American in Sound and American in Roots Musical Art Form the Early 20th Century

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Affiliate Ten
DISTINCTIVELY AMERICAN ARTS

Music, dance, architecture, visual arts, and literature

Photograph © Chris Lee

The evolution of the arts in America -- music, trip the light fantastic toe, architecture, the visual arts, and literature -- has been marked past a tension betwixt 2 strong sources of inspiration: European sophistication and domestic originality. Frequently, the best American artists have managed to harness both sources. This chapter touches upon a number of major American figures in the arts, some of whom have grappled with the Former World-New World disharmonize in their work.

MUSIC

Until the 20th century, "serious" music in America was shaped by European standards and idioms. A notable exception was the music of composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), son of a British father and a Creole female parent. Gottschalk enlivened his music with plantation melodies and Caribbean rhythms that he had heard in his native New Orleans. He was the first American pianist to achieve international recognition, but his early death contributed to his relative obscurity.

More representative of early American music were the compositions of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), who not only patterned his works after European models simply stoutly resisted the characterization of "American composer." He was unable to see across the same notion that hampered many early on American writers: To be wholly American, he thought, was to be provincial.

A distinctively American classical music came to fruition when such composers equally George Gershwin (1898-1937) and Aaron Copland (1900-1990) incorporated homegrown melodies and rhythms into forms borrowed from Europe. Gershwin'south "Rhapsody in Bluish" and his opera Porgy and Bess were influenced by jazz and African-American folk songs. Some of his music is besides cocky-consciously urban: The opening of his "An American in Paris," for example, mimics taxi horns.

Every bit Harold C. Schonberg writes in The Lives of the Great Composers, Copland "helped break the stranglehold of the German domination on American music." He studied in Paris, where he was encouraged to depart from tradition and indulge his interest in jazz (for more on jazz, see chapter 11). Besides writing symphonies, concertos, and an opera, he equanimous the scores for several films. He is all-time known, however, for his ballet scores, which depict on American folk songs; among them are "Billy the Kid," "Rodeo," and "Appalachian Leap."

Another American original was Charles Ives (1874-1954), who combined elements of pop classical music with harsh dissonance. "I establish I could not go along using the familiar chords early," he explained. "I heard something else." His idiosyncratic music was seldom performed while he was live, just Ives is now recognized equally an innovator who predictable later musical developments of the 20th century. Composers who followed Ives experimented with 12-tone scales, minimalism, and other innovations that some concertgoers establish alienating.

In the last decades of the 20th century, at that place has been a trend back toward music that pleases both composer and listener, a development that may exist related to the uneasy condition of the symphony orchestra in America. Unlike Europe, where it is common for governments to underwrite their orchestras and opera companies, the arts in America get relatively little public back up. To survive, symphony orchestras depend largely on philanthropy and paid admissions.

Some orchestra directors have establish a mode to proceed mainstream audiences happy while introducing new music to the public: Rather than segregate the new pieces, these directors program them side-by-side with traditional fare. Meanwhile, opera, old and new, has been flourishing. Because it is so expensive to stage, all the same, opera depends heavily on the generosity of corporate and private donors.

DANCE

Closely related to the development of American music in the early on 20th century was the emergence of a new, and distinctively American, art course -- modern dance. Amid the early innovators was Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), who stressed pure, unstructured move in lieu of the positions of classical ballet.

The primary line of evolution, however, runs from the trip the light fantastic toe company of Ruth St. Denis (1878-1968) and her husband-partner, Ted Shawn (1891-1972). Her pupil Doris Humphrey (1895-1958) looked outward for inspiration, to society and human conflict. Another pupil of St. Denis, Martha Graham (1893-1991), whose New York-based company became perhaps the best known in mod dance, sought to express an inward-based passion. Many of Graham's most popular works were produced in collaboration with leading American composers -- "Appalachian Spring" with Aaron Copland, for example.

Later choreographers searched for new methods of expression. Merce Cunningham (1919- ) introduced improvisation and random motility into performances. Alvin Ailey (1931-1989) incorporated African trip the light fantastic toe elements and blackness music into his works. Recently such choreographers equally Mark Morris (1956- ) and Liz Lerman (1947-) have defied the convention that dancers must be sparse and young. Their belief, put into action in their hiring practices and performances, is that graceful, heady motion is not restricted by historic period or body type.

In the early 20th century U.S. audiences besides were introduced to classical ballet by touring companies of European dancers. The start American ballet troupes were founded in the 1930s, when dancers and choreographers teamed up with visionary lovers of ballet such equally Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996). Kirstein invited Russian choreographer George Balanchine (1904-1983) to the United States in 1933, and the two established the School of American Ballet, which became the New York City Ballet in 1948. Ballet manager and publicity agent Richard Pleasant (1909-1961) founded America's second leading ballet organization, American Ballet Theatre, with dancer and patron Lucia Chase (1907-1986) in 1940.

Paradoxically, native-built-in directors like Pleasant included Russian classics in their repertoires, while Balanchine appear that his new American company was predicated on distinguished music and new works in the classical idiom, non the standard repertory of the by. Since then, the American ballet scene has been a mix of classic revivals and original works, choreographed by such talented erstwhile dancers as Jerome Robbins (1918- ), Robert Joffrey (1930-1988), Eliot Feld (1942- ), Arthur Mitchell (1934- ), and Mikhail Baryshnikov (1948- ).

ARCHITECTURE

America'due south unmistakable contribution to architecture has been the skyscraper, whose bold, thrusting lines take made it the symbol of capitalist energy. Fabricated possible past new structure techniques and the invention of the elevator, the offset skyscraper went up in Chicago in 1884.

Many of the almost graceful early towers were designed by Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), America's first bang-up modernistic builder. His most talented student was Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959), who spent much of his career designing private residences with matching piece of furniture and generous use of open infinite. One of his best-known buildings, however, is a public 1: the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

European architects who emigrated to the The states before World War II launched what became a dominant move in architecture, the International Style. Perhaps the near influential of these immigrants were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) and Walter Gropius (1883-1969), both former directors of Germany's famous design schoolhouse, the Bauhaus. Based on geometric course, buildings in their manner have been both praised as monuments to American corporate life and dismissed every bit "glass boxes." In reaction, younger American architects such every bit Michael Graves (1945- ) have rejected the austere, boxy await in favor of "postmodern" buildings with hit contours and bold decoration that alludes to historical styles of architecture.

THE VISUAL ARTS

America'southward first well-known school of painting -- the Hudson River school -- appeared in 1820. As with music and literature, this evolution was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself; in this case the westward expansion of settlement brought the transcendent beauty of frontier landscapes to painters' attending.

The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists every bit Winslow Homer (1836-1910), who depicted rural America -- the body of water, the mountains, and the people who lived nearly them. Heart-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism.

Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced Robert Henri (1865-1929). He was the leader of what critics chosen the "ash-can" schoolhouse of painting, later on the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life. Soon the ash-can artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe -- the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) at his Gallery 291 in New York Metropolis.

In the years subsequently World War Ii, a group of immature New York artists formed the first native American movement to exert major influence on foreign artists: abstract expressionism. Amongst the movement's leaders were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The abstract expressionists abandoned formal composition and representation of real objects to concentrate on instinctual arrangements of space and colour and to demonstrate the effects of the physical action of painting on the canvas.

Members of the next artistic generation favored a different course of abstraction: works of mixed media. Amid them were Robert Rauschenberg (1925- ) and Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Larry Rivers (1923- ), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923- ), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American pop culture -- Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.

Today artists in America tend not to restrict themselves to schools, styles, or a unmarried medium. A piece of work of art might exist a functioning on stage or a hand-written manifesto; it might be a massive pattern cut into a Western desert or a severe organisation of marble panels inscribed with the names of American soldiers who died in Vietnam. Perhaps the virtually influential 20th-century American contribution to world art has been a mocking playfulness, a sense that a fundamental purpose of a new piece of work is to join the ongoing debate over the definition of art itself.

LITERATURE

Much early American writing is derivative: European forms and styles transferred to new locales. For instance, Wieland and other novels by Charles Brockden Chocolate-brown (1771-1810) are energetic imitations of the Gothic novels so existence written in England. Fifty-fifty the well-wrought tales of Washington Irving (1783-1859), notably "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," seem comfortably European despite their New Globe settings.

Perhaps the first American writer to produce boldly new fiction and poetry was Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In 1835, Poe began writing short stories -- including "The Masque of the Cherry-red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Autumn of the Firm of Usher," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" -- that explore previously hidden levels of homo psychology and push the boundaries of fiction toward mystery and fantasy.

Meanwhile, in 1837, the young Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) collected some of his stories as Twice-Told Tales, a volume rich in symbolism and occult incidents. Hawthorne went on to write full-length "romances," quasi-allegorical novels that explore such themes every bit guilt, pride, and emotional repression in his native New England. His masterpiece, The Scarlet Alphabetic character, is the stark drama of a adult female cast out of her community for committing adultery.

Hawthorne'south fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819-1891), who start made a name for himself by turning material from his seafaring days into exotic novels. Inspired past Hawthorne's example, Melville went on to write novels rich in philosophical speculation. In Moby-Dick, an audacious whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human being struggle against the elements. In another fine piece of work, the short novel Billy Budd, Melville dramatizes the conflicting claims of duty and compassion on board a send in time of war. His more profound books sold poorly, and he had been long forgotten past the fourth dimension of his death. He was rediscovered in the early decades of the 20th century.

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), an ex-minister, published a startling nonfiction work called Nature, in which he claimed information technology was possible to dispense with organized faith and reach a lofty spiritual state past studying and responding to the natural world. His work influenced non just the writers who gathered around him, forming a movement known as Transcendentalism, but also the public, who heard him lecture.

Emerson's most gifted fellow-thinker was Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), a resolute nonconformist. After living generally by himself for two years in a cabin by a wooded pond, Thoreau wrote Walden, a volume-length memoir that urges resistance to the meddlesome dictates of organized society. His radical writings limited a deep-rooted tendency toward individualism in the American grapheme.

Marker Twain (the pen proper noun of Samuel Clemens, 1835-1910) was the offset major American writer to be born away from the Due east Coast -- in the border state of Missouri. His regional masterpieces, the memoir Life on the Mississippi and the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, were noted in affiliate 2. Twain's style -- influenced by journalism, wedded to the vernacular, straight and unadorned but also highly evocative and irreverently funny -- changed the fashion Americans write their language. His characters speak like real people and audio distinctively American, using local dialects, newly invented words, and regional accents.

Henry James (1843-1916) confronted the Old World-New World dilemma past writing directly about it. Although built-in in New York Metropolis, he spent most of his adult years in England. Many of his novels center on Americans who alive in or travel to Europe. With its intricate, highly qualified sentences and dissection of emotional nuance, James's fiction can exist daunting. Amidst his more attainable works are the novellas "Daisy Miller," virtually an enchanting American girl in Europe, and "The Plough of the Screw," an enigmatic ghost story.

America's two greatest 19th-century poets could hardly accept been more different in temperament and style. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was a working man, a traveler, a cocky-appointed nurse during the American Civil War (1861-1865), and a poetic innovator. His magnum opus was Leaves of Grass, in which he uses a costless-flowing verse and lines of irregular length to draw the all-inclusiveness of American democracy. Taking that motif ane footstep further, the poet equates the vast range of American experience with himself -- and manages non to sound like a crass egotist. For example, in "Song of Myself," the long, central poem in Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes: "These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me...."

Whitman was also a poet of the torso -- "the torso electrical," every bit he called information technology. In Studies in Classic American Literature, the English novelist D.H. Lawrence wrote that Whitman "was the first to smash the one-time moral conception that the soul of man is something `superior' and `to a higher place' the flesh."

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), on the other hand, lived the sheltered life of a genteel single woman in small-town Massachusetts. Within its formal structure, her poetry is ingenious, witty, exquisitely wrought, and psychologically penetrating. Her work was unconventional for its day, and piffling of information technology was published during her lifetime.

Many of her poems dwell on decease, often with a mischievous twist. "Considering I could non finish for Expiry," one begins, "He kindly stopped for me." The opening of another Dickinson poem toys with her position equally a adult female in a male person-dominated order and an unrecognized poet: "I'k nobody! Who are y'all? / Are you nobody as well?"

At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists were expanding fiction'south social spectrum to cover both high and low life. In her stories and novels, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) scrutinized the upper-class, Eastern-seaboard society in which she had grown upward. One of her finest books, The Historic period of Innocence, centers on a homo who chooses to marry a conventional, socially acceptable woman rather than a fascinating outsider. At well-nigh the aforementioned time, Stephen Crane (1871-1900), all-time known for his Civil State of war novel The Red Badge of Courage, depicted the life of New York Metropolis prostitutes in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. And in Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) portrayed a country daughter who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman.

Experimentation in way and form soon joined the new liberty in subject matter. In 1909, Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), past so an expatriate in Paris, published Three Lives, an innovative piece of work of fiction influenced by her familiarity with cubism, jazz, and other movements in contemporary fine art and music.

The poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was born in Idaho only spent much of his adult life in Europe. His work is complex, sometimes obscure, with multiple references to other art forms and to a vast range of literature, both Western and Eastern. He influenced many other poets, notably T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), another departer. Eliot wrote spare, cerebral poesy, carried by a dense structure of symbols. In "The Waste Country" he embodied a jaundiced vision of postal service-World War I society in fragmented, haunted images. Like Pound's, Eliot's poetry could be highly allusive, and some editions of "The Waste Country" come with footnotes supplied past the poet. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

American writers besides expressed the disillusionment post-obit upon the war. The stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the restless, pleasure-hungry, defiant mood of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's characteristic theme, expressed poignantly in The Peachy Gatsby, is the tendency of youth's golden dreams to dissolve in failure and disappointment.

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) saw violence and decease start-hand as an ambulance driver in Globe War I, and the senseless carnage persuaded him that abstract language was mostly empty and misleading. He cut out unnecessary words from his writing, simplified the judgement structure, and concentrated on physical objects and actions. He adhered to a moral code that emphasized backbone under pressure, and his protagonists were strong, silent men who often dealt awkwardly with women. The Dominicus Besides Rises and A Farewell to Arms are by and large considered his best novels; he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

In addition to fiction, the 1920s were a rich period for drama. There had not been an important American dramatist until Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953) began to write his plays. Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, O'Neill drew upon classical mythology, the Bible, and the new science of psychology to explore inner life. He wrote frankly about sexual activity and family unit quarrels, merely his preoccupation was with the individual'due south search for identity. One of his greatest works is Long Twenty-four hour period'southward Journey Into Night, a harrowing drama, small in scale but large in theme, based largely on his ain family unit.

Some other strikingly original American playwright was Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), who expressed his southern heritage in poetic yet sensational plays, usually nigh a sensitive woman trapped in a brutish environment. Several of his plays have been made into films, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Can Roof.

V years before Hemingway, another American novelist had won the Nobel Prize: William Faulkner (1897-1962). Faulkner managed to cover an enormous range of humanity in Yoknapatawpha, a Mississippi county of his own invention. He recorded his characters' seemingly unedited ramblings in order to represent their inner states -- a technique chosen "stream of consciousness." (In fact, these passages are carefully crafted, and their seeming randomness is an illusion.) He also jumbled time sequences to prove how the past -- especially the slave-holding era of the South -- endures in the present. Among his slap-up works are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, Become Downwards, Moses, and The Unvanquished.

Faulkner was role of a southern literary renaissance that as well included such figures as Truman Capote (1924-1984) and Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Although Capote wrote short stories and novels, fiction and nonfiction, his masterpiece was In Cold Blood, a factual account of a multiple murder and its backwash, which fused dogged reporting with a novelist's penetrating psychology and crystalline prose. Other practitioners of the "nonfiction novel" take included Norman Mailer (1923- ), who wrote well-nigh an antiwar march on the Pentagon in Armies of the Night, and Tom Wolfe (1931- ), who wrote about American astronauts in The Right Stuff.

Flannery O'Connor was a Catholic -- and thus an outsider in the heavily Protestant South in which she grew upward. Her characters are Protestant fundamentalists obsessed with both God and Satan. She is best known for her tragicomic brusque stories.

The 1920s had seen the rise of an artistic black community in the New York Metropolis neighborhood of Harlem. The flow chosen the Harlem Renaissance produced such gifted poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Countee Cullen (1903-1946), and Claude McKay (1889-1948). The novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1903-1960) combined a gift for storytelling with the study of anthropology to write brilliant stories from the African-American oral tradition. Through such books as the novel Their Optics Were Watching God -- most the life and marriages of a light-skinned African-American woman -- Hurston influenced a later generation of black women novelists.

Later on World War II, a new receptivity to diverse voices brought black writers into the mainstream of American literature. James Baldwin (1924-1987) expressed his disdain for racism and his commemoration of sexuality in Giovanni's Room. In Invisible Homo, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) linked the plight of African Americans, whose race can return them all but invisible to the majority white culture, with the larger theme of the human being search for identity in the modernistic globe.

In the 1950s the West Declension spawned a literary movement, the verse and fiction of the "Crush Generation," a proper noun that referred simultaneously to the rhythm of jazz music, to a sense that postal service-war society was worn out, and to an interest in new forms of experience through drugs, alcohol, and Eastern mysticism. Poet Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) set the tone of social protest and visionary ecstasy in "Howl," a Whitmanesque work that begins with this powerful line: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed past madness...." Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) celebrated the Beats' carefree, hedonistic life-way in his episodic novel On the Road.

From Irving and Hawthorne to the present day, the short story has been a favorite American form. 1 of its 20th-century masters was John Cheever (1912-1982), who brought yet another facet of American life into the realm of literature: the flush suburbs that accept grown up around most major cities. Cheever was long associated with The New Yorker, a magazine noted for its wit and sophistication.

Although trend-spotting in literature that is nevertheless being written can be dangerous, the contempo emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been striking. Here are only a few examples. Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko (1948- ) uses colloquial language and traditional stories to fashion haunting, lyrical poems such every bit "In Common cold Tempest Light." Amy Tan (1952- ), of Chinese descent, has described her parents' early struggles in California in The Joy Luck Society. Oscar Hijuelos (1951- ), a author with roots in Republic of cuba, won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Dearest. In a series of novels beginning with A Boy's Own Story, Edmund White (1940- ) has captured the ache and comedy of growing up homosexual in America. Finally, African-American women have produced some of the most powerful fiction of recent decades. I of them, Toni Morrison (1931- ), writer of Beloved and other works, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, simply the 2d American adult female to exist and then honored.

Dorsum to Contents

The evolution of the arts in America has been marked by a tension between two stiff sources of inspiration: European sophistication and domestic originality.

Although trend-spotting in literature that is nonetheless being written can be dangerous, the recent emergence of fiction by members of minority groups has been hit.

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