The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson, the same dyspeptic duo who tried to stamp out Sibelius, mocked the cult of Toscanini, Walter Damrosch’s music-appreciation lectures for children, and other instances of classical hype in the thirties. If their diatribes were egregiously snooty in tone—“It is highly doubtful,” Adorno sniffed, “if the boy in the subway whistling the main theme of the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony actually has been gripped by that music”—the critique of the middlebrow mentality sometimes hit home. The classical conglomerates, Thomson noted, confined themselves to a repertory of fifty masterpieces, because they were the easiest to sell. Yet the failure to support the new led inexorably to the decline of classical music as a popular pastime, for nothing bound it to contemporary life. A venerable art form was set to become one more passing fad in a ravenous consumer culture.

  Young Copland

  Aaron Copland hardly looked the part of the Great American Composer. He was a tall, wiry man with an angular, bespectacled face, resembling an awkward office clerk in a Hollywood genre picture. He was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants; he was an ardent leftist; he was gay. Yet he had a plausible claim to the evanescent mythology of the frontier and the Wild West. In the late nineteenth century, his maternal grandfather, Aaron Mittenthal, operated an emporium in Dallas, near such outfits as W. R. Hinckley’s tin shop and Ott & Pfaffle’s gun store. According to family legend, Mittenthal once hired the outlaw Frank James, brother of the famous Jesse James.

  Copland heard stories of the West, but he spent his childhood in Brooklyn. His father ran a department store at the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue, and the family lived above it. Copland later described the neighborhood as “simply drab” and claimed that he had received no musical stimulus from it, although he could hardly have been unaffected by the diverse clamor of popular and classical airs that enlivened any Brooklyn or Manhattan block at the turn of the century.

  Copland’s background was, as it happens, very similar to George Gershwin’s. Both were Brooklyn-born, a little over two years apart. Both were Russian-Jewish in origin. Both studied composition with a man named Rubin Goldmark. And they haunted the same locales in their youth; Gershwin attended recitals at Wanamaker’s department store, while Copland made his debut there in 1917. Copland noted some of the similarities in his memoirs, but said that no personal bond formed between them: “When we were finally face to face at some party, with the opportunity for conversation, we found nothing to say to each other!” Each may have envied the other’s advantages—Copland’s intellectual acclaim, Gershwin’s fame and wealth.

  While Gershwin developed his craft in the back rooms of Tin Pan Alley, Copland followed more conventional avenues of European study. In 1921, at the age of twenty, he attended the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, outside Paris, and plunged into the carnival of twenties styles. Walking through the city on his first day, he saw a poster for the Swedish Ballet and found himself sitting through Cocteau’s absurdist ballet Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with music by five of Les Six. Over the next three years he showed impeccable taste in concertgoing, attending the first nights of Milhaud’s Creation of the World and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, Koussevitzky’s performances of Stravinsky’s Octet and Honegger’s Pacific 231, and the Paris premiere of Pierrot lunaire. At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore he timidly approached James Joyce to ask about a musical passage in Ulysses. All told, he was very much in the middle of the action, although he observed more than he participated; it was his fellow student Virgil Thomson who danced all night at Le Boeuf sur le Toit.

  Copland’s teacher was the organist, composer, and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, who honed the compositional skills of half the major American composers of the rising generation—Copland, Thomson, Harris, and Blitzstein, among others. Through Boulanger, Copland absorbed the aesthetics of the twenties—the revolt against Germanic grandiosity, the yen for lucidity and grace, the cultivation of Baroque and Classical forms. She preached, in other words, the gospel according to Igor Stravinsky. If you were to take a Stravinsky score such as the Octet or the Symphonies of Wind Instruments, loosen up the tightly controlled structure, and insert a few melodies of the New England hymnal or urban-jazzy type, you would have the beginnings of a Copland work such as Billy the Kid or Appalachian Spring. The entire style is implicit in the “Pastorale” of Histoire du soldat.

  In 1923 Boulanger did Copland the gigantic favor of introducing him to Koussevitzky, who, she had heard, would be taking over the Boston Symphony the following season. After hearing Copland bang out his Cortège macabre on the piano (Prokofiev happened to be in the room as well), Koussevitzky proposed that Copland write a work for organ and orchestra, with Boulanger as soloist. Walter Damrosch also promised the young composer a place on his New York Symphony concerts. Thus, Copland’s Organ Symphony was booked for performances in both New York and Boston—a sensational send-off for a composer aged twenty-four. The symphony begins in an atmosphere of spacious mystery, with a sweet, ambiguous flute melody unfolding over sustained notes on the viola. The ending is all action and gesture and dancing motion; the solo instrument begins to sound less like the voice of God and more like an organ at a fairground. The journey from nocturnal meditation to communal celebration brings to mind Ives’s American idylls, but Copland executes his design with a clarity and an economy that do credit to his French training.

  Copland showed an uncommon flair for the lowlier arts of organization and publicity. He recognized that composers would make little headway with the public unless they formed a common front, as Les Six had done in Paris. “The day of the neglected American composer is over,” he wrote in 1926. The announcement had been made before, but Copland made it stick. He helped design Koussevitzky’s epoch-making American programming in Boston and also became the dominant figure in the League of Composers, which had formed as an alternative to the modernist-minded, racially bigoted International Composers’ Guild. (Carl Ruggles promptly dubbed the league a “filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews.”) With Roger Sessions, another Brooklyn-born music fiend, Copland developed the Copland-Sessions Concerts, which tried to bridge the gap between modernist and populist camps. A spirit of camaraderie and derring-do broke out among younger American composers. Virgil Thomson later fondly called this group Copland’s “commando unit.”

  Copland acquired a degree of notoriety with two jazz-inflected works, the Music for the Theatre of 1925 and the Piano Concerto of 1926. Although his comprehension of jazz went not too much deeper than that of his Parisian contemporaries (“It began, I suppose, on some negro’s dull tomtom in Africa,” he wrote), he did send a strong rhythmic jolt into American concert music. The jabbing, bluesy riffs of the Piano Concerto point the way to Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, while the climactic theme of Music for the Theatre’s “Burlesque” sounds like Jerome Kern’s “Ol’ Man River,” written two years later. As Copland’s biographer Howard Pollack observes, the racy hint of striptease in the title can also be felt in the raucous, how-ya-doin’-honey orchestration.

  Having “done” jazz, Copland moved on to the dissonant high modern. His Piano Variations of 1930 is a monolithic masterpiece that threatens to surpass the ultra-modern school of Varèse and Ruggles in the relentlessness of its attack. It is based on a broadly gesticulating four-note motif—E, C, D-sharp, C-sharp an octave above—that Copland probably extracted from the slow movement of Stravinsky’s Octet. The theme is subjected to an astringent sequence of permutations that at times approaches twelve-tone writing. By the end, the music is heading in a tonal direction: grand triads of A major and E major ring out in the treble, though with sharp dissonances attached. A new American harmony, brash and bluesy, grows from primordial chaos.

  Copland’s early works won raves from progressive critics. Paul Rosenfeld, Varèse’s celebrant, called them “harsh and solemn, like the sentences of brooding rabbis.” But brooding did not pay the bills. In 1938, Pollack tells us, the composer’s checking account
contained $6.93, and he was asking himself whether he should seek refuge in academia. He continued to struggle with feelings of spiritual hollowness, of social irrelevance. “I might force myself a little,” he wrote in his diary in 1927, contemplating the possibility of getting drunk. “My everpresent fear is that by thinking that I know myself, i.e. my normal self completely, I may circumscribe whatever latent possibilities I may have.” On Christmas Day of 1930 he wrote: “How does one deepen one’s experience of life. That is a problem that interests me deeply. Would serving as dish washer for a week help—or doing a term in prison? Or the Gurdjieff Method?” Copland soon found an answer to these nagging questions: his spiritual plunge, his drunken adventure, would take the form of leftist politics.

  Popular Front Music

  On October 24, 1929, Wall Street posted nine billion dollars of losses in a few hours, and the Great Depression began. The economic collapse staggered America’s urban elites, but it came as no great shock to farmers and agricultural workers, who had remained ungilt during the Gilded Age and had not roared during the Roaring Twenties.

  Most rural Americans were still part of an agrarian society, functioning largely without indoor plumbing and electricity. Back in the final years of the nineteenth century, resentment against the powers that be had spawned the People’s or Populist Party, which mixed utopian socialism with religious revivalism and old-fashioned demagoguery. Populism was the first effective progressive movement in American politics, even though it never caught fire at the national level. Crucial to its rhetoric was a sacralization of the heartland and the Wild West, where, it was thought, a pure American spirit had resisted the encroachments of industrial capitalism. Populism entered the mainstream with the onset of the Depression, altering the vocabulary of urban intellectuals and Democratic politicians. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural speech, mimicked Populist jargon when he decried the “practices of the unscrupulous money changers” and demanded “a better use of the land for those best fitted for the land.”

  According to polls, one quarter of the American people wanted a socialist government and another quarter had an “open mind” about the prospect. Such statistics gave Moscow the idea that America was ripe for the plucking. In the 1932 presidential campaign, William Foster and James Ford ran as the first serious Communist Party candidates. Ford was also the first African-American to appear on a presidential ticket, the Communist International having determined that blacks were instrumental to the cause. Many in the Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia, Duke Ellington included, committed themselves to Communism to a greater or lesser degree. But the Communist vote in 1932 was meager; for America, Roosevelt was radical enough.

  In the mid-thirties a new directive went forth from Moscow: Western Communists should find common ground with other leftist groups, the better to insinuate themselves into positions of power. From the order stemmed the Popular Front, which bound together various parties of the left around a limited set of pro-union, anti-fascist, anti-racist positions. The American Communist Party, under the leadership of Earl Browder, adopted the slogan “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism.” Such formulations charmed the gentler spirits in the Popular Front coalition—those who envisaged a gradual interpenetration of Soviet and American values rather than an overthrow of the government. Michael Denning, in his book The Cultural Front, argues that Popular Fronters manipulated the Soviets as much as the Soviets manipulated them. Americans are said to have drawn on the intellectual resources of the Soviet cause—and on its finances—while pursuing their own agenda.

  Still, the Popular Front was in many ways a shut-in, fanatical world, faithfully replicating the worst of the Soviet mind-set. Ideologues encouraged conformity and discouraged dissent, even if it meant denouncing yesterday’s conformity as dissent and vice versa. Most American Communists refused to acknowledge the violence of Stalin’s regime, even when evidence of it was placed in front of them. After Shostakovich was denounced in 1936, the New Masses reporter Joshua Kunitz quoted the soothing words of a young Communist: “Don’t worry. There’ll be no blood, no prisons, no ruin and no darkness. The fellows who deserve it will be criticized—that’s all.” (Kunitz retailed these rationalizations in a lecture to New Yorkers that May: “The Truth About Shostakovich,” followed by refreshments and dancing.) Others knew of the violence and chose simply to accept it. Back in 1933, New Masses had invited its readers to ask themselves this ominous question: “Based not on my words, or thoughts, but on the day-to-day acts of my life, would the working-class leaders of the future American Soviet Government be justified in putting me in a responsible job—or in a prison camp for class enemies?” At its most frightening, American Communism exhibited a kind of voluntary self-repression.

  The man in charge of coordinating international Communist activity in the musical area was Hanns Eisler. The firebrand of pre-Nazi Berlin was now hailed by the Daily Worker as the “foremost revolutionary composer…beloved of all the masses of every country.” As chairman of the International Music Bureau of the Comintern, Eisler visited America twice in 1935, lecturing in New York at the New School for Social Research and at Town Hall. The latter appearance shook up the local composers, Copland and Blitzstein included. Eisler informed them that modern composers had become nothing more than luxury tools of the capitalist system—“dealers in narcotics”—and that if they wished to break out of their prison they would have to fulfill a new social function. They were told to abandon purely instrumental music for more “useful” forms—workers’ songs, workers’ choruses, socially critical theater pieces. In another lecture Eisler stated bluntly that “the modern composer must change from a parasite into a fighter.”

  Charles Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford, two exemplary leftist composers, so feared the sin of formalism that they nearly barred themselves from composing altogether. Seeger, who came from old New England stock, began as an Ivesian modernist, formulating a method of “dissonant counterpoint” that spread widely among the ultra-modern composers. His best disciple was Crawford, a young Chicago-based composer, who began studying with him in late 1929 and fell in love with him not long after. This earnest, self-deprecating woman went on to write some of the most fabulously byzantine music of her time. In String Quartet 1931, orderings of pitch, rhythm, durations, and dynamics anticipate avant-garde music of the post–World War II era; in Chant 3, a women’s chorus is divided into twelve parts, each assigned a separate chromatic note and shifting through a variety of polyrhythms. Even as she indulged in these experiments, Crawford gave strong narrative shape to her material. The slow movement of the Quartet unfurls as a continuous wave of sound, its complexities concealed behind a softly shimmering exterior.

  Ruth and Charles were married in 1932, and around the same time they fell under the influence of Communist ideology. Charles helped to found a new organization called the Composers’ Collective, wrote a column for the Daily Worker, and penned a song titled “Lenin! Who’s That Guy.” Most important, he undertook to collect American folk songs in league with the father-son team of John and Alan Lomax, who were in the process of recording traditional music in the South and West.

  Judith Tick’s biography of Ruth Crawford Seeger movingly records the stages by which this gifted composer gave up her urge to create. She worked for a while on a second quartet, which was to have blended modern techniques with folk sources in a “combination of simplicity and complexity,” but it never materialized. Her confidence sapped by her husband’s neolithic belief that “women can’t compose symphonies,” she devoted herself instead to meticulous folk-song transcriptions. Her work appeared in two Lomax anthologies, Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA, which became bibles of the postwar folk-song revival (one of whose leaders was her stepson Pete). Only after the war did she regain interest in composition, completing in 1952 a Suite for Wind Quintet. But cancer claimed her the following year. Thus ended the career of one of the few major women composers of the early twentieth century.

  Co
pland had been leaning leftward since his days playing piano at the Finnish Socialist Union. On European trips in 1927 and 1929 he encountered Mahagonny Songspiel and The Threepenny Opera, and fell to thinking about how a composer could combine social critique with mass appeal. Later, in 1930 and 1931, he attended the first meetings of Harold Clurman’s Group Theatre in New York, which included among its regular collaborators such theater notables as Clifford Odets, Maxwell Anderson, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Elia Kazan. Copland, who had been Clurman’s roommate back in the Paris days, became a stalwart of the Group Theatre, finding space for meetings, identifying potential donors, and offering financial support from his own almost empty pockets.

  There was a Communist cell within the Group Theatre, but most members understood the project in largely aesthetic terms, as a corrective to the intellectual flight from society. Odets, who made his breakthrough with the pro-union play Waiting for Lefty in 1935, was obsessed with the figure of Beethoven, who represented for him not only the triumph of genius but also the tragedy of isolation. “[Beethoven] was the first great individualist in art,” Odets wrote. “Today we are locked in a death grip with our individualities and coming back to a social thing again. Call it Communism, call it Group Theatre, call it the life of farms, but artists are coming back to the truth of root things, fundamentals again.”