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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue I.S.A.M. Matters [1992] by
H.W.H. Mail from Wiley by Richard Crawford Everbest: Remembering H. Wiley Hitchcock by Susan Feder H.W.H., Cowell, and New Music by David Nicholls H.W.H. Reflections by Ellie Hisama and Nancy Hager |
H.W.H.’s Newsletter (1971-92) by Carol J. Oja
Paging through over twenty years of the I.S.A.M. Newsletter, as I have done in recent days, reveals the emergence of American music as a field of scholarly study. It has also turned out to be a journey of self-reflection. From the moment the Institute opened its doors in the fall of 1971, its founder, our own H. Wiley Hitchcock, directed his new venture towards the future. Wiley defined I.S.A.M.’s mission pluralistically, and he gamefully challenged entrenched academic assumptions about race, ethnicity, social class, and geography. His zeal for an all-embracing sweep of American traditions was infectious, and he carved out for himself the roles of entrepreneur and activist. I.S.A.M. quickly became a kind of Bell Labs for a new area of study. Interlocking programs of Junior and Senior Research Fellowships were devised and funded. Monographs started to be published. Conferences took shape. Amidst this activity, the I.S.A.M. Newsletter appeared as a kind of networking hub, striving to bridge an acute “communications gap in our field,” as Wiley articulated it in the first issue. In an era before the Internet, digitized research resources and communication technologies weren’t even a pipe dream. Responses to a questionnaire sent by I.S.A.M. to music departments around the country revealed extraordinary interest in teaching and studying American repertories. Yet the most rudimentary tools—whether editions, bibliographies, or full-fledged scholarly studies—were scarce. That first issue of the Newsletter, then, looked plain and thoroughly pragmatic. Four pages. No photos or jazzy headlines. Simply a sturdy proclamation of an ambitious vision. Wiley’s plans gained traction rapidly, and over the next few years, the Newsletter chronicled an astonishing pace of activity. Funding from the Rockefeller Foundation covered stipends for visiting research fellows. Gilbert Chase, then the reigning scholar of American music, held the first such appointment (1972-73). The next year, Richard Crawford became the second Senior Research Fellow. By the fall of 1974, at the beginning of I.S.A.M.’s fourth year, the Ives Centennial Conference was taking place, and a great deal had been accomplished. The I.S.A.M. Newsletter reported a “Ragtime Jamboree” that brought together the likes of Eubie Blake, William Bolcom, David Jasen, and Eileen Southern. The first monograph appeared (United States Music: Sources of Bibliography and Collective Biography by Richard Jackson). The Charles Ives Society was formed, and Recent Researches in American Music (through A-R Editions) was announced. Simultaneously, I.S.A.M. Newsletters
from this inaugural era made it clear that a culture of research and
performance in American music was expanding around the country. This was a
growth market—a time when idealistic visions yielded long-standing
programs. The Newsletter announced “The Perlis Project” at
Yale, an early stage of Vivian Perlis’s Oral History, American Music. John Kirkpatrick’s edition of
Ives’s Memos appeared.
Eileen Southern’s The Black Perspective in Music started
up. Martin Williams’s recording
set Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz emerged, at the same time
as he was appointed to the Smithsonian’s Division of Performing
Arts. And William Brooks, Neely Bruce,
Deane Root, and members of the American Music Group at the The next two years of the Newsletter, leading up to the U.S. Bicentennial, bore witness to continuing growth in the study of American traditions. New World Records, the iconic set of 100 recordings that chronicled a diverse spectrum of American repertories, was announced in a lead article in May 1975, and the American Musicological Society began supporting an edition of the music of William Billings, prompting a wry comment in that same issue: “[This] is a welcome change from the lack of American orientation in the Society’s publications in the past.” During that period, a string of other major initiatives appeared, including the formation by Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer of “Continuum,” a performance series in New York dedicated to new American music, and the inception of “A Bibliography of Works by and about Women in American Music” by Adrienne Fried Block and Carol Neuls-Bates, with funding from the NEH. During the Bicentennial, the Newsletter chronicled every American event at the AMS conference, as though marveling at a remarkable phenomenon (November 1976). This conference included the first panel ever devoted to women composers, chaired by Judith Tick. Equally as exceptional, the AMS’s prestigious Kinkeldey Prize went to two Americanists in a row: Vivian Perlis in 1975, then Richard Crawford and David McKay in 1976. Meanwhile, the Newsletter grew from four to six pages (May 1973), then eight (Fall 1975). It gained a new masthead designed by Roland Hoover (husband of the Smithsonian’s Cynthia Hoover), which included a droll epigram: “‘Truth is precious, and should be used sparingly’—Mark Twain.” That was the fall of 1976. By the next issue, the size reached twelve pages (May 1977), then fourteen (November 1980). The current length of sixteen pages was set in May 1981. Perhaps most important of all, the late Rita Mead had been appointed as Research Assistant in the fall of 1973, and a collaborative synergy developed between her and Wiley. Not only did the Newsletters get longer but they became more stylish. Like the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town,” which in those days delivered clever but unsigned vignettes, the early Newsletters did not attribute authorship. But then Wiley and Rita wrote the whole thing. Headlines, which had been conventionally used from the beginning, became a site for playful creativity after Rita arrived. Integrated nests of headlines became an I.S.A.M. specialty, such as this cluster in May 1977, for which each line introduced a paragraph or two of prose on a divergent array of topics: News and Information . . . . . . . . about People . . . Playing Studying Speaking Teaching Publishing And winning awards . . . and Places Here There And everywhere All this happened before my time. I first met Wiley in December
1977—not long after I.S.A.M. had turned six—when I attended his
conference on “The Phonograph in Our Musical Life.” I was a newly-registered student at the In November 1979, I made my debut in the Newsletter
in excerpts from a public interview with Aaron Copland and Minna Lederman
Daniel, and this began a long and gratifying association with the
publication. A year later, failing
health forced the talented Rita Mead to retire, and I joined Wiley as
Research Assistant of I.S.A.M. and Associate Editor of the Newsletter. Over the next seventeen years, I remained
linked to I.S.A.M. and its publications in various capacities, even while
moving on to teach at Producing the Newsletter with Wiley was loads of fun yet demanding, a high-pressured blast. Our collaboration provided me with a strong model of efficient work habits, for Wiley wrote with enviable ease and discipline. In the early 1980s, when most folks still crafted prose with pen and paper, Wiley would often return from lunch during Newsletter season and sit down to write. There were few strike-overs. The prose simply flowed, and it had a distinctive style: elegant, compact (even synoptic), punctuated with wit. Only adjectives that made their point with laser-beam precision were permitted. I.S.A.M. could easily have posted a banner over its door bearing Strunk and White’s dictum, “Omit needless words.” Learning to shape the Newsletter’s
nuggets presented a challenge. But I
loved it. This was an opportunity to
pose as a journalist, to keep up with the newest books and
recordings—to cut loose! Feature
essays by guest authors (or as Wiley put it, “the centerfold”)
entered the scene in May 1978 and they broadened the coverage to include not
only news and reviews but also articles on broad-ranging topics. This eclectic range was not just a founding
principle of I.S.A.M., but one which held firm over time. Wiley’s only noticeable predilection
had to do with contemporary composers.
He avidly kept up with new music, as did Rita and I. Milton Babbitt, Aaron Copland, Elliott
Carter, Ross Lee Finney, Roy Harris, Charles Ives, Ned Rorem, Nicolas
Slonimsky, Virgil Thomson, and William Schuman all were featured in the Newsletter,
as did more experimental figures like Robert Ashley, John Cage, Henry Cowell,
Noah Creshevsky, Conrad Cummings, Charles Dodge, Peter Garland, Malcolm
Goldstein, Lou Harrison, Meredith Monk, Conlon Nancarrow, Pauline Oliveros,
and Roger Reynolds. And then there were the columns, including Mark
Tucker’s “Behind the Beat” on jazz and popular music, which
began in 1982, and Charles Wolfe’s “Country and Gospel
Notes,” which appeared six years later. In fact, Mark’s
contributions deserve to be singled out, for they extended far beyond that
column. His byline first appeared in
November 1981 with “The Wolverines Go for SPAM,” an article about
a student-led American-music initiative at the In closing, I want to share a couple of Newsletter
items that were especially delectable. Wiley enjoyed locating odd bits of
Americana, and in the issue of May 1981, he got a huge kick out of
reproducing photos from Thaddeus Wronski’s The Singer and His Art,
Including Articles on Anatomy and Vocal Hygiene (New York: D. Appleton,
1921). With bizarre facial
contortions, Wronski illustrated the physical posture needed for a singer to
convey “horror” or “hypocrisy” or
“arrogance.” Belly laughs
rolled regularly out of Wiley’s office as that issue came together. Yet he also took Wronski seriously, tracking
down his path from We also got a kick out of compiling a “centerfold” titled “American Musicians at Home on the Range,” with favorite recipes of American musicians (May 1984). This included John Cage’s “Baked Rutabaga,” Louis Armstrong’s “Red Beans and Rice,” Colin McPhee’s “Nasi goreng,” Sidney Cowell’s “Simply Extraordinary/Extraordinarily Simple Green Beans,” and “The Sonneck Society Elixir: Benjamin Franklin’s Orange Shrub Punch.” Singer-songwriter Ned Sublette, who happened to be free-lancing as I.S.A.M.’s typesetter at the time, contributed the final recipe, “Elvis Presley’s Judgment Day Pancakes.” It called for garnishing the pancakes with “some red pills, some blue pills, some black pills, some yellow pills, and some white pills”—a bit of grisly humor about Presley’s premature death seven years earlier, spurred by addiction. How many publications emanating from a distinguished research institute would include that? Wiley adored his Newsletter and took great pride in it. As with all of I.S.A.M.’s endeavors, he anchored it in collaborative exchange and a strong sense of community. His colleagues and students were featured, and as the years passed, their bylines appeared with increasing frequency. Lively imaginations had a chance to take flight, and in the process, a “communications gap” disappeared. — ISAM home Who we
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