Odd men in

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Mellers, Wilfrid

Odd men in Mavericks and other traditions in American music Michael Broyles Yales UP (New Haven & London, 2004); ix, 38ypp; £25. ISBN 0 300 10045 °

OVER THEIR MANY CENTURIES the nations of the Old World (Europe) have evolved, despite their disparity of customs and variety of interests, a consistent code of musical grammar, amounting to regulations to how music may be intelligibly notated. The New World (the United States) inherited the European code without having contributed to its creation: a fact that had consequences in the ways in which American musics evolved in relation to those of Europe. Given the dearth of established traditions in the land of the common man, the most 'representative ' American composers have paradoxically tended to be odd men out; and Michael Broyles has had the bright idea of telling the story of American music , and collaterally of America itself, by way of the lives and works of these outsiders, or mavericks.

The word maverick originally meant a Texan who owned but did not brand, as he was legally supposed to, his cattle. This suggests that the maverick state is not only unruly but might also be unreal. Consider, for instance, the earliest composer Broyles discusses in depth, William Billings: who lived in New England through the second half of the 18th century, from 1746 to 1800: a shambling, ungainly man who reverenced a puritanical God and was a maverick by default since, while having no musical training, he picked up European hymnbook harmony by ear, and in replicating it ungrammatically made a music that sturdy New England folk enjoyed singing, revelling in rather than deploring its primitivism. Billings's technical gaucherie was also his honesty; and he lived up to his prescription that 'every man should be his own Carver'.

This works only if 'every man' has sparks of talent or even genius such as Billings displays in his exclusively vocal music, made for friends and compatriots to sing as holy acts of praise. He was a manual worker (a tanner) who lived and breathed new music in a new world: an American naïf in that his art was, as Broyles puts it, 'an overflow of wonder, energy, and released delight'. It's as though he were experiencing music for the first time, as in a sense he was; the sensation is enlivening enough to justify apparently interminable stretches of common triads in root position, often lasting for five minutes without rising to a single modulation, let alone a climax. Such music reflects the positivism of the American New Man, who, as Crèvecoeur put it, 'has passed from servile dependence, penury, and useless labour to toil of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.' So art and commerce met.

There is nothing in the least sanctimonious and little that seems puritanical in Billings's jolly hymnody, which can still awaken in us a sense of dawns in a new found land. Yet although Billings was never religiose, the fact that his merry music is dedicated to his God seems to have kept it pristine: whereas the work of the earliest secular composer Broyles examines is mainly of documentary interest. Anthony Heinrich, of Austrian descent, started out as a Bostonian business-man in the first decade of the u;th century, hoping to live by exporting Bohemian glassware to America's greedy markets. This and other business ventures failed; and Heinrich may well have been the first American consciously to turn to music as a means of making his fortune. Not lacking in self-confidence, he was pleased to be styled 'the Beethoven of America', though his aspirations were hardly Beethovenian. He rather had an eye and ear for role-playing, living in a picturesque log-cabin whilst churning out more that 350 compositions, some of them on a grand scale, deliberately exploiting pretentiously patriotic themes. Broyles admits that Heinrich's Often ornate and difficult' music doesn't come off in the way that Billings's inspired amateurism did. From being a log-cabin man extolling les belles sauvages - the Red Indians who had once roamed the American forests - Heinrich became a grandiloquent symphonic composer in high romantic style, albeit with a technique hopelessly inadequate to his ambitions. Understandably Broyles's account of him is sociologically fascinating but musically unrewarding. Heinrich's public marvelled at and honoured him, but history has mislaid him; he is unlikely to be redeemed.

BUT the next composer Broyles tackles, Charles Ives (1874-1954) is no longer a curiosity of American history, if ever he was such: but rather the most completely representative American composer conceivable in that he was both a highly successful business-man fired by noble motivations as well as by a down-to-earth business sense, and a deliberately amateur composer whose genius has established him unassailably as the 'greatest American Composer' thus far.

There is by now a small library of books about Ives, exploring his re-creation of 19th-century (especially Beethovenian) traditions in combination with startling innovations that testify to his awareness of America's interestingly embryonic state and also to the acuteness of his ear. Possibly because Ives's achievement has been so deeply studied, Broyles devotes less space to him than he allots to several lesser composers. It's a shade misleading that Broyles brackets Ives with Leo Ornstein, an American composer of Russian extraction whose experimental maverickism still intrigues us without his remotely approaching Ives's human breadth and humane depth - or for that matter his assured range from the simplest song to the alarming complexities of the Fourth Symphony. Ives was a maverick in his appetite for experience but a great artist in his marshalling of the materials of music, garnered impartially from the European tradition from Bach to Brahms, and from then current American hymnody, parlour music, ragtime and jazz.