Benjamin Cutter

On "would be" American Composers

It was the writer's privilege some years ago to converse with a past master in the art of musical instruction as the students thronged through the corridors of a great school of music. A chance remark became, as is often the case, a germ for thought; to which this present paper owes its writing. "Who knows but some Schubert is now walking this corridor!".

This idea fastened itself then in the mind of the writer; and as the years passed by, bringing to him a close professional acquaintance with the subject itself, it possessed him more and more, and to-day it seems to him very probably that some Schubert is walking our streets, is taking part in our musical lives, and yet has not come to his rights through conditions beyond his power to control - some undiscovered genius that needed only the right impulse at the right time and in the right way to blossom out into a gift whose outgivings would gladden the hearts of future generations.

Musical Talents Taken in Time

That this is so suggests a fault somewhere in our scheme of education, or a possible misuse of opportunity, or a failure to apprehend the needs of that youth whose peculiar gifts fit him for musical composition. At any rate, in comparing the musical training of the your in America with that of the youth abroad, the first thing that appeals to one is the fact that the boy abroad is ready to finish his education when the American boy is beginning his theoretical studies. Abroad, a musical gift, a pronounced gift, is a thing that is heeded; to state it in an un-ideal way, it is a business proposition; the boy may become a composer, or that enviable thing, a conductor of operas, of concerts; a money-earning notability. This gifted boy - say in some German city - may be fortunate enough to have a wise parent, who places him at a very early age in proper hands or takes the child to an authority and abides by his counsel; the outcome is that while this child is in the lower or middle grade schools he has already begun to study the piano and possibly the violin and, what is more to our point, to study harmony.

Little by little the thing grows. In his twelfth or thirteenth year, let us assume, he begins the study of counterpoint, and at the same time the composition of little pieces. It is very likely that some abatement in the stress of the regular school work is arranged fork, provision being made for further study in later years, when the special musical training shall have been completed. By his fourteenth year this boy writes music with the ease and dispatch that a young school girl shows in her epistolary effusions; but with this notable difference - that his productions show coherency, order, design, the result of his regular training in giving to his thoughts both structure an beauty.

Such a boy need be no over-strung delicate child. History shows us quite the reverse. History shows us that these acquirements, having been won little by little, have come to him naturally and without any extraordinary effort. In his seventeenth year, or in his eighteenth, the hand of this youth is penning symphonies. Postpone the time of beginning two years or so - to eleven or twelve - and the outcome is about the same. The name of Richard Strauss, who has stirred modern music so deeply, is the name of the one who experience fits the above statement.

American Students Commence Too Late

Look about, now, in our American musical life and find, if you can, the counterpart of this. The American boy, and the American girl - for the American girl is to be reckoned with - both begin too late. And they both begin too late not because of their own fault, but because their parents, while providing for other kinds of education, have not understood what a musical education demands, and have failed to heed the signs that one of these gifted children may possibly show.

American parents cannot understand, for instance, what makes a certain child so "queer." With no musical past of their own to speak of, unacquainted with the conditions that would otherwise render them knowing and discerning, they gaze on a boy who is distracted and absent, poor in his school, ever scribbling tunes, moody, irritable, as a conundrum. Of the creative impulse that is striving within him and that finds perhaps a vent in arrangements of rag-time pieces, marches and little songs - the reflexes of what he has already heard - they have no conception. They may encourage him in practicing in this lower field of our art, but they are surely unaware that rightly led, this holy impulse would soon be carried out and beyond the vulgarity of rag-time music into the things that are better and higher, and that this queer boy, poor in school though not necessarily poor in wit, the object of the scorn of his successful brother scholars with their mater-of-fact minds moving in the inherited channels of mathematics and the humanities, that this same boy may have in him the germs of genius and undoubtedly possesses a gift that developed, will lift him, other things being equal, to a high place in his calling. They are unaware that such a boy, repressed, discouraged, may pass, perforce, without interest through his school course, and with a sense of derailment go through life, off his rightful track, out of his sphere, and rankling and sore at heart. As the years go by the creative impulse will become extinct. In its place will flow a wellspring of sorrow and bitterness that will surge up afresh whenever the compositions of this or that more favored one are heard.

Obstructions in America

This is no imaginary picture. To point to those who serve as subjects for it would be easy. In New England, where the writer passed his boyhood, the distrust of a musician's career, due to religious belief and ideas, has had its part to play. Again, the sheer inability of parents to understand an abnormal child. Again, the business sense of a parent = "too little money in music."

The American youth, when he comes to study, comes late, generally too late. His brain cells are no longer in their early plasticity and impressibility. He learns; but it takes him long to learn, longer than it would have taken some years earlier, because the channels of thought are now formed slowly. When he should be writing in the larger forms, handling an orchestra, dealing in its many colored tones, he is painfully and slowly wrestling with that part of counterpoint that his more favored brother abroad learned with comparative ease four years earlier.

Let us be understood. Certain men have begun late and have even reached greatness. Witness Tschaikowsky who began when twenty-one; witness Schumann. But they seem to have paid for it, Schumann never reaching the highest point in form and Tshaikowsky becoming apparently a neurotic, as the hysteria of his music betrays. The success of these men does not invalidate our contention; that the youth of gifts who begins late so exhausts himself in the effort to acquire technical proficiency that his Muse generally fails him when it should really first begin to sing. Add to this the stress of starting in a profession, the burden of a family that a young man may incur, and we have more reason why so many young Americans of gifts have after a time of promise, even unusual promise, fallen back into the rut of earning a living and have allowed their gift to remain hidden, unused.

The Road To Mastery

The road to mastery in musical composition is a long one. To go through it worthily means to possess an intellect of no mean order. The requirements in the way of concentration, imagination and unflagging doing, are fully equal to those made by the higher mathematics. But taken early and carried along sensibly, the boy of gifts, of whom alone we write, learns his harmony in two or three years' time, learns to handle chords, to harmonize tones, to modulate. It is very likely that his gift prompts him to strike out on his own account and to write little pieces or to arrange for orchestra. He next takes up counterpoint, learning the so useful art of placing one melody against another, without which all choral composition is defunct, and meanwhile is carried through the so-called small forms for piano, piano and other instruments, voice. This counterpoint, this long and severe part of the course, is where the American is at his weakest, where he becomes exhausted, and where, when one reaches down to the last analysis the great men of all time have been greatest - Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Strauss. In this pitting of one part against the other, this interweaving of many voices to which modern music owes so much of its charm and which is yet only a phase of technique, wholly subordinate to beauty of melody - the life of all music - in this phase of his art the young American is too little schooled. Instrumentation, the art of writing for the orchestra, and the practice of the larger forms - overture, opera, symphony - conclude the course.

The Opportunity of the American Boy

It is safe to say that the American boy is the equal of that German or that French boy who is given this training and who stands it because the course of work is pursued so leisurely and so rationally. Why the young American has not done as much as his transatlantic brothers may be apparent to the reader; it is not due altogether to a lack of gifts. In the next two decades the growth of musical life in this country seems bound to produce orchestral bodies in our larger towns and cities and that great thing in the musical culture of a race, the good opera house. To cater to these needs, and to the needs of American home music, should be the future of the young American composer.

The Etude Magazine November 1912