A Question About The Impressionists and America

[Lat-Literal]

Last night, in the second episode of ITV's documentary series "Great Art", we were told the story of how it was the brave decision of 19th-century Parisian art collector Paul Durand-Ruel to back these radical artists and then, on the verge of bankruptcy, to exhibit them in New York in 1886 that created impressionism as we know it. Thanks to his sales to enlightened wealthy Americans that subsequently filled American galleries with Impressionist masterworks Durand-Ruel kept impressionism alive at a time when it faced complete failure. In fact, that is an understatement. The early reception given to these artists by the French and other Europeans - except perhaps in London - had been in the form of laughing out loud.

https://www.itv.com/presscentre/ep2week2/great-art

Which begs the question why it was that, Griffes and a few others aside, the US did not produce many impressionists in music. Was it that the French classical composers did not have promotion there in the way that was given to the visual artists by Durand-Ruel? Or is that they were well known in the US but not perceived as being sufficiently influential to spark creativity along similar lines by many American composers? In theory, there is no reason why there should have been a difference here between the visual arts and music. For once the Americans had had an opportunity to see the paintings it was the newness of the country which enabled its citizens to be open minded. That would or should have applied to music too.

[richardfinegold]

Not only did Americans lag behind in appreciating Impressionist Music, they lagged behind in producing any Music. We didn’t produce any Composer of stature until the 1930s when Gershwin and Copland-sons of Russian Jewish emigrants at that—became active. Dvorak tried to jump start a musical tradition when he taught here, and several worthy composers and works resulted, but none with any great permenance.
There was a very distinct class bias at work here. Quite a lot of European Concert Music has roots in folk music, however disguised those roots may be in the end product. Here, folk music was the music of Blacks, Native Americans, and Appalachia, three groups who were chronically marginalized by the educated Bourgeoise of this Country. It isn’t the first irony in “the land of the free” that we could erect a class based caste system (with respect to Music) to match any Class based system of the Old World.
Any way, that’s my take on it. I have no real research to support it, just a General Interest in U.S. History and the History Of Classical Music in general

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Did the Americans produce "many Impressionists in painting", Lats? Compared with achievements in literature in the US in the Nineteenth Century, there was no comparable originality in the other Arts until the Twentieth Century.

As far as Music is concerned, the experience of Ives gives an indication of why this might have been so - the conservative academic and cultural dependence in genteel society. If Ives' First Symphony (about as "radical" as Dvorak) could evoke ridicule from both his mentor at Yale, the composer Horatio Parker for its frequent modulations*, and from the first conductor Walter Damrosch, then what chance his more independent ideas? Academic Music Education in the US was geared towards the German Classics - Bach, Mozart, Brahms - and much of the work of these teachers and their pupils are very much "impressionistic" of a different type than you mean, Lats - Parker does an impression of Dvorak on the lines of the drunk bloke in the pub "doing" Tommy Cooper.

Pace rfg, there were composers of significance in the US before 1930 - Ives the most important of them, but also Griffes, Beech, Ruggles, MacDowell, Foster, and Joplin - but it's interesting that those who made the greatest international admiration only emerged much later when new generations of European composers felt that those composers had done similar things in their own work to what the younger composers were doing in theirs. And the independent developments in US Folk/Popular Musics was, as he says, very much an underculture - it isn't until Ragtime and Jass recordings reach Europe during the War years that such Musics become chic amongst the younger generations of that genteel class which patronised orchestras and "Serious Music".

Serious interest in Modern Music only started with the arrival of figures like Stokowski (especially given the huge international profile he brought to the Philadelphia Orchestra), Koussevitski, and Slominsky - and the tuition of American composers in France (together with a rejection of German-based Music education bias in the post-War period - many of the German conductors of US orchestras were replaced by men from the Allied countries). But this happened in the 'Twenties, and by then Impressionism was the work of the older generation, and Jazz was actually American Music that was, for the first time in history, impressing and influencing European composers.

And, of course, visual Art is more readily "available" to people than is Music: the viewer is "in control" of their response to a painting or sculpture - they can take five seconds or five hours looking at a work; they can control the physical distance between the work and themselves; they decide which areas of the canvass to move their sight across; they can go away from it and return after having a coffee, or a week later; they can see an individual work in context - surrounded by other works; and they are experiencing the Artist's work itself directly - not through the filter of an intermediary performer's "interpretation". Visual Art tends to make a more immediate - <ahem> - impression than Music, because it doesn't need time in the same way: sympathetic listeners at a concert can't ask the performers to go back a couple of bars and play that bit again - and the next performance of an unrecorded work might never occur again.

So - a cocktail of elements involved: class (and race) prejudice, early insecurity succeeded by the realization that the European "parent" culture(s) had nearly destroyed themselves - and would have done so without American help - in the First World War. The culture needed time to grow. And, by the time it had done so sufficiently, Impressionism was passé.


(*This might be an exaggeration: Ives' later recollections, when it appears that he might already have been suffering from dementia, are a marked contrast with his youthful favourable - and grateful - reports of Parker's teaching and encouragement in his letters to his parents. Nonetheless, the conservative, strictly academic teaching at US universities - where Music wasn't officially an Academic course until Ives' time there - is fact, testified by these Ives letters, and for which he was, at the time, grateful. No stricter, certainly, than what Bruckner taught in his University teaching - if probably less insightful. )

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Did the Americans produce "many Impressionists in painting", Lats?

<doh><doh><doh><doh><doh>!!!!

Whistler !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

... the painter who made made more of an imp ... act on Debussy than any of the French painters!!!!

Imbecile! Idiot! Fool! Moron! Cretin! Mountebank! Twit! Slackwit! Know-nowt!

[richardfinegold]

<doh><doh><doh><doh><doh>!!!!

Whistler !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

... the painter who made made more of an imp ... act on Debussy than any of the French painters!!!!

Imbecile! Idiot! Fool! Moron! Cretin! Mountebank! Twit! Slackwit! Know-nowt!

Mary Cassat. And American Painters were prominent, primarily in Europe, before Impressionism, such as John Singer Sargent and Grant Wood

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Mary Cassat. And American Painters were prominent, primarily in Europe, before Impressionism, such as John Singer Sargent and Grant Wood

Mary Cassatt - but I'm still really appalled that I could have forgotten so famous a name as Whistler's! And I think that Sargent (a wonderful painter) should also be included amongst the "Impressionist- influenced" in the way that Lat's OP indicates. That "living and working in Europe" aspect is fascinating - and continues with James, Eliot, Pound, Stein well into the 20th Century. By contrast, at the end of the thirties, all the Great Names of European composing - Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Varese, Martinu -
were living and working in the US, some even becoming American citizens: it's a microcosm of the general "thrust" of Western History in the 20th Century.

I don't think that Grant Wood could be described as "before Impressionism", though - given that he was born twenty years after the first Impressionist Exhibition?

[Serial_Apologist]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Isn't that the score to "En blanc et noir"???

Thinking about musical impressionism, apart from Griffes (apparently pronounced Griffies, for reasons I've never fathomed), whose music tbh more recalls Rachmaninov to me than Debussy, Charles Ives's orchestral music and many of his songs contain gorgeously atmospheric passages of what I for one can only call impressionistic music. The setting within which "Watchmen, Tellers of the Night" is couched in the Fourth Symphony, and the, iimss, visionary last movement with its wordless chorus, more than suggests knowledge of Debussy's "Sirènes", and possibly, even, of Holst's "Neptune", composed presumably earlier, though dating is a problem with this great work. I've never gone along with those who consider Ives's harmonic sense untutored and "primitive", though it may be admitted that his speed of working would surely have been a factor in the lack of clear realisation, or indications to that end, in his scores.

After Ives and Griffes, impressionistic elements become harder to find in American music composed in Euroclassical tenets: as over here, the "idioms" were taken up by America's film and documentary composers, but the strongest harmonic imprints are to be found in US jazz from the 1920s on - Bix Beiderbecke's use of unresolved dominant sevenths, Earl Hines's of whole tone scale washes, Duke Ellington's, Charles Mingus's and, of course, Gil Evans's rich harmonisations and wonderfully blended wood wind and brass sonorities, the pianistic imagination of Bill Evans that so impressed Miles Davis. Then there's the modalism McCoy Tyner adapted from his leader John Coltrane that so often betrays Debussyian links in the harmonic usage - all those unresolved parallel chorded intros in his numerous solo versions of the latter's "Naima". Much to the chagrin I think of several posters to our Jazz Board, who think any manifestations of pastoralism evocative of non-existent pasts dreamed up for nostalgia, the impressionist aesthetic lives on in the jazz piano mainstream, arguably to an historically over-extended degree (!) possibly lending authority to how pianists in European jazz, especially here! have drawn on our own pastoral post impressionist composers like John Ireland to convey previously little expressed moods in jazz, an essentially urban outlooking music.

[Lat-Literal]

Thank you for all these excellent posts which I think in combination successfully answer my question. The only part on which I am wobbling slightly is the conservative outlook for that does not seem to have been there in the reactions to the visual impressionists. If this was the New World, it appears that it was in sight rather than sound.

I do think Griffes was an impressionist. When it comes to the New England School, it was said that Chadwick when he stayed in France was influenced by the emerging impressionist movement but I don't hear it in his work. MacDowell - not too sure. He was at the very least evocative. But I'd argue that the music of Amy Beach did have impressionist elements. For better or worse, the Indianists were essentially romantics. To look a little earlier, Gottschalk is interesting in the way in which he had a notion of exotica, especially in the titles of his work. But to describe him as an ahead-of-his-time trailblazer would not be right. So then it mainly goes to the much later Ives - and, yes, all of the above.

[richardfinegold]

I don't think that Grant Wood could be described as "before Impressionism", though - given that he was born twenty years after the first Impressionist Exhibition?

Wood was reputed to have issues with tardiness....

[Serial_Apologist]

Thank you for all these excellent posts which I think in combination successfully answer my question. The only part on which I am wobbling slightly is the conservative outlook for that does not seem to have been there in the reactions to the visual impressionists. If this was the New World, it appears that it was in sight rather than sound.

I do think Griffes was an impressionist. When it comes to the New England School, it was said that Chadwick when he stayed in France was influenced by the emerging impressionist movement but I don't hear it in his work. MacDowell - not too sure. He was at the very least evocative. But I'd argue that the music of Amy Beach did have impressionist elements. For better or worse, the Indianists were essentially romantics. To look a little earlier, Gottschalk is interesting in the way in which he had a notion of exotica, especially in the titles of his work. But to describe him as an ahead-of-his-time trailblazer would not be right. So then it mainly goes to the much later Ives - and, yes, all of the above.

But exoticism and romanticism predate impressionism, which was very much - and here I'll likely get taken to task for not knowing what I'm talking about! - about capturing the instant in its richness. Macdowell was a contemporary of Grieg; Gottschalk of Liszt. One is historically gun jumping to consider either to be impressionists, especially given how musical developments have historically lagged behind their equivalents in other arts - the Schoenberg school being the one exception I can think of. Analogous impressionistic devices either invented by Debussy, or extended from earlier practitioners of harmonically enthwarted surprise including Chabrier, Mussorgsky and Satie, for purposes in his case of suspending musical continuity, would immediately be taken up for populist effectiveness by later composers on both sides of the Atlantic, especially those of late romantic stamp. such as Respighi and Bax. Even Ravel's daybreak movement from "Daphnis", sumptuously bedecked in rippling pre-echoes of John Adamsian minimalism, are not truly "impressionistic" inasmuch as they unfold and actually add emphasis to the music's overwhelmingly melodically directed flow, rather than detracting from conventional melodic fulfilment. As with its pictorial inspiration, musical impressionism is a step in the direction of abstraction, of a breaking with continuities greater in degree than the by-that-stage long practised unexpected modulation or failure to round off in the home key by virtue of unfolding moment-by-moment; and it was a development hard to bring off on the large scale. Outwith the French tradition (that few even French composers carried to the degree Debussy did up to "Jeux" and the second book of "Préludes") the few impressionist works I would cite would include "Neptune" from "The Planets" (1916?), John Ireland's piano piece "Island Spell" (1912), and passages from, rather than entire works, including the first two of the 3-movement "Northern Sketches" by Delius (1913) The opening of Respighi's "Fountains of Rome" (1917), those of many Ives orchestral works, and, later, the third movement of Bartok's "Music for Strings, Harp, Celesta and Percussion", and such pieces of abstract neo-impressionism as Ligeti's "Atmospheres", as well as his own very post-Debussyian piano studies. Takemitsu's mature music I would judge directly in the tradition of French impressionism according with my preferred definition of characteristics - which was a nice return of favours, when one considers the debt Debussy and his fellow impressionists in the arts had to the Far East.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Isn't that the score to "En blanc et noir"???

And I agree wholeheartedly about Ives - The Housatonic at Stockbridge, too. (But it's "Watchman, tell us of the night", btw)

Thanks for adding the Jazz details - I was going to mention Ellington, but realized that I wasn't on home territory here (read: "wouldn't be entirely sure of what I'm talking about") and that far better-informed information would come from others.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Wood was reputed to have issues with tardiness....

[greenilex]

Post-Impressionists?

[cloughie]

Did Berlioz pre-empt impressionist music with the 'scenes aux champs' in SF?...and surely there is an impressionist feel to Copland's music from his French training!

[richardfinegold]

Most of what I have heard of early American Composers (most are late 19th/early 20 th Century, rather late in the Countries development) comes from the works contained in the big Mercury reissue boxes, and the occasional radio broadcast. One of our local presenters here likes to program Beach, Griffey’s, Gottschalk, Billings, etc), I stand by my initial comment that until Copland and Gershwin emerged there was no American Concert Music Of lasting value. Ives may have predated the latter two but was unappreciated until a later time.
To amplify my comments about Class, it must be remembered that America is a society Founded on immigration (something that our current idiot in chief isn’t aware of, don’t get me started...). Concert music just isn’t a priority if one is struggling with a farm on the Praire or surviving 80 Hour work weeks in New York sweatshops. It was up to the Protestant New York and Boston Brahmins that were descendants of earlier settlers to promote Concert Music and a local Cultural scene, and until recently they looked to Europe for models. They were not interested in promoting music from Blacks (ragtime, Jazz) Appalachia, klezmer, Irish Folk, etc.
The Concert Music thus created was separated from the folk music of the time, and the effect was like transporting a shrub from one location to another while clipping off the roots. It may look pretty at first in the new location but eventually whithers and dies. The Concert Music here from Composers that were trained in German Academies May make a good initial impression but ultimately lacks substance and for lack of a better word, authenticity. When Composers began to embrace their ‘American-ness’ then worthwhile Music was produced