way. Only when we heard it played on the instrument for which it was written, the organ, did we realize it is a hushed prayer, possibly meant for a church service.
She insisted that "Negro" music is rhythmically complex, and driving, and included this "Juba Dance" in her first symphony.
Some of her music was lost. Much of it was only discovered in 2009, in her abandoned summer home.
Ft 1. Amy Cheney (later Amy Beach) was a child prodigy. It is reported that at the age of 2, she could sing 40 songs in the correct keys, and improvise an alto part to her mother's songs. At age 4, she composed her first piece, and gave her first recital at 7. At age 17, in an examination, she was asked to play Bach Preludes and Fugues from memory, then transpose them into different keys, which she did, easily.
The family could not afford to send her to Europe to study, so she became self-taught in harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration through intense study of scores by the great masters, especially Bach.
Attachments area
Preview YouTube video George Whitefield Chadwick: String Quartet No. 4 in E minor
George Whitefield Chadwick: String Quartet No. 4 in E minor
Preview YouTube video Amy Beach (1867-1944): Romance for Double Bass and Piano
Amy Beach (1867-1944): Romance for Double Bass and Piano
Preview YouTube video Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32, "Gaelic Symphony": II. Alla siciliana - Allegro vivace
Symphony in E Minor, Op. 32, "Gaelic Symphony": II. Alla siciliana - Allegro vivace
Preview YouTube video Florence Beatrice Price: Adoration
Florence Beatrice Price: Adoration
Preview YouTube video Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor - III. Juba Dance. Allegro
Price: Symphony No. 1 in E Minor - III. Juba Dance. Allegro