by Beth E. Levy
THE DVOŘÁK DEBATE
Between May and December of 1893, composers and audiences participated in one of the landmark debates in American musical history. The presence of Antonín Dvoák at the National Conservatory in New York City sparked intense discussion about European expertise and the appropriate use of folk sources. Dvoák was hardly the first composer to experiment with American folk idioms. Yet he is still among the most famous to have done so, and in the 1890s his words carried the weight of continental authority. Although the Czech composer was hired as an exponent of the German tradition á la Brahms, he knew what it was like to work on the periphery of Europe's musical centers. He had learned the importance of inventing and marketing a provincial style that could win cosmopolitan acceptance. He admitted the importance of regional and racial difference, and he recognized that musical nationalism and gestures toward authenticity were deeply intertwined.
Less than a year after his arrival, Dvoák issued a proclamation that would quickly overshadow his status as a disciple of Brahms: “I am now satisfied,” he told the readers of the New York Herald, “that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.”1 Not all shared Dvoák's unequivocal assessment. When pressed by the editor of the Boston Herald, Boston's musical elite tended to take exception to the notion that “plantation” or “slave” songs were the best basis for distinctively American music. As Joseph Horowitz has shown, there was a distinct difference between the enthusiasm that cosmopolitan New Yorkers mustered for their adopted son and the skepticism, verging in some cases on hostility, with which many Bostonians greeted their Bohemian guest. To Harvard's John Knowles Paine, it seemed “a preposterous idea to say that in future American music will rest upon such a shaky foundation as the melodies of a yet largely undeveloped race.” George Whitefield Chadwick stated flatly that “such negro melodies as I have heard…I should be sorry to see become the basis of an American school of composition.” Benjamin Lang, too, begged to differ with Dvoák's claim. And he made a polite request: “I wish that Dr. Dvoák would write something himself, using themes from these plantation songs. Such an act would set an example for our American composers.”2
As Lang may well have known, Dvoák had already committed himself to exactly such a project: his Symphony in E Minor, “From the New World” (1893). Much has been written about the aftermath of its premiere; the critical posturing threatened to engulf the symphony, and subsequent reverberations still shape its reception by raising questions about racial authenticity and national or regional identity. Shortly before the first performance, Dvoák complicated the answers to these questions by revealing that the middle movements of the symphony had grown out of his fascination with Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha and its romantic re-creation of Indian lore.3 The rich confusion of ethnic implications that resulted may account in part for the symphony's enduring status as a turning point in American music history.4 Here was a Slavic composer, employed as a representative of the Germanic tradition, publicly committed to the incorporation of African American melodies and inspired by (faux) Native American legend.
James Huneker was one of the first to weigh in on the symphony's value and its racial mixing: “When the smoke of criticism has cleared away it will be noticed, first, that Dr. Dvoák has written an exceedingly beautiful symphony; secondly, that it is not necessarily American, unless to be American you must be composite. The new work, thematically considered, is composite, sounding Irish, Slavic, Scandinavian, Scotch, negro, and German.”5 More enthusiastic critics, such as Henry Krehbiel, William J. Henderson, and even H. L. Mencken, noted the work's hybrid character as one of its chief virtues. Henderson, for example, praised the main melody of the slow movement: “It is an idealized slave song made to fit the impressive quiet of night on the prairie. When the star of empire took its way over those mighty Western plains blood and sweat and agony and bleaching human bones marked its course. Something of this awful buried sorrow of the prairie must have forced itself upon Dr. Dvoák's mind.”6 Whether Henderson had in mind the grasslands of Iowa (where Dvoák had spent part of the previous summer) or the vast expanses of the Far West (a rather more likely site for bleaching human bones), his words suggest that the “New World” Symphony's New York appeal was enhanced by its openness—its ability to accommodate every critic's favorite stripe of Americana.
By contrast, as Horowitz points out, members of the Boston intelligentsia retained a mixture of skepticism and indignation when their turn came to review Dvoák's symphonic effort. Spurred by the influential writings of Philip Hale, Boston readers learned to ridicule this supposedly “American” product as a hodgepodge of foreign elements—Scotch snaps, “negro airs,” and “primitive” gestures—that were all too typical of cosmopolitan New York. William Apthorp included in his response a brief excursus: “Our American Negro music has every element of barbarism to be found in the Slavic or Scandinavian folk-songs; it is essentially barbarous music. What is more, it sounds terribly like any other barbarous mu-sic.”7 Far from being a source of delight, the symphony's interpretive slipperiness functioned as a red flag to the Brahmins, for whom such hybridity was at best unrefined and quite possibly dangerous. Nearly twenty years later, Hale lamented that, even though he had presented ample evidence that the symphony expressed “the state of a homesick soul,” other critics would not abandon the idea that the “New World” was based “for the most part, on negro themes, and that the future of American music rests on the use of congo, North American Indian, Creole, Greaser and Cowboy ditties, whinings, yawps, and whoopings.”8
American composers participated in this debate with words and music. The most conservative composers fervently wished to partake of what they saw as the universal “mainstream,” populated by German masters, not regional ones. Paine protested: “The time is past when composers are to be classed according to geographical limits. It is not a question of nationality but individuality, and individuality is not the result of imitation—whether of folk songs, Negro melodies, the tunes of the heathen Chinese or Digger Indians, but of personal character and inborn originality.”9 Many of Paine's compatriots, however, were at least a little interested in creating a national music, whether according to Dr. Dvoák's prescription or by some other means. Like Dvoák, they favored the tried-and-true European model for creating a national music: injecting indigenous elements into conventional contexts. But unlike the Czech composer, they recognized that this was no simple proposition in the multiethnic United States.
As Dvoák's American sojourn wore on, his position became more circumspect. He stood by his preference for “the so-called plantation melodies and slave-songs,” but admitted that “it matters little whether the inspiration for the coming folk-songs for America is derived from the Negro melodies, the songs of the Creoles, the red man's chant, or the plaintive ditties of the homesick German or Norwegian. Undoubtedly, the germs for the best of music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country.”10 As an outsider, Dvoák could afford to base his selection of folklore on personal inclination rather than political agenda or family heritage. Here he was not bound by the rigid dictates of supposed national or racial authenticity that had complicated his creation of a Czech musical identity.11 It hardly made a difference whether his information about Native American life came from Longfellow, Buffalo Bill, or the Kickapoo Medicine Show, nor did it matter whether his exposure to African American music came courtesy of Stephen Foster, from his students' recollections, or from his perusal of the American press. The theme of his slow movement could still become the ersatz spiritual “Goin' Home,” and Dvoák's secretary could still maintain that the subtitle “From the New World” had been added as an afterthought, “one of his innocent jokes.”12
For Dvoák's American contemporaries there was more at stake. They knew that any type of folk borrowing would bring with it pressing questions of authenticity. And they knew that not all folk music was created equal. To Amy Beach
it was self-evident that biographical justifications for borrowing were necessary or at least highly desirable:
To those of us of the North and West there can be little if any “association” connected with Negro melodies.…We of the North should be far more likely to be influenced by old English, Scotch or Irish songs…than by the songs of a portion of our people who were kept so long in bondage.…If a Negro, the possessor of talent for musical composition, should perfect himself in its expression, then we might have the melodies which are his folk-songs employed with fullest sympathy, for he would be working with the inherited feelings of his race.13
Beach put this philosophy into action almost immediately with her “Gaelic” Symphony (1894-96), which quotes Irish-Gaelic folk songs. As Adrienne Fried Block has observed, she may have learned from Dvoák's example, for some of her later works also borrow Native American themes. She steered clear of black America, however, for reasons that she readily confessed:
Without the slightest desire to question the beauty of the Negro melodies…or to disparage them on account of their source, I cannot help feeling justified in the belief that they are not fully typical of our country. The African population of the United States is far too small for its songs to be considered “American.” It represents only one factor in the composition of our nation. Moreover, it is not native American. Were we to consult the native folk songs of the continent, it would have to be those of the Indians and Esquimaux, several of whose curious songs are given in the publications of the Smithsonian Institute. The Africans are no more native than the Italians, Swedes, or Russians.14
Indian melodies at least had the virtue of indigenousness; moreover, for many Americans, the imagery associated with the native “noble savage” was more appealing than the minstrel show stereotypes of the “plantation darkey.” Though Edward MacDowell opposed the creation of a specifically American style, after the tremendous popularity of his “Indian” Suite, he observed that “the stern but at least manly and free rudeness of the North American Indian” was a worthier inspiration than “the badge of whilom slavery.”15 Such were the continental divides between New York and Boston, between cosmopolitan and provincial, between races, colors, and creeds.
THE TURNER THESIS
Less than six months before Dvoák's premiere, and about eight hundred miles west, the nation's foremost American historians, meeting at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, witnessed another key moment in American cultural history when young Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his address “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Though the speech went virtually unremarked by its original audience, it quickly became a fundamental document in American historiography, marking a move away from narratives centered on military or political heroes and shaping the nascent discipline of western history for decades to come. No matter how vigilantly later historians have revised the factual premises of Turner's hypothesis, it has retained its narrative power.
Turner's address, famed for its rhetorical and social-scientific authority, began with a statement that placed the western frontier at the center of America's conduct and character. Responding to an 1890 census report which stated that the “frontier line” separating civilization and wilderness was no longer a viable concept for analysis, Turner proclaimed: “This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.” He asserted that “the peculiarity of American institutions” resulted from “the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness.”16 In other words, the frontier was both a convincing reason for American exceptionalism and the best assurance of its continuation.
If Dvoák's “New World” was populated by Negroes and Indians, Turner's belonged to men of European extraction. They made up the successive waves of settlement that washed across the North American continent—from the Appalachians, to the Midwest, to the Great Plains, the Rockies, and beyond. The Indian trader prepared the way for the rancher and the small farmer, whose families and commercial support systems eventually coalesced into frontier towns. The promise of available land drew families of different classes and backgrounds; unnecessary European habits were abandoned as unpragmatic; democracy was renewed. The changing frontier thus functioned as what Turner called “the line of most rapid and effective Americanization.” At first, the wilderness shaped the settler into a less-than-noble savage: “Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.” Gradually, though, the fertilization of Old World roots in a New World environment bore uniquely American fruit: “The advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe.…And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.”17
More recent historians have disagreed about whether Turner saw the frontier as a line of expansion into the empty West, or a line of conflict along which Euro-Americans met and conquered indigenous tribes. As Kerwin Lee Klein has observed, “One could read pre-Columbian North America as the historical landscape of savagery or the wild space of nature. Frontier history swung back and forth on this hinge, revealing alternate worlds, pasts, and futures.”18 Turner himself had stated at the outset that the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization,” and that each phase of westward expansion was “won by a series of Indian wars.” Yet the potent phrase “free land” and Turner's frequent references to the natural obstacles of the American wilderness soon gained lives of their own. It was all too tempting for Turner's readers to let romantic depictions of Anglo ingenuity and perseverance in the face of a hostile landscape override the human toll of westward expansion. Though tragic depictions of defeated and “vanishing” tribes often took pride of place in the arts and anthropology, it was heroic Anglo advance under the banner of Manifest Destiny that captured most historians' imaginations. According to Klein, “More and more, wilderness displaced savagery as the frontier scholar's antagonist of choice and a simple agon replaced Turner's dialectic.”19
In one of Turner's earliest essays, “The Significance of History,” he famously stated: “Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.”20 Given this philosophy of history, we might ask what contemporary conditions Turner himself was responding to when he chose to begin his speech with the census figures heralding the closing of the frontier. Why did his thesis emerge at the exact point when the frontier line could no longer ensure the future development of American democracy?
The explanatory power of the Turner hypothesis was enhanced by its appearance when the time was ripe for retrospect. Indeed, there is nothing new in grounding theories of national identity in the process of looking backward. Dvoák knew this as well as anyone, and even his most inclusive recipe for musical Americanness was liberally seasoned with nostalgia. The plantation song (even when recreated by Foster), Native American lore (especially as depicted by Longfellow), and the “plaintive ditties of the homesick German or Norwegian” were not modern musical currency at the turn of the century. In the United States, where historical memory forms a more reliable basis for cohesion than race, American identity has always depended on the specious clarity of hindsight to blur the rough edges of ethnic and class tensions. Among representations of America, the landscapes of the American West are particularly susceptible to suffusion by nostalgia. The penetration of unspoiled nature, the supposed disappearance of Indian tribes, and the unrepeatability of westward expansion—all these conjure a sense of loss no less palpable than the exhilaration of pio
neering advances. Those historians who took Turner's thesis as gospel, and the legions of artists and thinkers whose efforts were colored by its endorsement of Manifest Destiny, could never fully escape its twinning of progress and nostalgia.
Perhaps only a historian of Turner's generation, the first for which the strife of the Civil War would have been barely a memory, could step so decisively away from viewing North-South sectionalism as the crucial topography of U.S. history: “The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast,” he announced, “it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle…occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion.”21 As a defining episode in the nation's character, westward expansion had undeniable advantages over civil war. It had direction, and it had a resolution that a majority of Americans could comfortably consider a victory. The frontier calculus could generate many useful images: hard-won advances against hostile nature or the embrace of Mother Nature, the glory of the successful Indian fighter or a world-historical pathos that consigned Native Americans to extinction. In every case these pictures were preferable to the bloody battlefields that set brother against brother and nearly shattered the Union.
There is a second, more specific way in which Turner's thesis responded to the demands of its time and place. Gathered together under the auspices of the Columbian Exposition, the more attentive members of the American Historical Association might have predicted where Turner would finally anchor his exploration of American identity: “Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World,” he declared, “America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open but has even been forced upon them.” The cadence that closed Turner's march of history balanced American exceptionalism against the westward movement of universal history as charted by Hegel and others, according to which the riches of the Orient yielded to the glories of Greece, the grandeur of Rome, and the rise of modern Europe. In Turner's eyes, the American frontier experience continued this westering process: “What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks…the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely.”22 From the Far East to the Far West, America's Manifest Destiny was the world's westward expansion, the crowning achievement of the age of imperialism. In Klein's words: “West, even as a particular arid region of the United States, always also harks back to ‘The West' as a cultural tradition from ancient Greece to modern Europe. And since Americans have frequently claimed for themselves a privileged place in the course of history, the West is crucial to understanding history in the abstract. The frontier was not just the place where civilization and wilderness made American democracy, it was the ragged edge of history itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other.”23
