Europe Nationalism in Music and the United States
The Legacy Of Nationalism And The Special Case Of The United States
Nationalism must be at least partly blamed for the Holocaust and other instances of "ethnic cleansing" in the twentieth century, given that nationalism's intense focus on defining an authenticating group identity entailed a corollary focus on what that group was not. The most notorious early instance of this in musical discourse was Wagner's essay Das Judentum in der Musik (1850; rev. 1869), which helped give nationalism a racialized profile it has never lost.
Nationalism has often moved in quite another direction in the United States, which, according to the European model, would have had either to elevate the American Indian as the core part of its authenticating past or to foster an alternative mythology of a "virgin" land settled by Europeans, transformed by their new setting. A third alternative, which has helped absorb the contradictions between the first two, has been to claim some form of "melting pot" nationalist basis; such was Dvorák's approach in his "New World" Symphony, op. 95 (1893), blending "Negro" melodies (spirituals), Indianist idioms, and a European-based style, in a recipe later taken up by William Grant Still (1895–1978) in his blues-based Afro-American Symphony (1930), for example. More central exemplars of American nationalist music are the often nostalgic "New England" idiom of early modernist Charles Ives (1874–1954), the jazz-based concert idiom of George Gershwin (1898–1937), and the "wide-open spaces" idiom of Aaron Copland (1900–1990), which was often allied with an emergent American style of balletic dance. Departing from these "high art" traditions, many have chosen to locate America's most distinctive musical profile within popular music, either within jazz ("America's classical music") or song, which has, historically, absorbed a wide number of influences. In terms of musical nationalism, perhaps the most fully realized American tradition—based on popular song styles and a variety of mostly assimilationist plots—is that of the American musical, both for the stage and in films.
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Raymond Knapp
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