"This book reflects a breakthrough in American music studies, an unrecognized field among traditional musicologists until the past few decades, during which enormous progress has been made in documenting three centuries of American musical activities and figures. Time and effort had to be expended exclusively on the development of basic historical studies. The time has come for a new phase, one that can take a creative, interpretive approach. Professor Crawford's study will introduce this higher level of scholarship into the field of American music studies."—Vivian Perlis, author of Charles Ives Remembered

"A major statement by a senior scholar on what American musicology is all about. . . These themes are also topical; they come at a time when much more research is being done in American music, but little thought is being given to the big picture, the vision, the philosophy, and the implications of historical research. Now is the time for a synthesis, and there are few scholars better equipped to do that in American music than Richard Crawford."—Michael Broyles, author of Music of the Highest Class

Richard Crawford is Professor of Music at the University of Michigan. His writings have won awards from the American Musicological Society, the Sonneck Society for American Music, and the Music Library Association.

The American Musical Landscape

By Richard Crawford

University of California Press

Copyright © 2000 Richard Crawford
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520224827
1
Cosmopolitan and Provincial: American Musical Historiography

Historical writing is judged on quality of information and authority of interpretation. Other scholars are its ultimate judges, for worth is measured by its usefulness to them. Quality of information depends upon accuracy and thoroughness. (Are the facts true? Are the sources comprehensive? Is the documentation complete?) But the quality of a study's information can be hard to judge apart from the author's interpretive perspective. As time passes, the past enlarges and, like the road already traveled, takes on new aspects. Facts about the past do not change. But as one's vantage point moves, the meanings of facts often change with it. New interpretive perspectives appear, sometimes strongly reacting against earlier ones. Such shifts can carry the temptation to dismiss earlier work, as if a perspective that one no longer accepts taints even the facts its author has brought to light. Fresh insights are sure to follow a break with past perspectives. But if such a break is allowed to relegate older histories to oblivion, it works against the building of a tradition of historical study.

A scholarly field forms a tradition of historical study when earlier writers on the same subject are recognized as predecessors, when their work is studied closely, when the questions they raise are identified, discussed, and debated, and when their findings are assimilated. A tradition of historical study progresses, in the sense in which E. H. Carr has defined historical progress, by transmitting the knowledge and experience of one generation of scholars to the next.1 Entry into a musicological field with a tradition thus depends upon mastering a core of scholarly writings, which themselves deal with a certain musical repertory and are centered on fundamental issues, subject to changing interpretations and approaches.

Within American music, one can find a few fields in which such a tradition has formed. The music of Charles Ives is one. In Ives studies, and a few others as well, bibliographical and editorial foundations have been laid, biographical investigations undertaken, local inquiries launched, and style-based books and articles written. In such fields, an agenda has been set and a process of distillation begun. Scholars have mapped the terrain, data are more known than unknown, major issues have been defined, and interpretive refinements are proceeding apace.2

No such tradition has formed for historical studies in American music as a whole. Since 1955, Gilbert Chase, Wilfrid Mellers, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Charles Hamm, four respected scholars, have each written a history of American music from earlier times to the present. Chase's, Hitchcock's, and Hamm's books were published for the American college textbook market, while Mellers's was brought out by a trade publisher.3 As a group, the four books are most remarkable for having so little to do with each other, either in approach or in territory covered. Hamm's work, the most recent of the four, contains the following statement: "Though I have dealt with a wider range of music than is found in any earlier histories of music in the United States, much has been left out. In fact, one could easily write another book, perhaps of equal length, dealing with the music I have chosen to exclude. Perhaps I will undertake such a book myself one day."4 Hamm's words suggest that historians of American music have yet to agree what the history of American music is ; the four books I've mentioned bear out this suggestion.

Chase's book is comprehensive by the lights of its time, and it is written with the conviction and documentary command of a seminal work. Chase breaks sharply with earlier histories by devoting more than half his book to folk and popular music, which he claims as our chief source of musical vitality.5 Mellers praises Chase's work as "admirable" and then proceeds to go his own way, saying little about folk music or the years before 1900. He distinguishes elements in American music that are "genuine and meaningful" from those that are not,6 and he concentrates on music that shows twentieth-century American composers coping successfully with a commercial environment—with special emphasis on composers and players in the jazz tradition. Hitchcock,who wrote the slimmest volume of the four, acknowledges the influence of Chase's work on his own, but his account includes folk music only peripherally.7 His division of the nineteenth century into two streams—the "cultivated" and the "vernacular" traditions—has been widely borrowed. But not by Hamm, who deals with his predecessors in a respectful footnote, then strikes out on an entirely new path, concentrating on music brought to the New World from Europe and Africa and changed in its subsequent history here. Folk and popular musics fill a large proportion of his book, as they do Chase's. But unlike Chase, Hamm cares most about reception—about the music that has won the widest audience; and he flaunts folkloric values by claiming "contaminated" music as America's "most characteristic and dynamic" musical product.8

These contrasts may be pursued a bit more through glimpses of further details. Chase violates chronology by ending his book with a chapter on Charles Ives, for him the culminating figure in American music, because, "first and alone among American composers," Ives "was able to discern and to utilize the truly idiosyncratic and germinal elements of our folk and popular music."9 With Ives identified as the Messiah, one tends to notice in the earlier parts of Chase's text prophecies of his eventual coming. Mellers's scholarly apparatus—a bibliography of books running barely to a page and a discography of more than fifty pages—shows that he approached the subject with open ears if with somewhat closed mind. Hitchcock balances his coverage between eras, genres, and approaches and preaches the gospel that American musical history is coherent. (He lacks the curmudgeonly streak of Chase and Mellers; if anything on the American music scene makes Hitchcock mad, the reader doesn't find out about it.) Hamm begins by announcing that several new record series are the most significant recent developments in American musical research. And his book reflects his own encounters as a listener with an unusually wide range of American musics.

These incongruities reflect the different backgrounds and interests of our four authors and the differing sponsorships under which their books appeared.10 But more than that, they reflect the absence in America of a canon of musical masterworks and composers—the kind of canon on which European musical historiography centers.11 One might guess that our historians' freedom to define their subject is a recent phenomenon—part of the general social reorientation that followed WorldWar II. But in fact, that freedom (or lack of continuity) goes back much further. It is present from the beginning of the writing of American music history. And it reflects the strain of randomness that, over nearly a century and a half of serious study, has run through histories of American music. If one thinks of pluralism as an American trait, perhaps it is especially fitting that such disparate figures as Hood, Ritter, Mathews, Elson, Howard, Chase, and Mellers have written histories of American music. For in background, outlook, taste, and training, it is...