American Stravinsky

Front matter

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Conclusion

List of Tables List of Musical Examples

Scherzo humoristique (Cat and Mouse): Copland’s American Petrushka and His Debt to Stravinsky

Popular Music and Jazz: Authentic or Ersatz?

Paris and Jazz: French Neoclassicism and the New Modern American Music

Back in the United States: Popular Music, Jazz, and the New American Music

European Influence beyond Stravinsky and Les Six: Haba and Schoenberg

Toward a New National Music during the 1930s: Copland’s Populism, Accessible Style, and Folk and Popular Music

“Folk” Music and the Popular Front: El Salón México

Billy the Kid A Vision for American Music...

Notes Bibliography Index xiii

JS

Tables

Table Introduction 1 Cowell’s Categories of American

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 1.3

Table 1.4 Table 1.5 Table 1.6 Table 1.7 Table 2.1

Table 2.6 Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Composers According to Style and Aesthetic Copland’s Diagram of Rounded Binary Form Copland’s Diagram of Sonata Form

Scherzo humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse), Overall Form

Scherzo humoristique, Introduction Scherzo humoristique, Section A Scherzo humoristique, Section A’

Scherzo humoristique, Section B

Two Pieces for String Quartet, “Rondino,”

Soggetto cavato, Fauré

Two Pieces for String Quartet, “Rondino,”

Scale Types Derived from Subject

Two Pieces for String Quartet, II. “Rondino,’

Sonata-Rondo Form ABACBA

Two Pieces for String Quartet, “Rondino”

Section C, the “Development”

Two Pieces for String Quartet, “Rondino,”

Ostinati 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, Form Ragtime versus Jazz Rhythm

“Jazzy” from Trois Esquisses, Formal Organization

Dance Symphony, Movement II, “Dance of the Adolescent,” Form

44 ŞI 6I

XIV

Table 5.1 Table 5.2

TABLES

Milhaud, Le boeuf sur le toit, Overall Tonal Scheme Outlining Interval Cycles

Music for the Theatre, Prologue, Overall Form

“The Sidewalks of New York,” Verse 1 and Chorus

Billy the Kid Chronology Based on Autobiographical Accounts

Cowboy Songs Used in Billy the Kid and Their Sources

87 98

Musical Examples

Copland, Scherzo humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse), mm.1-4

Copland, Scherzo humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse), Pentatonic occurrences in section B, mm. 21-30

Copland, Two Pieces for String Quartet, II.

Rondino, Canon Subject (T!)

Copland, Two Pieces for String Quartet, Il.

Rondino, Interlocking Ostinati 4, 5, and 6

Copland, Two Pieces for String Quartet, Il.

Rondino, Octatonicism, mm. 58-67

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, mm. 1-6, Theme 1, flute

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, T! inv and ostinato!

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, Theme? and, ostinato?

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, “Scherzo,” ostinato?

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, “Scherzo,” Theme!

Copland, Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, “Scherzo,” harmonic pedal points, [21]— 4

Copland, Example of Ragtime and Jazz Rhythm!

Copland, Example of Additive Rhythm

Copland, Example of Polyrhythms

SI a) Walter Donaldson with lyrics by Gus Kahn, “My Buddy,” b) “My Buddy” quotation in “Jazzy”

Copland, Dance Symphony, Movement I, + 2-[6] — 3, Theme 2, Ostinato 1, 2, and 3

Copland, Dance Symphony, Movement I, “Dance of the Adolescent,” Theme 1,

[3] + 1-4] -7

Copland, Dance Symphony, Movement I, [11], counterpoint

Copland, Dance Symphony, Movement M, “Dance of Mockery,” — 6, polymeter

Copland, Dance Symphony, Movement IM, “Dance of Mockery,” [29], shifting metrical accents and Rebarring

Waltz from Petites Valses, later used as “Theme of the Adolescent” in Dance Symphony

Copland, Music for the Theatre, Prologue, Section A, mm. 1-5

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Prologue,”

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Interlude,” mm. I—II

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Burlesque,” 47-48] — 2

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Prologue,” reduction of [2]-[3]

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Prologue,” [8}[8] + 3

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Prologue,” m. 2, m. 5, m. 11, and 13, chords and the two versions of the octatonic

Charles B. Lawlor and James W. Blake, “The Sidewalks of New York,” Chorus

Copland, Music for the Theatre, “Dance,” [25]-[26]

Musica EXAMPLES

Ios

II2

Example 6.4 Example 6.5 Example 6.6

Example 9.6 Example 9.7 Example 9.8 Example 9.9

Copland, “Poet’s Song,” mm. 1-5, Row and bass ostinato

Copland’s arrangement of folk song “Banu (We’ve Come)”

Copland, Vitebsk, [D], folk song treated as a canon

Copland, Vitebsk, mm. 1-5, intonation Copland, Vitebsk, Copland, Vitebsk,

Copland, “What Do We Plant,” Whole-Tone Scale, mm. 12-14

Copland, “Sunday Afternoon Music,” the progression in the inset box

Copland, “The Young Pioneers”; a) Inset box explaining rhythm; b) mm. 1; m. 17

Copland, “Into the Streets, May rst”

a) Complete son “El Palo Verde”; b) Copland, El Salon México, Motives a, m. 2—3; motive, b, m. 3-4 a) Complete “La Jesusita”; b) Copland, EI Salón México, [2] + 4, “La Jesusita” as it appears in the trumpet and clarinet

“El Mosca” as it appears [4] + 6

Copland, El Salón México, [8], Section five of the Introduction

Copland, El Salón México, [22|-[22] + 4 and 23]-23] + 4

Copland, El Salón México, and +6 Copland, El Salón México, +3 Copland, El Salón México, and

Copland, El Salón México, mm. 1-4 of “La Jesusita,” reduction showing thirds G-B and A-C;

Example 9.10 Copland, El Salón México,

201 203 203

Musical Examples xvii xviii

Copland, El Salón México, a) Copland, “Violin Piece,” Billy the Kid sketches, p. 55; b) Eb Quintal Chord (F, Eb, G, B> moving to Ab, F, G)

Copland, Billy the Kid, mm. 14-26 melody in flute and oboe

Copland, Billy the Kid, mm. 1-8, harmonic progression a) “Great Grandad,” from The Lonesome Cowboy; b) “Great Grandad” as it appears in Billy the Kid a) “Whoopee Ti, Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies” from The Lonesome Cowboy;

b) Copland, Billy the Kid, “Old Grandad,” 2nd statement, [9]

a) Copland, Billy the Kid, [40]; b) Copland, Billy the Kid, a) “The Dying Cowboy (Oh Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Prairie),” The Lonesome Cowboy; b) “The Dying Cowboy (Oh Bury Me Not on the Lonesome Prairie),” as it appears in Billy the Kid

Musica EXAMPLES

The twentieth century has often been called the “American” century, which aptly suggests how extensively traditions and genres of American music grew and influenced music globally over those years. Beginning in the 1920s, Aaron Copland built his career during the years American art and popular music gained international prominence. By the midtwentieth century, he had become the composer most strongly associated with Americana, or the self-conscious use of American folk idioms in art music. For nearly sixty years audiences easily recognized works such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo, Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Lincoln Portrait as somehow American. Yet long before the Brooklynite was pegged as a composer of Americana and identified with cowboys and the open range, he was considered one of the United States’ most promising modernist composers, a purveyor not of an American style but of an international, modernist one. While audiences of the latter twentieth century viewed Copland as the quintessential composer of Americana, audiences during the 1920s and 1930s viewed him primarily as an upstart, bad boy of American music—full of brash dissonances and bold rhythms.

American Musical Modernism

At the New York premiere at Aeolian Hall, January 11, 1925, of Copland’s Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Walter Damrosch quipped, “Ladies and gentlemen, I am sure you will agree that if a gifted young man can write a symphony like this at twenty-three, within five years he will be ready to commit murder!”! Two years later the Eastman Philharmonic performed the symphony in Rochester as part of Howard Hanson’s series American Composers Concerts.” In 1933 an article by Copland appeared in American Composers on American Music, edited by Henry Cowell. The concert series and the book publication occurred within a short span of time, and a historian’s first inclination is to schematize each forum, viewing the Hanson concerts as nationalist and the Cowell book as modernist. The nationalist forum offered the American composer a venue to solve the difficult problem of securing performances of new works. The modernist forum gave him or her an opportunity to explain the new stylistic and aesthetic orientation of the first generation of twentieth-century North American and Latin American composers. These venues, one in publishing, one in performance, illustrate two of the means by which Copland disseminated his music and aesthetic and critical ideas. However, this simple dichotomy obscures how Copland perceived himself as composer and as critic. The book and the concert series were both forums for the modern American composer, and Copland did not consider himself solely American or solely modernist, but as a modern American composer.

What Was Modernism?

Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (1892-95), often marked as the first masterpiece of modern music, broke with the aesthetics and style of German Romanticism, particularly Wagnerism. By the 1920s Europe remained an attractive place for the young composer to receive a musical education, but now the exciting destination was no longer Germany. France emerged as an international music center, where not only Debussy but also Stravinsky was active. During the late teens and the early 1920s, the New Music, or the new styles and musical aesthetics from Europe began to reach major urban American music centers such as New York and Boston, emerging international polestars.

There were contemporaneous attempts by composers and critics to classify and define the new music. Today, the term twentieth-century music is objective, and generally applied to all styles and aesthetics of music composed during this period. However, during the 1920s and 1930s, Copland’s own time, two terms were in general use, modernism and ultramodernism; only the former is still in use today. Copland used these two terms extensively, though today their meanings are considered imprecise. According to Paul Griffiths, American writers used both terms to refer to the music of composers such as Varèse, Schoenberg, Bartók, Stravinsky, Cage, Antheil, Webern, and Copland. The term modernism suggests a “conscious pushing-back of the frontiers, and so is not inappropriate in connection with composers who have seen this as their aim.” Willi Apel, however, found the term applied “so loosely that it is virtually meaningless. The dates of the period so described vary with each writer.” Some date the beginning of modernism in music to the period during which “Elgar, R. Strauss, and Sibelius (all born c. 1860) produced their first significant works. Others would restrict it to the music of contemporary (living) composers.”* Lexicographer Nicholas Slonimsky defines modern music simply as “that written since 1900. The variants are

2oth-century music, New Music, Music of Our Time, Music of Today and Contemporary Music.” All these writers generally agree that modernism applies to the music of composers who depart from Common Practice harmonic and tonal conventions.

The term ultramodernism is equally difficult to define. Ultramodernism is a radical aesthetic position as much as a musical style. Slonimsky applies the term to “music beyond the limits of traditional modernism.” As he expounds, “Certain attributes of ULTRA-MODERN MUSIC have retained their validity: dissonant counterpoint, atonal melodic designs, polymetric and polyrhythmic combinations and novel instrumental sonorities.”* In his Dictionary of Contemporary Music, John Vinton attributes the origin of this term to American critics and composers who used it to describe the style and aesthetic of those such as Stravinsky and Schoenberg. In her 1921 study, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music, Katherine Ruth Heyman characterizes ultramodern music as departing from modal, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic conventions.°®

Perusal of writings by contemporary composers helps clarify the terminology and confusion of modernism with ultramodernism. In Music Here and Now, Ernst Krenek, like the lexicographers already mentioned, defines contemporary music as “whatever is written by contemporaries of the person using the term.” Noting that musicians in both the United States and Europe used the word similarly, Krenek adds that it describes more than just the date of composition. Modern music is “that part of our contemporary music which emerges from the whole by a visible deviation from tradition in its material, its style, or in some other essential feature.”” The descriptions and definitions offered by composers and critics whose writings appeared in the American journal Modern Music define modernism and ultramodernism more narrowly and precisely. Cowell, in “New Terms for New Music,” focuses on the terms atonal, polyharmony, polytonality, dissonant counterpoint, polyrhythm, and polymeter. In doing so, he linked these techniques with “new music,” leading one to deduce that modern music was a function of new harmonies and rhythms.®

Recent scholars have attempted to clarify these terms as well. Elliott Antokoletz defines ultramodernism as the aesthetic of Ives, Cowell, Ruggles, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Rudhyar. Stylistically, he links the term with “the Stravinskian ostinato technique—based on constant rhythmic reinterpretations of narrow-ranged modal layers.” With respect to American composers, he associates the style with “the open quality found in American symphonic works of Harris and Copland— octave pedals in low instruments” and modality.”? David Metzer considers modernism not only a musical-stylistic and aesthetic movement, but a cultural and historical one. Borrowing extensively from historian Peter Gay, Metzer understands modernism to coincide with the post-Victorian era, a historical and cultural period of major cultural, social, and revolutionary change. Modernism changed all arts and thought—it changed ways of knowing, of “thinking, feeling, and seeing,” challenging Western civilization to change its aesthetic sensibility, philosophical style, and social life. Modernism dawned in reaction around rgro in the United States, creating a new zeitgeist here, as it had in Europe. Modernism broke free of the genteel Victorian tradition in the arts and culture, separating idealism and morality from art.!°

Thus, modernism can be viewed both culturally and musically. Culturally, modernism is the period from around the turn of the century onward, in which British and American society left behind genteel artistic and social traditions. Musically, modernism describes music contemporary with the lives of composers, critics, and musicians who were active during the years encompassed by this study, 1920-41. Ultramodernism, in contrast, is applied to experimental music, exemplified by the works of composers such as Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Varése, that self-consciously broke with the musical conventions of the Common Practice.

Henry Cowell’s American Composers on American Music (1933)

Cowell’s American Composers on American Music sought to inform the public of new directions in American music from a source other than music critics, who usually were not composers and who, as Cowell wrote, “do not understand in the least what is taking place in either feeling or technique, but give out vague personal impressions which have little relation to the reality and which differ widely with each individual critic.” Cowell sought to counter the detrimental effect of such critics and to give a fairer description of contemporary composers’ aims. His book provided a forum for the young American composer to speak for himself, to explain new stylistic and compositional trends, directions, and developments. Cowell presented a representative sample of the range of ideas Copland’s peers held on American music at the time. Cowell included both the “progressive” or modern composer and the more conservative composer.!! The volume’s first twenty essays were devoted to composers analyzing and discussing the music of their peers.

Cowell selected and grouped by criteria of stylistic orientation and influence, delimited first according to nationality (American, German, Russian, etc.). His second criterion was national influence on an individual composer’s style: whether he or she was influenced by European music. Cowell subcategorized composers according to a perceived French or German (Cowell used the term Teutonic) influence. He also

TABLE INTRODUCTION 1 Cowell’s Categories of American Composers According to Style and Aesthetic

Modern Progressive Conservative European influence

French influence

German influence American idioms identified composers whose music had traces of Americanisms, or, as he put it, whether they used “indigenous materials or are specially interested in expressing some phase of the American spirit in their works.” 12 Conservative composers were represented as well (see table intro.r). As the table suggests, Cowell’s taxonomy was biased: he was interested in modern composers foremost. He did not bother to further categorize and devise subcategories for moderate or conservative composers. His categories symbolized a wide range of aesthetic and stylistic choices that the first generation of twentieth-century American composers faced. The American composer was conservative, progressive, or modern; European influenced or lacking in European influence; if European influenced, French or German influenced; interested in American vernacular idioms or not; of American birth or an émigré. The American composer could be one, or any combination, of these.

Copland represented one of Cowell’s group of “progressive” or “modern” American composers, those who “do not attempt to develop original ideas or materials but who take those which they already find in America and adapt them to a European style.” 13 Others in this category adapted American vernacular idioms such as jazz, popular music, and Native American music to European style, primarily French, or in the case of George Gershwin, a combined nineteenth-century German Romantic, Italian late nineteenth-century operatic, and French style as represented by Stravinsky.

Copland’s Path

Cowell’s categorization of Copland was accurate and astute. During his formative years as a teenager in New York, Copland discovered Stravinsky, and the Russian’s style left an indelible mark on both his own early style and overall musical aesthetic. As did many American composers, Copland went to Europe—in his case, Paris after World War I—where he absorbed the aesthetics and various styles of the neoclassicism of Milhaud and others of Les Six, a group of young French composers. His study in Europe shaped his embrace of jazz, an identifiably American idiom in vogue throughout Europe. Following his return to the United

States in 1924, Copland continued to combine stylistic elements borrowed from Stravinsky, French neoclassicism, and American jazz and popular song. A major stylistic shift occurred during the Great Depression as he simplified his musical language and reached out to a broader, populist American audience beyond the modern music aficionados and cognoscenti.

How Copland began as a brash modernist and later came to be identified as the quintessential American composer is the subject of this book, which traces the development of both his aesthetic ideas and his musical style, situating both in the context of European and American musical modernism, as well as broader social and cultural changes of the 1920s and 1930s. The first chapter, “Scherzo humoristique (Cat and Mouse): Copland’s American Petrushka and His Debt to Stravinsky,” treats the younger composer’s development of a modernist musical style by dividing his progress into two stages: (1) his tutelage in New York with Rubin Goldmark, and (2) his study at Fontainebleau and later in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. This chapter begins by looking at Copland’s style as a teenager and his early interest in European modernism, at first Debussy, Scriabin, and Stravinsky. This chapter also provides a detailed analysis of two early compositions, “Jazzy” from Trois Equisses (Three Moods) and Scherzo humoristique (Cat and Mouse), begun in New York and completed in France. In the former, one sees Copland’s first mature use of jazz in a modernist work. In the latter work, one also sees the influence of Stravinsky, especially his Petrushka and octatonic technique, combined with Debussy’s pentatonicism.

The second chapter, “Boulanger and Compositional Maturity,” finds Copland in France studying with Nadia Boulanger, first during the summer of 1921 at Fontainebleau and over the next three years as one of her private students in Paris. One work, “Rondino” from Two Pieces for String Quartet, looks back to Boulanger’s own teacher, Gabriel Fauré, while simultaneously embracing the more recent styles and techniques of Debussy and Stravinsky. This chapter shows how under her tutelage he became influenced by a group of young French neoclassical composers collectively called Les Six. Copland’s first American premier of a major orchestral work, the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, also owes its genesis to Boulanger. Copland’s first American breakthrough, this work established his reputation as a promising American modernist. It is also the most Stravinskian of his works from the 1920s.

The next two chapters, chapter 3, “Popular Music and Jazz: Authentic or Ersatz?” and chapter 4, “Paris and Jazz: French Neoclassicism and the New Modern American Music,” further explore how Copland conceived of and used jazz. Before he left for France Copland had begun to experiment with jazz in short pieces. In France he embraced the aesthetics of Jean Cocteau and French neoclassicism, which encouraged the young composer to draw upon the music of everyday life as part of a move away from German Romanticism. Copland observed how Milhaud and Auric had used American jazz, which had had a grand reception in France since its arrival via James Reese Europe during World War I. Copland noted how these composers had combined blue notes (as the flatted third and flatted seventh scale degrees), dotted rhythms (to imitate the swung eighth notes of jazz rhythm), and other techniques imitative of 1920s American jazz and ragtime with modernist harmonic techniques. His stay in Europe also awakened a nationalist impulse within him, not the old-fashioned type of American composers such as George Chadwick and his former teacher Goldmark, who both essentially combined German Romanticism with melodies—often quotation of folk song—based on Native American and African-American folk music. Rather, Copland desired to see American modernist music represented beside European new music. Like other American expatriates he began to see the United States through a new lens, colored by his European experience. Boulanger also helped Copland see that the United States’ musical idioms, particularly jazz, were distinct from those of Europe. Intrigued by the rhythms of jazz, Boulanger stressed that it could be another compositional resource for Copland as an American modernist composer.

Copland returned to the United States in 1924, which marks the beginning of his American career and the focus of the next seven chapters. Chapter 5, “Back in the United States: Popular Music, Jazz, and the New American Music,” develops Copland’s use of jazz and the influence of Milhaud, as seen in Music for the Theatre. Chapter 6, “European Influence beyond Stravinsky and Les Six: Haba and Schoenberg,” examines the influence of Schoenberg and his twelve-tone method and Alois Hába’s influence on Copland during the late 1920s. Chapter 6 explores how he combined music from his ethnic heritage with eastern European modernist techniques. Aware of Jewish composers such as Ernest Bloch, who did use Jewish themes, Copland also explored his own ethnicity. After hearing a folk tune while attending the play The Dybbuk, Copland was inspired to compose Vitebsk, which also shows the influence of Alois Haba and his use of quarter tones. Copland also lent a composition to a collection in support of Palestine, a hora, “Banu (We’ve Come)”; however, through most of his career, Copland rarely composed explicitly “Jewish” works (yet critics such as Virgil Thomson wrote about the “Jewishness” of his music—here one detects perhaps anti- Semitic stereotyping). The seventh chapter examines how Copland’s style evolved to become more accessible, first seen in his pieces influenced by Paul Hindemith’s aesthetic of Gebrauchsmusik. Copland also composed Schulmusik, works intended for students and young musicians. During this stage of his career, Copland did not abandon the techniques he had borrowed from Stravinsky, Debussy, and Milhaud; rather, he simplified his textures and created works that were less technically demanding on the performers and listeners.

The next two chapters focus on the influence of Copland’s involvement in leftist politics on his aesthetic and musical style during the early years of the Popular Front. His political engagement deepened his interest in composing music easily accessible to a broad audience, as discussed in chapter 8. Involved in the Popular Front movement, he became active in leftist composers’ organizations. At first, influenced by the ideas of Ernst Krenek, he sought to compose an American mass music; yet even this style was infused with Stravinskian modernist techniques, as was “Into the Streets May First,” the winner in a New Masses song competition. Copland’s writings also appeared in leftist publications. The Left developed an interest in American folk music tradition, as folklorists traveled throughout the country and recorded traditional folk music practitioners. Several performers, such as Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson, were brought north to perform at meetings, hootenannies, union meetings, and such. Anthologizers such as Carl Sandburg and Lawrence Gellert issued collections of folk music closely linked to the Left and leftist causes. Chapter 9 addresses Copland’s most extensive use of folk music in the late 1930s, first seen in El Salón México. In composing this work, Copland turned to several published music collections, as he would for later works in which he quoted folk tunes. However, he did not use them in the way European nationalist composers such as Dvorak or American nationalist composers such as his teacher Goldmark did. Rather, he used Stravinsky as his model and applied the same techniques heard in Stravinsky’s so-called Russian works such as Rite of Spring. El Salón México also demonstrates how Copland applied his ideas about music and politics and used Stravinskian techniques with folk music in this work. Copland’s next major composition to incorporate folk music, the ballet Billy the Kid (as well as the suite), followed on the heels of El Salón México, and used folk music in the same way, as is discussed in chapter ro. This chapter also makes use of materials found in the Copland Collection at the Library of Congress to establish a new chronology for this ballet.

Chapter One

Scherzo humoristique (Cat and Mouse) :: Copland’s American Petrushka and His Debt to Stravinsky

Who wrote this fiendish “Rite of Spring,”

What right has he to write the thing,

Against our helpless ears to fling

Its crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing? —NICHOLAS SLONIMSKY, Music Since 1900

Copland’s path to a modern neoclassical musical style has two stages of training, American and European. The first began during the late teens in New York with compositional studies with Rubin Goldmark; the second began in 1921 in France with his study with Nadia Boulanger. His American training offered him mastery of styles and techniques of the Classic-Romantic period; his European training provided him with mastery of those of music then current in Europe. Past studies of Copland’s life and career have conventionally credited Boulanger with shaping his ideas about modernism and with the maturation of his musical style. However, before Copland departed North American shores, he had ideas of his own—ones clearly formed in New York independent of Goldmark that reflect a level of maturity that would be refined by Boulanger. Copland showed an acute and analytical interest in the music of Igor Stravinsky, Aleksandr Scriabin, and French composers such as Debussy and Ravel.

Early works composed during his studies with Goldmark and Boulanger illuminate Copland’s understanding of ultramodernism and modernism. These compositions reveal his interest in and mastery of the new techniques of Stravinsky and, limitedly, Scriabin, seen first in his earliest mature composition, Scherzo humoristique (The Cat and the Mouse). Cat and Mouse was also the work that brought Copland his first public success. He took it with him to Paris, where it was publicly performed and became his first published composition.

New Music in New York

The new music of both American and European composers during the second decade of the twentieth century was variously referred to as modern and as ultramodern music. As Carol Oja writes in her study of the rise of modern music in New York, during the time the music of European modernists began to arrive in the United States, through the early years of the Great Depression, modernism was something of an umbrella term that encompassed the works of composers who “explored an imaginative range of styles and ideologies.” Styles and compositional methods varied among composers who emerged during the r910s and 1920s, and “difference and diversity were at modernism’s core.” There was no common musical style or language; no single school of composition dominated. The one uniting principle was freedom, innovation, and reaction to—if not rejection of—the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition in a new century marked by technological, economic, and social change. Pianist-composer Leo Ornstein’s early public performances (from 1915 to the end of the decade) of both his own works and those of other modernists introduced New York audiences to highly dissonant music marked by tone clusters and a new conception of piano technique. Other prominent modern composers emerged as leaders of the movement. Bartók received some performances; Scriabin (who had visited in 1906) and Erik Satie were well received in the United States. The music of Arnold Schoenberg was sporadically programmed during the century’s second decade, his String Quartet in D Minor premiered by the Flonzaley Quartet in January 1914 in New York. His orchestral works also received major performances: in December 1914 the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed Five Orchestral Pieces under the baton of Karl Muck. Months later the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society premiered Pelleas und Melisande. Ornstein also introduced New York audiences to Schoenberg’s music, performing Opus 11 in recital. One influential modernist, Edgard Varèse, first arrived in late December 1915, and became what Oja terms the “matinee idol of modernism” in New York during the 1920s. Other Europeans soon followed: Ernest Bloch, E. Robert Schmitz, and Dane Rudhyar. By the second half of the 1920s, two Americans would emerge as modern music leaders: Henry Cowell and Aaron Copland.!

While many styles were considered “modern” during this time, critics referred to the dissonant, innovative music of composers such as Schoenberg and Stravinsky as “ultramodern.” Composers of this ilk sought to break free of the tonal system, embraced an aesthetic of experimentation, and liberated dissonance in their works. Stravinsky made an early and major impact on American concert life. The BSO performed Fireworks in December 1914. American audiences were further introduced to his works via the Ballets Russes’ 1916 Metropolitan Operasponsored American tour. Other New York performances of Firebird and Petrushka took place in January 1916. Petrushka appears to have captivated New York audiences, inspiring sisters Irene and Alice Lewisohn to present it at Grand Street’s Neighborhood Playhouse later that year. A production of Petrushka choreographed by Adolph Bolm (based on Michel Fokine’s) choreography was staged at the Met in 1919. Concert performances of Stravinsky’s works also took place. Although his Three Pieces for String Quartet was poorly received in 1915, Olga Haley and the London String Quartet successfully presented Pribautki in New York in the spring of 1918; the Flonzaley Quartet premiered Concertino for String Quartet in November 1920.7