Voices in the Wilderness.(Books)

Voices in the Wilderness

6 American Neoromantic Composers

by Walter Simmons

Scarecrow Press, 419 pages, $70

Walter Simmons's argument in this book, the first of a projected series from Scarecrow Press on 20th Century traditionalists, is that the modernist and avant-garde trends, though they get most of the attention from the academic musicologists who write music history, are only one stream--and not necessarily the most significant one--in modern American music. Composers who stayed closer to classic tonality and form not only wrote much that pleased (and still pleases) large concert audiences; they produced an imposing and valuable body of work "comparable in expressive power, individuality, and craftsmanship to the revered masters of the past".

Voices in the Wilderness deals with six composers born from 1880 to 1930 that for Simmons epitomize neoromanticism: Ernest Bloch, Howard Hanson, Vittorio Giannini, Paul Creston, Samuel Barber, and Nicolas Flagello. These men wrote music "primarily concerned with the evocation of mood, the depiction of drama--either abstract or referential--and the expression of emotion--personal, subjective emotion, in particular". Their ideal, as conservative composers who embraced the legacy of such European late romantic predecessors as Richard Strauss, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Sibelius, and Ravel, was to join the expression of mood, drama, and personal emotion to the classical goals of "formal coherence, developmental rigor, and structural economy".

Despite their conservatism, however, the American neoromantics weren't simply retreads of their predecessors. Their music tended to be more economical and disciplined, more driving and at times asymmetrical and unpredictable in rhythm, more adventurous and dissonant in harmony, and less strictly bound to tonal centers. Moreover, the composers Simmons chooses exhibit an "overall seriousness of purpose reflected in works of ambitious scope that attempt to address the fundamental existential and spiritual concerns of humanity. Each reveals an internally coherent psycho-aesthetic point of view, or 'vision', a relatively consistent standard of both workmanship and expressive urgency, and characteristic stylistic features that comprise [sic] a unique compositional 'voice.'"