Over at The American Scholar, Joseph Horowitz has asked the big question about art music in America: can it find an orientation, a future direction, a way forward? In truth, the question has loomed over our musical culture, unanswered, ever since the serialist revolution over a hundred years ago. Horowitz's telling highlights composers who resisted serialism, such as Busoni, Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives (we might widen the lens even further to include the likes of Debussy, Ravel, Delius, Hindemith, Scriabin, and Shostakovich). He also connects a few dots from Dvořák and his stay in America to composers who answered Dvořák's call to honor and integrate music from Native American cultures; a somewhat prominent example is Busoni's Indian Fantasy for piano and orchestra, whereas a more obscure but quite inspiring example is Arthur Farwell's "Hoka" String Quartet (which Horowitz names "the closest thing I know to an American idiom in parallel with Béla Bartók’s raw absorption of Transylvanian song and dance").
Conspicuously absent from Horowitz's analysis are composers working in or inspired by our African-American heritage. The list is long: William Grant Still, Florence Price, Harry Burleigh, William Levi Dawson; Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, Mary Lou Williams, James P. Johnson; Thelonius Monk, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane; Lennie Tristano, Dave Brubeck, Bill Evans, Gil Evans; and so many more. And how about that quintessential American Louis Armstrong? Albert Murray dubbed him a "Promethean bringer of syncopated lightning from the Land of the Titans" (!) and identified Armstrong's Hot Fives and Hot Sevens as "the model for a truly indigenous American chamber music" that flourishes to this day. Horowitz also mentions music that "composes itself": what of improvisational masters of free jazz like Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, Pharoah Sanders, and the ever-amazing Keith Jarrett? With regard to the underrated Billy Strayhorn specifically, Walter van de Leur in his book Something to Live For shows that Strayhorn independently developed a harmonic and melodic language quite close to Bartók's axis system as described in Ernő Lendvai's book on Bartók's compositional methods. This huge tradition of distinctively American music offers an alternative path out of the wilderness of atonality and twelve-tone madness.
Is there potential for a 21st-century "Third Stream" integration that brings together many of these strands of American and European music? Only time will tell. The music of the future is still to be created...
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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