The grass is never greener than in the verdant nostalgia of the classical music lover’s mind. Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin, to name a few, were geniuses, but overall, there are more quality composers working today than in any given year of the 18th or 19th centuries. Those eras overflowed with rote. Half the reason Beethoven remains so revered is because of how ho-hum many of his contemporaries were. But we don’t see it that way. We still mostly like the oldies.
Why then, did classical music, especially in this country, take such a different course from the other arts, with audiences generally disconnected from contemporary creations? That’s the basis of a fascinating and significant book by Joseph Horowitz, “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall.” It is the focus of a WFMT-produced special airing on WQED-FM Tuesday at 8 p.m.
While the book is more thorough, the radio show, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin, backs up points with recordings. You could do this yourself with a superb two-disc collection just released by Naxos, “The Story of American Classical Music.” It contains representative music from many of the composers Horowitz outlines, as well as a lucid history.
Through a historical overview of American musical institutions and composers, primarily in Boston and New York City, Horowitz drives home an insightful thesis: A major factor in the “fall” was a spurning of our living composers in favor of star, often foreign, performers who gravitated to established music. This ossification created an unbeatable canon, “rejecting contemporary culture, enshrining dead European masters and celebrity performers.”
For all its independence on other fronts, the United States remained culturally subservient to Europe for some time. All art forms felt it, but classical music has struggled the most to escape its pull. In its first centuries, America produced more institutions of great repute than composers. Compare Carnegie Hall to George Chadwick or the New York Philharmonic to Edward MacDowell. Our biggest contributions were of form, not content.
Whenever Americans in the 18th and 19th century wrote music that didn’t ape European trends, it “would be rejected by most of the [American] public as primitive or irrelevant,” writes Horowitz.
American audiences would compensate for low esteem in composition by “out-adoring” Europeans for Europe’s own, whose music they could at least be proud to hear in their “better” concert halls and by their more proficient orchestras. Horowitz calls it a “psychology of insecurity,” and it meant Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner, Dvorak and others were more beloved here than Americans Foote, Fry or even Ives.
Horowitz feels this sentiment made the United States particularly susceptible to that Romantic musical phenomenon: the superstar performer. He cites Wagner’s pamphlet “On Conducting,” published in 1869, which rejected “time-beating” in favor of conductors who molded scores interpretively.
Wagner was writing in support of a growing trend, and as conductors took more artistic control of music, they began to be worshipped as its high priests. Arturo Toscanini was more important to many than the composers whose music he conducted. The same was true with other musicians. By the time Vladimir Horowitz held regal sway over the ebony and ivory, he was as famous as the music sitting on his piano. The same certainly was true for tenor Enrico Caruso.
It’s fine that a musician stands equally with a specific piece — classical music lives in the musician’s contemporary interpretation of music despite its age. But when a generation or two of conductors and performers retreat within the canon, it ultimately stunts the field. It is simply bizarre that if you ask someone to name some of the important musical figures of the 19th century, you are likely to get Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert and the like. Ask the same question about the 20th, and you often hear Toscanini, Heifetz and Ma.
Composers did play a part in this shift, some writing modernist music that turned off audiences. (The withdrawal of music education and the rise of the recording industry also played a part.) But for every Boulez there was a Menotti. And there’s no telling how the modernist trends would have turned out if more conductors and musicians had been a part of the process.
Eventually, the crowd-pleasing focus on the canon ran thin, and the audiences began to move away from classical to more popular and vibrant music: pop and rock. The current financial situation of orchestras and other groups has much to do with not keeping audiences interested in contemporary developments over the years. It’s culminated in today’s environment, in which a new album by U2 or Wilco, a new play by August Wilson or musical by Stephen Sondheim, or a new building by Frank Gehry or Rafael Vinoly makes headlines and builds massive excitement. Not so with new compositions by John Adams or Michael Daugherty. And Beethoven hasn’t written anything new in decades.
Classical music could stand to be more vital to the greater population; it could stand to be more healthy. Horowitz’s book is most significant for outlining how we got where we are. But I cannot subscribe to the pessimist subtitle of the book. I don’t think classical music has “fallen” — it’s just different than before. There are some aspects I don’t like, some I do.
There is much music out there that is moving and that could generate excitement if the field had shepherded itself better. And when these works are performed, they are done by better professional musicians now than ever before. The level of even a small-budget orchestra is astounding these days. Take that, 1800.
And don’t forget, yesterday’s classical music scene was astonishingly limited in its world view — some of it downright classist and racist. If you lived in the 18th century, odds are you never would have been allowed to hear Haydn’s music, unless you were a noble. And if you were a person of color or of a certain ethnic group, you could add many more restrictions. Today, classical music is more diverse and open than ever, in audience, orchestra, opera and composer makeup.
Things could be better, there is no doubt. The field definitely was its own worst enemy for some time and continues to struggle to define itself. But don’t try to sell me on the “fall” of classical music. That’s a specious trap many of us tend to fall into about the past.
Someday, people will be longing for the good old days of 2005.