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Inside This Issue George Handy’s Bloos by Benjamin Bierman Bukharian Jewish Music in Queens by Evan Rapport American Hymn Tune Index by Gayle Sherwood Magee Nine Hours with Jelly Roll Morton, review by Jeff Taylor Alvin Lucier, review by David Grubbs |
Composing Queer Review by Howard Pollack
Marc Blitzstein In The Queer Composition of America’s Sound:
Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (University of
California Press, 2004, $19.95), Nadine Hubbs takes as her springboard the
fact that some composers of the mid-twentieth century associated with echt Americana, notably Thomson and
Copland, were homosexual. Although
this phenomenon has, as Hubbs suggests, ironic implications in the context of
today’s political climate, it operates here as a framework for
scholarly inquiry rather than polemical critique. The book opens with an exploration of the relation between the Thomson-Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts and the homosexuality of its creators — connections discerned as early as Olin Downes’s disdainful review of the premiere, but sympathetically elaborated here. Hubbs notes, for instance, that Maurice Grosser, the opera’s scenarist and Thomson’s lover, “presents the saints in sex-segregated groupings” (p. 28); that “Saints Teresa and Settlement notably bear the initials of [Alice] Toklas and Stein” (p. 30); and that Commère and Compère embody “the culturally ubiquitous and domineering topos of heterosexuality” (p. 47). The author contextualizes such observations with some consideration of the attraction saints and monastic life held for homosexual men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Locating queerness in the music is of course more difficult. After some tentative observations along these lines, including reference to the “muted” eroticism in the music for Saint Teresa, Hubbs turns to the question of Thomson’s influence on Copland’s work of the late 1930s, so that the argument for the creation of a communal gay style becomes somewhat tautological. At the same time, the author brings helpful attention to an unpublished essay of Virgil Thomson written in 1924-1925, “My Jesus, I Love Thee.” This work, by “implicating Baptist hymnals and Christic [queer] erotics in a condemnation of . . . bourgeois materialism in American religion,” has the potential for assisting gay-oriented readings of Thomson’s music, in particular, his use of traditional hymn tunes. Hubbs’s analysis of Four Saints sets the stage for the book’s more encompassing goal, namely, the charting of the “creation of an emblematic ‘American sound’ in concert music” by a “circle of gay composers” that includes not only Copland and Thomson, but Marc Blitzstein, David Diamond, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, and Ned Rorem (p. 4). Chapter 2, “Being Musical: Gender, Sexuality, and Musical Identity in Twentieth-Century America,” summarizes issues of sexuality and gender as they relate to American concert music—as art and as profession—from Ives through Copland. It’s a helpful summary, too, though the author’s claims (by way of the book’s dedicatee, Philip Brett) for music as a special refuge seems exaggerated given the prominence of gays and other scorned minority groups in the other arts. A brief “intermezzo” inquiring into Paul Bowles’s elusive gay identity—which Hubbs intriguingly compares to the character of Michel in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist — follows as a means of exemplifying the differences among the author’s circle of gay composers. The as-yet unpublished memoirs of composer Philip Ramey—a close friend to both Copland and Bowles—should help clarify this aspect of Bowles’s life. In chapter 3, “A French Connection,” Hubbs sets forth her central thesis: that the creation of a national “sound” by the members of her prescribed circle took shape about “an influential definitional axis” involving four principal “themes” defined as follows: “foreign apprenticeship, especially in Paris; studies with Nadia Boulanger; self-conscious affiliation with things French, often in express opposition to things German; and cultivation of a tonal, perhaps neoclassical compositional idiom, usually pursuing clarity and economy” (p. 132). Hubbs seems to spend more time qualifying this argument than making it; but the topic is a thorny one, and Hubb’s caveats and asides are interesting in their own right, whether or not one accepts her central thesis hook, line, and sinker. In the fourth and final chapter, “Queerness, Eruption, Bursting,” Hubbs considers how the academy’s repudiation of this “axis” in the 1950s intersected with that era’s homophobia. In short, the book purports that a group of queer-identified Boulanger students brought American music to a kind of peak in the 1930s and early 1940s, only to have their accomplishments undermined after the Second World War by the ascendency of aggressively dissonant—and, for Hubbs, heterosexual—musical trends, and the concomitant decline of relevancy of, and prestige for, classical music at home. This thesis raises a number of questions and contradictions. Most obviously, as Hubbs well realizes, some heterosexual composers conform to the book’s “definitional axis” more so than do some gay composers, making homosexual orientation neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for the kind of aesthetic orientation outlined here. Similarly, although Hubbs regards such composers as Cowell and Barber as, so to speak, homosexual “others” operating outside the realm of the “tonal Americana,” the ties among these varied gay composers were deeper than suggested here. At the least, Hubbs’s labeling of Cowell as “nontonal” and “experimental” needs some qualification in light of, say, his numerous Hymns and Fuguing Tunes, which, like Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915, seem to fit the problematic term, “tonal Americana,” as well as certain works by Thomson and Copland. And why privilege Thomson and Copland as avatars of an “emblematic ‘American sound’” in the first place? Why not Ives? Gershwin? Ellington? Roy Harris? The answer to some of these conundrums lies partially in the looming presence of Ned Rorem, whom Hubbs mentions and cites more often than anyone else aside from Copland and Thomson. Indeed, Hubbs’s very “definitional axis” admittedly stems from Rorem. Some of the book’s claims made on behalf of Thomson and Bowles also derive from Rorem, whose dialectic also includes a Jewish-gentile one beyond the scope of Hubbs’s immediate concerns, complete with a dig at Blitzstein (p. 69), some resentment towards Copland (“For a gay goy like me he never lifted a finger,” p. 123), and an identification with “the queer goyische flavor” as represented not only by Bowles, but Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote (pp. 110, 235n7). The fact that all of Hubbs’s composers essentially operated outside academia also warrants consideration. How did their independence from the academy influence their artistic decisions? And did they steer clear of academia — or academia steer clear of them — because of their homosexuality? Some future studies, accordingly, might attempt to integrate Hubbs’s perspective with these more socio-economic ones. In the meantime, we have this lively and thought-provoking monograph to build on. Marc Blitzstein (1905-1964) figures only peripherally in The Queer Composition, as he does in most accounts of American music. In his monumental Marc Blitzstein: A Bio-Bibliography (Praeger, 2005, $119.95), Leonard Lehrman notes that Hubbs “does not mention even one of MB’s musical works.” Born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Philadelphia, Blitzstein, a prodigy, studied piano with Alexander Siloti and, like Barber and Menotti, composition with Rosario Scalero, followed by advanced studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Arnold Schoenberg in Berlin. In his early years, he wrote mostly songs and instrumental music, but in the 1930s, he turned primarily to the Broadway stage, taking as his model the work of Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, and Hanns Eisler. For his stage works, which more consistently than Weill explored social issues from a Marxist perspective, he typically wrote not only the music but the texts, which showed a flair for lyrics at once sardonic and moving. Blitzstein enjoyed only two big successes in his lifetime: his agitprop opera, The Cradle Will Rock (1936), and his English adaptation of The Threepenny Opera (1954). Lehrman notes, in fact, that Blitzstein made more money from his lyrics to “Mack the Knife” “than on everything else he ever did put together” (p. 1). But Regina (1949), his operatic adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, has endured, and the time seems ripe for the rehabilitation of some of his other stage works as well. For decades now, Leonard Lehrman — himself a composer of ten operas and six musicals—has indefatigably championed Blitzstein, including editing his work, completing unfinished compositions (notably the opera, Sacco and Vanzetti), and playing and singing the music. This bio-bibliography represents the fulfillment of such lifelong devotion. Lehrman’s book opens with an interesting miscellany, including an exhaustive genealogy and an ample bibliography on Blitzstein’s writer-wife, Eva Goldbeck. What follows is a chronological list of Blitzstein’s works by genre; a chronological list of the composer’s texts to music by others; a list of articles written by Blitzstein; a list of general articles about Blitzstein written both during his lifetime and after his death; a large annotated section devoted to articles and documentation organized by work; a discography and a videography including archival artifacts; and an index of names and organizations. Researchers will want to know that the microfilm reel numbers refer to archival material that resides at the Blitzstein Collection at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. The section devoted to annotations by work (pp. 158-583) constitutes about two-thirds of the volume. The amount and variety of material gathered for each composition is imposing, including books, dissertations, articles, reviews, letters, reports, marginalia, promotional materials, interviews, and performances. The annotations themselves are similarly rich, ranging from translations of excerpts from foreign-language journals to analytical comments about the music. If a document discusses more than one work, separate annotations might be found under each respective work. This naturally leads to considerable back-tracking and contributes to the book’s heft, but eliminates the need for the author to index works. This unusual organization, although somewhat unwieldy, immeasurably assists studies based on individual pieces. To help facilitate this ambitious undertaking, Lehrman resorts to elaborate abbreviations and codes; otherwise, the volume could well have been double the size. The extensive use of abbreviations poses difficulties, but given the amount of material such coding permits, the serious scholar will be glad to make the effort. So many abbreviations must have made proofreading a nightmare, and the volume includes a lengthy list of errata, which itself contains a few typos (Lehrman maintains up-to-date revisions at http://ljlehrman.artists-in-residence.com/MBbio-bibCorrections.html). The book has other limitations, including incomplete citations for scores of entries. But such flaws pale beside the sheer magnitude of this accomplishment, a “life in documents” for which the term, “bio-bibliography” hardly suffices. —Howard Pollack University of
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