2/8

Reading through Gann this week was interesting. Although it was a basic history lesson, the time period is the one where music in America really began to diversify. On the one hand the western classical tradition is alive and kicking in composers like Howard Hanson and Roy Harris. However, this is paired with the ragtime and later jazz of Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong, new atonalities like Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, and those moving in between the many worlds, like Aaron Copland and George Gershwin. America was in a state of flux, with composers seeking new ways to interpret and even produce sound. This diversity in and of itself inspired later composers to look for diversity for it's own sake. The big difference in this period historically, is that the musics that were occurring in different facets of the culture were all notated, written down and preserved for us to study and learn from.

Listening this week was centered around Virgil Thomson's Mother of Us All, an opera surrounding the life of Susan B. Anthony. ALthough it is split between fictional and nonfictional characters, Thomson points out Anthony's cultural and historic importance to pay homage to an American great. Thomson, I believe, is making a point about women as much as he is about Susan B. Anthony herself. To say that historically women have played just as big a role as men, and yet get much less press and text than men do. His librettist, Stein, did a wonderful job encouraging Thomson to go with Susan B. Anthony. She is a wonderful American figure of prominence who gives tremendous credit to American steadfast will.


The music itself was not intoxicating or overly moving. Thomson could have done much more in the way of mixing American genres to make this work a real kaleidoscope of Americana, but instead chooses to restrict the context to that of the musical heritage of the south. This is a great way to gain some popular appeal, but begins to drag on into the second act.

Besides the opera, we listened to Roy Harris' Third Symphony, surprisingly a one-movement work. Harris may be poking fun at the traditional notion of the symphony itself. While it contains all the elements of traditionalism, it remains a one-movement work, and rather brief at only 15' while some contemporary symphonic composers would keep an audience there for an hour and on.

The work begins emotional and dramatic, ethereal, reminiscent of Mahler's First in it's ambiguity. It moves deliberately though, getting to a point quickly. I could not help feeling this entire work was a joke. Harris moves through motives and themes without giving most any time, and does not stop to develop them in the least. While others would take the time to work with each idea and develop it (even a little), Harris almost jokingly moves on, although with a natural motion that allows him to change colors and timbres without the audience questioning a moment, it seems nothing will stop to develop until in the tenth minute, when there is no counter-melody to his context, Harris lets a mild mannered melody stand alone without any backing or development as if to poke fun at the idea of over-developing and dissecting each little theme under a microscope as a work crawls forward conceptually. 

I love this work, but cannot tell if it is meant as a farce or is set upon itself to just be a moment of beauty, and it functions as either.