The Great American Symphony

When Dvorak’s New World Symphony debuted in New York, it was hailed as a masterpiece, the American symphony that American composers had tried, and failed, to produce. 

Which American composers would those be? Douglas Shadle’s Orchestrating the Nation answers the question. It’s a question contemporary symphony-goers need answered too. As the David Allen puts it in his NYTBR review, “Subscribers to major orchestras today could go a lifetime without hearing the hundred or so symphonies that Mr. Shadle tabulates were written by 50 or so composers ‘born or living in’ the United States from 1800 to 1900.”

During that period, there was ongoing experimentation to forge an American way in music: “Americans saw the symphony as a model of republicanism, of the individual’s place in the whole, and believed that it would become ‘the cornerstone of an authentically national musical culture.’ They were enmeshed in a trans-Atlantic culture of musical debate about its form: programmatic or absolute, patriotic or universal, classicist or Wagnerian.”

Allen thinks that the dominance of German music is a “victory for Teutonic cultural power,” and argues that the forgotten American music is worth reviving for its own musical sake’ At the time of its first performance John Knowles Paine’s First Symphony was regarded “as the fulfillment of America’s destiny as the future home of the symphony. One of those works has been performed hundreds of times by the New York Philharmonic, the other just four times. Both of Paine’s symphonies are as enjoyable as many of the late-Romantic symphonies heard more often.

Paine didn’t get much play because of American cultural insecurity, expressed in Europhilia: “Paine, who led Harvard’s music department, and less prominent composers gained so little purchase because writers, conductors and orchestral musicians ‘maintained inhospitable attitudes’ toward American music ‘before it had a chance to thrive.’ Those in power saw the constant playing of established and not-so-established European composers as the path toward cultural enlightenment..” Thus, “European music of dubious quality was treated with reverence, but critics measured American composers on a forbidding scale,” comparing American composers (unfavorably, of course) to Beethoven.