for fancy goes first and strikes out the work roughly, and art comes after and polishes it over.9
Billings was fourteen years younger than Haydn, ten years older than Mozart, but his music inhabits another world than that of European classicism. In some ways it seems to hark back to an earlier European style; it is modal rather than tonal, with a folkish flavor, deriving perhaps from the Anglo-Celtic folk tradition. It is to all intents and purposes non-harmonic; certainly tonal functional harmony plays no part in its repertory of expressive means. Any conflict between the needs of chord progression and the shape of an individual melodic line is invariably resolved in favor of the latter, even if this produces a harmonic clash, so that astounding dissonances unknown in contemporary European music are used freely and often without any feeling of need for resolution. Open and parallel fifths, both proscribed by European rules, are heard here so frequently that it is clear that the sound was positively enjoyed by these composers and their congregations. To harmonically attuned ears the music may sound tonally monotonous, the more so as modulation, apart from the occasional perfunctory movement to the dominant, is virtually non-existent, but to feel this is to miss the point of the music, which is concerned with other matters, and pursues its concerns in a remarkably stylish and consistent way. The music is mainly for unaccompanied chorus—at least, no accompaniment is provided, although wind and even string instruments might join in doubling the vocal parts should they happen to be available. Keyboard instruments were rare and played no part in the world of these composers—which may have been a contributing factor to the absence of harmonic device in their works, obliging them to think in terms of lines rather than of chords (the role of the keyboard, with its power of bringing complex textures under the control of a single individual, in the development of tonal harmony has already been remarked on).
A typical New England anthem consists of a number of short sections cunningly put together, with chordal sections alternating with sections in simple imitative counterpoint (“fuging”) and remarkable manipulation of textural effect in which the whole group may be set against one, two or three voices, as well as contrasts of tempo, dynamics and vocal timbre, all used as structural rather than as decorative elements. That the first western non-harmonic music since the Renaissance should have been composed in a society founded on the ideal of individual liberty (Billings was an active supporter of the Colonial cause and wrote not only its principal rallying-song, Chester, but also an eloquent Lament Over Boston on the occasion of the burning of the city by the British) by a musician who believed that “every composer should be his own carver” and that “nature must inspire the thought” should come as no surprise to the reader who has thus far followed the argument of this book.
Billings, like his colleagues, was very concerned for the manner of performance; many of his ideas would have shocked his European contemporaries, and even today show a very cavalier attitude to the demands of traditional tonal-harmonic music, especially the importance it assigns to the real bass. He liked, for example, to have male and female voices on each part, producing an octave, and occasionally a double-octave, doubling—a kind of organ sonority in six or eight parts. His ear was very idiosyncratic, but it is clear that he knew the kind of sound he wanted:
Suppose a company of forty people; twenty of them should sing the bass, and the other twenty should be divided according to the discretion of the company into the upper parts. Six or seven voices should sing the ground bass, which sung together with the upper parts, is most majestic, and so exceeding grand as to cause the floor to tremble, as I myself have often experienced … Much caution should also be used in singing a solo (sic); in my opinion 2 or 3 at most are enough to sing it well. It should be sung soft as an echo, in order to keep the hearers in agreeable suspense till all the parts join together in a full chorus, as sweet and strong as possible.10
It was also apparently not unusual for these composers to place the various parts at some distance from one another, making use of the spatial separation between them—attesting further to a concern for the individual part, which was virtually unknown in the European music of the time.
Here, then, was the stuff of a new, democratic tradition in music, strong, confident, firmly rooted in the life of the people, and accessible to them, which could match the aspirations of Jeffersonian democracy. Yet it vanished without trace for almost two hundred years, swamped by the movement towards gentility and European-style “correctness” which took place under the leadership of musicians such as Lowell Mason in the early years of the nineteenth century. To Mason, who, appropriately enough, was also the first to bring to music the methods of that typically American institution, Big Business (which was just getting under way in the early nineteenth century), music was principally a commodity. He published an enormous quantity of music, hymns, church music generally, children’s instructional manuals and songbooks, secular songs, some of them his own compositions (From Greenland’s Icy Mountain is his) but mostly taken from the work of lesser European composers and the lesser works of greater, often rearranged to take out their most striking features, leaving a bland and bloodless mixture, not unlike the products of present-day American television, and for much the same reasons. Mason grasped the fact that if music was to be treated as a commodity then clearly it had to appeal to the widest number of people and antagonize the fewest. Good quality, yes—but not so original as to disturb or frighten off a potential customer. (This blandness is still to be found today in many American collections of music for high school orchestras, bands and the like.) In any case the raw but richly alive works of the New England tunesmiths clearly would not do.
It is not too fanciful to see in this betrayal of the ideals of the early composers a parallel of the betrayal of the idea of the rights of man that began to take place in the early nineteenth century as industrialism got under way. America in the nineteenth century produced writers of real greatness who preserved an aggressive stance of independence—Melville, Twain, Whitman, Emerson, for example, and above all Thoreau, while American art music produced only Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Stephen Collins Foster, both interesting figures but scarcely of comparable stature. Could not this be because music, for the very reason that it is less precise in its outward meanings, less conscious of exactly what it is saying, gives even deeper expression than literature to the subconscious motivations of a culture? In any case, the history of nineteenth-century American art music is a dismal affair; one after another, young composers crossed the Atlantic, to Dresden, to Leipzig, Vienna or Weimar, rarely to Paris, coming back with music that was no more than a pale imitation of German romanticism. As David Wooldridge in his recent biography of Charles Ives remarks, the vision of the New England tunesmiths “went forfeit to the competent … Only music malingered dismally, generation over generation of American composers making the pilgrimage to Europe like dowagers to a spa, to fetch back the continuing seed of a foreign culture for the continuing delight of old ladies.”11
It was not, however, the Europeanized American composers who dominated the art-music scene; indeed, they were hard put to it to get a hearing at all. It was European, and especially German, music, its apparatus and standard repertoire—a state of affairs that largely continues even today with the large and socially accepted concert organizations. And precisely because this music had, and has, no organic relationship with indigenous American culture it proved sterile, without roots; it is perhaps for this reason that, while in Europe those who find in themselves no point of contact with classical music (in the popular sense of the word) are content to ignore it and go their own way, in America it seems to arouse positive hostility. A standard plot for the Hollywood musicals of my youth concerned the confrontation between “longhair” musicians and the “regular kids,” as portrayed by the young Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Bonita Granville and Jane Withers, who wanted to “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” There is malice, too, in the Marx Brothers’ hilarious destruction of a performance of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, and in the cutting loose of the floating platform in At the Circus allowing the symphony orchestra under the baton of the outrageously caricatured Italian conductor to float out to sea still energetically playing Wagner—an architypal image if ever there was one. But we must be clear; it was not music that the average American disliked, then as now. His culture was full of it, from minstrel shows
