At the Symphony next weekend (March 12-14)
Sounds of the 20th and 21st-Century American Symphony
A variety of celebrations are already underway or planned across the United States and its territories to mark the Semiquincentennial of this nation’s birth. The Nashville Symphony continues its participation in this celebration on March 12th for the Lawrence S. Levine Memorial Concert, titled An American in Paris with Our Town and featuring works composed by George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Caroline Shaw, Tan Dun, and Maurice Ravel. This collection of pieces, as the symphony’s website describes, offers a reflection on the nation’s evolving soundscape. Indeed, this performance will demonstrate America’s sonic evolution, but it invites listeners to reflect on its core values, as shown by the music’s history of innovation, industry, and identity.
Between the wars in America, composers sought to incorporate a “crossover” of symphonic music and Jazz. Carol Oja’s excellent depiction of this moment in her book Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s defined the moment as a particularly “volatile” one that “yielded a series of works that fused divergent genres,” but also “meant crossing racial barriers in an era of segregation and blurring the distinctions between art and entertainment” (319). George Gershwin’s premiere of Rhapsody in Blue (1924), William Grant Still’s Darker America (1924), and John Alden Carpenter’s Skyscrapers (1926) all symbolized this moment of symphonic experimentation with Jazz by American composers. These works not only captured the imagination of modernist American composers but also that of their predominantly French compatriots such as Darius Milhaud and Maurice Ravel. Milhaud visited New York City in 1922–23 and 1926, and Ravel traveled there in 1928. Both composers famously implored their American counterparts to heed the musical advantages Jazz offered. Milhaud, composer of jazz-inflected pieces like the Creation du Monde, appealed: “All great composers, you know, have written in the dance form popular at the time…There is no reason, therefore, why the best composers should hesitate to write jazz” (quoted in Oja 2000, 296). Ravel, on the other hand, admonished American composers when speaking about his admiration for Jazz music: “An artist should be international in his judgments and esthetic appreciations and incorrigibly national when it comes to the province of creative art” (quoted in Oja 2000, 296). Ravel and Milhaud’s enthusiastic support for incorporating Jazz music, and Gershwin, Carpenter, and Still’s experimentations, demonstrate a particular national and international response that encapsulates Gershwin’s An American in Paris (1928) and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (1931).
Gershwin’s An American in Paris is a tone poem that details an outing of an unnamed American man in the French capital. The program is told through the ternary structure, featuring a vibrant eight-bar theme that serves as the germinal idea of the entire opening section (See Example 1). The contrasting middle section features a melancholic blues theme that later gives way to a return of the jaunty opening melody, but now in a much more frenzied and excited state (See Example 2). While not as overt with its jazz inflections as his Rhapsody and Concerto in F, the piece nonetheless features the requisite blue notes and syncopated melodic and rhythmic phrases. Alongside the jazz flares are the expectant developmental and transitional passages, comprising short motivic references to previous material and the introduction of new ideas, providing a clear representation of the composer’s ability to fuse the sounds of art and entertainment.
Ravel’s place on the program demonstrates the influence of American musical sounds on the broader compositional interests of European composers (mainly French). Exchanges of ideas were a consistent and considerable part of 1920s American musical composition, as already evidenced by Milhaud and Ravel’s visits. However, Ravel’s approach was different from Gershwin’s in that he tried less to blend the styles and allowed them to stand in clear contradistinction from one another. In his Piano Concerto in G, Ravel combines a neoclassical approach, drawing on the forms of mid- to late eighteenth-century concertos, with a modernist penchant for complex harmonies and rhythms.
This can be found in the Stravinskian sounds of the first thematic area, with its rhythmically and motivically mechanistic sounds. The piano opens with bitonal triplet arpeggiations constructed between a G-major triad in the right hand and an F-sharp major triad in the left. The pizzicato strings break up the monotonous arpeggios by shifting between on- and off-beat rhythmic accentuations (See Example 3). Lastly, the piccolo and the trumpet share a bouncy, folk-like melody that shapes the piece’s opening character. The second theme area is more subdued; the piano’s arpeggiations dispense with the overlayed bitonal arpeggiations for more traditional pianistic structure: a chordal arpeggiation in the left hand (F-sharp, C-sharp, A-sharp), while the right hand plays a pentatonic melody comprised of the pitches F-sharp, G, A, B, and C-sharp. The winds enter with melodic motives again; however, they now contain descending, one-measure blues riffs passed from piccolo, to clarinet, and to trumpet. Unlike Gershwin, these shifts to jazz/blues sounds stand in clear contrast to the rest of the orchestral material. Over time, the piano begins to incorporate these riffs, making it part of its overall catalogue of material to draw from.
Jazz was not the only aspect of America’s modern symphonic sound that drew the attention of American and international composers. The opportunities offered by the burgeoning Hollywood film studios attracted both well-known composers from the concert hall and lesser-known ones. The film scores of Steiner, Rosza, Korngold, and many others established a lush, leitmotif-like strain of mid-to-late Romanticism in the Golden Age of Hollywood sound. One of Aaron Copland’s first feature film scores came in 1939–1940 for the film adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The play explored the everyday lives of the people living in a fictional New England town before the outbreak of World War I. The story appealed to Copland, and the film itself called for more plaintive, transcendental sounds than leitmotifs and mickey-mousing. The resulting score incorporated hymn-like harmonies that imitated the sounds associated with the fictional community depicted on screen. The score also reflected the composer’s own Americana style, combining elements of folk-like melodies and less abrasive dissonances found in some of Copland’s most notable works: Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1943), and Appalachian Spring (1944). As distinguished film music scholar Mervyn Cooke has pointed out in his History of Film Music, Copland’s early film, symphonic, and ballet scores all contributed a “direct model” for other film composers in creating a “distinctively nationalistic style that broke away from the overblown Eurocentric romanticism that dominated Hollywood scoring in the 1930s and 1940s” (123–124).
Caroline Shaw, the youngest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, also tackles the cinematic in her orchestral work The Observatory. Although not written to accompany a film, it was influenced by the commission from the LA Philharmonic, the Griffith Observatory, and the Hollywood Bowl, where it premiered. Shaw indicates as much in her own program note, that it attracted her attention toward sci-fi films: “I love the way epic tales of the beyond can zoom in and out, using imagined alternative universes to tell stories about ourselves on multiple scales at once. And I love how music in these films carves and colors our attention to those worlds (in their various permutations)” (Shaw, 2019). The Observatory exudes cinematic grandeur in its large, opening chords. At the same time, motivic interplay between strings and woodwinds offers a contrastingly intimate portrait of gazing up at the pulsating shimmers of stars and planets in the night sky. The entire work features long exchanges of these primary soundscapes, simulating the passing of objects in orbit or the alternation between shallow and deep focus of images on a screen.
Tan Dun’s appearance on the program also has ties to the cinematic as the composer is probably best known to audiences from his Academy Award-winning film score for Ang Lee’s period romantic epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. His Internet Symphony: Eroica, however, is related to the newest form of media: digital media. The piece was commissioned by YouTube/Google for a premiere by the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra was assembled through an audition process on YouTube, where professionals and amateurs uploaded their auditions to the platform, judges selected finalists, and those videos were released to the YouTube community to vote on the members who would make up the orchestra. Tan Dun’s Internet Symphony was one of the primary audition pieces everyone had to perform. The piece is not overly interesting from the notes on the page, as it needed to be accessible to a wide range of players, both trained and untrained, from a variety of cultural, social, and musical backgrounds. Thus, the symphony serves a much larger role beyond simply the evolution of America’s sound; it signifies America as a site for collective music-making, a space for innovation and change in how we construct ensembles, and a place where the world feels welcome. The Internet Symphony symbolized global unity, with the United States at its center.
The entire program, in fact, represents something much larger than a quick trip down America’s sonic memory lane. It signifies various aspects of America’s ingenuity, industry, and identity. The experimental innovations of the blues and jazz produced timeless works, blurred and dismantled stylistic barriers, and paved the way for America’s sound to be exported onto an international stage. The film industry likewise served as a hub for exiled European composers (Korngold, Steiner, Waxman, among others) who helped shape the early Golden Age of American film in Hollywood. Film scoring also provided a space for composers such as Copland to explore and employ his nationalistic sounds, often using parts of his film music in his concert pieces. The progressive, innovative, and industrious nature of American music has been a central component of the last century and more. This concert is not merely an escapist look back at what America once was. I believe it asks us to think about what we want our musical future to be, too.
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Dr. Josh Bedford is Assistant Professor of Musicology at Middle Tennessee State University and coordinates the Bachelor of Arts in Music program. He received his Ph.D. (2020) and M.A. (2013) in Musicology/Ethnomusicology from the University of Georgia. He received a Bachelor of Music Education (2011) from Indiana State University. His primary research focuses on opera and laughter, exploring Russian composers’ uses of laughter in adaptations of Nikolai Gogol’s stories.
