On the Outside Looking In: Gay Composers Gave America Its Music

By Scott Cantrell

Dallas Morning News - 10 July 2005



Along with the boom of rockets and crackle of firecrackers, the sounds of the Fourth of July include the brassy flourishes and drum-poundings of Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, and the composer's Lincoln Portrait and Billy the Kid Suite.

More than half a century on, and 15 years after Copland's death, these works still define a distinctively American sound.

Rodeo even backs James Garner's growl, "Beef. It's what's for dinner." It's hard to imagine a movie about the American West without music inspired by Copland's wide-open sonorities.

Copland's scores are part of our national mythology. Their wide-eyed clarity and tunefulness radiate working-class idealism and traditional family values.

Ironically, these celebrations of outdoorsy, big-sky Americana, and of WASP home and hearth, were created by a homosexual Jew from Brooklyn. If it took the Czech Antonín Dvorák to interest American composers in the folk music all around them, maybe it took another set of outsiders to define our shared musical identity.

Copland was one of a group of composers who, starting in the 1930s, cultivated a new nationalist  or at least populist modernist  style. And most of them were gay, including Virgil Thomson, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein, David Diamond, Lou Harrison, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein and Ned Rorem. (Though Bernstein married and sired children, he became openly homosexual after his wife's death. Bowles married Jane Auer, but sexually, they went their separate ways.)

By contrast, most of the pricklier modernists, including Charles Ives, Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, were straight.

The gay composers all knew one another and networked extensively. At the height of their collective influence, from the late 1930s to the early '50s, they were a potent force. Through their movie and ballet scores, notably, and knockoffs by others, they helped define in sound what it means to be an American.

"American music didn't have much of a banner to fly until Copland hit it big in the late '30s," says Nadine Hubbs, a University of Michigan professor whose book, The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (University of California Press), explores how these composers, together with certain cultural trends, created those distinctively American sounds.

Her book opens with the delicious irony of a recent U.S. Army promotional recording featuring music by Copland, who, of course, couldn't serve in the Army if he acknowledged his sexuality.

(Copland was pretty discreet about his private life, which included a series of relationships with much younger men, but he didn't hide it.)

But then, as Hubbs points out, the land of the free and home of the brave has long had an uncomfortable relationship with the arts.

Thanks to our Puritan heritage  and a cult of the macho  the arts and their practitioners have often been viewed as suspect if not subversive, effete if not downright unmanly. Real men don't listen to string quartets.

The openly homophobic Ives chided hostile listeners to stand up and take dissonance "like a man."

Indeed, Ives seems to have set up a kind of socio-cultural war between the edgier modernist composers, most of whom were straight, and the "softer" modernists (Copland et al.), most of whom were gay.

The divide wasn't, and isn't, definitive, but it's surprising how easy it is to line up a dichotomy.

From Ives on, the edgier modernists tended to be products of what Dr. Hubbs calls "the great-man and masterwork ideologies of the Germanic musical tradition." And by the 1920s the avatars of Austro-German music were proclaiming that tonality, based on the traditional major and minor scales, was dead.

Arnold Schoenberg and his followers constructed music by mathematical formulas rather than sound. Melody and consonance were replaced by spiky disjunction, harmony by dissonance.

By the middle of the 20th century, Schoenbergian serialism was the heterosexual high road. Mathematical rigor made music respectable to the midcentury cult of scientific progress.

"Experimentalism and dissonance, precisely because they didn't taste so good  they were a more bitter medicine  were seen as more masculine and bold and daring," Hubbs says. "Tonality was feminized."

Copland and Thomson [right], by contrast, sparked a new vogue for studying in France. "Even now," Hubbs says, " 'French' has a connotation of queer, hyper-elegant, sissy." And their pivotal teacher there wasn't a man, but Nadia Boulanger.

While they incorporated American folk tunes and idioms  and, in Copland's case, some late essays in serialism  their compositions took on the clarity and direct appeal of French neoclassicism. And they weren't afraid of prettiness.

If the more aggressive modernists such as Carter and Milton Babbitt were the hunter-gatherers of modern music, Copland and company were the nurturers. If one side of the divide was intellectual, the other was sensual. One camp favored abstract internationalism, the other personalized nationalism. One posited scientific argument; the other cultivated the elegant epigram.

Hubbs tends to interpret this divide as a matter of sexual politics, and that certainly played a role. But she also points out the exceptions, the avant-garde camp including Henry Cowell, who was jailed for sodomy, and John Cage, longtime lover of choreographer Merce Cunningham. The ranks of populist modernists included the heterosexual Roy Harris, Walter Piston and William Schuman. And the development of populist modernism in music had much to do with economic and political developments that get short shrift in the book.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was almost de rigueur for any serious would-be American composer to study in Germany. But during World War I, anti-German passions led to banning even Beethoven from American concert halls. By the 1920s, Paris was the new center of culture  and counterculture.

The Great Depression was another major factor. Copland began his compositional career as a more challenging modernist, but by the late 1930s he sensed a need for more affirming fare. And, savvy operative that he was, he realized that's where the money was.

The introduction of movie soundtracks created a new market for demonstrably American music that sounded up-to-date but unthreatening. So did the burgeoning modern-dance movement: A number of Copland's most enduringly popular scores were created for ballets by Martha Graham, Agnes DeMille and William Loring.

"Classical music has actually played a more important role in modern America than people realize," notes Bard College president and conductor Leon Botstein in an interview on the iclassics.com Web site. (The New York State college's SummerScape Festival, running through August 21, is titled "Copland and His World.")

So as the country worked its way out of the Depression and into World War II, Copland penned his classic essays in Americana: Billy the Kid (1938); Fanfare for the Common Man, A Lincoln Portrait and Rodeo (all 1942); and Appalachian Spring (1944).

Thomson got on the Americana bandwagon even before Copland, with his scores for the ballet Filling Station and the films The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River. Copland was a more sophisticated composer, but Thomson, also a hugely influential music critic, was there earlier. Of course, Ives was using American folk tunes in "serious" scores by the turn of the 20th century, but his music wasn't widely performed until the 1960s.

In orchestral music, the self-conscious Americana of those Copland scores of the '30s and '40s soon dissipated, to resurface in music for film and TV Westerns. For one thing, the American classical-music scene was now absorbing a huge influx of European performers, musicologists and composers  the latter including Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Hindemith and Bartók  fleeing fascism, communism and World War II. And, as Hubbs explores in some detail, the McCarthy hearings in the early 1950s inspired a wave of gay-bashing that made it wise for Copland and company to lower their profiles.

"It was a masculine decade, during the Cold War," Hubbs says. "We were quite threatened by the Soviet scare, so we were flexing our muscles. Our musical culture was masculinized by the influx of all those Germans, whose aesthetic ideals were of that sort that Copland and Thomson had arrayed themselves against."

But the softer side of modernism flowered in American operas of the 1950s, in works by gay composers including Barber and his lover Gian Carlo Menotti and the heterosexual Robert Ward and Carlisle Floyd. It's still very much in evidence in Floyd's 2000 opera Cold Sassy Tree.

Indeed, the United States seems unique today in maintaining a vibrant tradition of populist operas. Whatever the merits of Jake Heggie's Dead Man Walking or Mark Adamo's Little Women, they're keeping their composers in royalty checks. Hubbs doesn't much venture into more recent decades, but it's still true that many of the most successful classical composers are gay or lesbian, among them John Corigliano, Lowell Liebermann and Jennifer Higdon [right].

By the 1930s, Hubbs says, tonality and atonality had acquired sexual identities, even if they weren't yet widely expressed as such. Homosexual composers probably felt freer to defy the dictates of the avant-garde priesthood precisely because they already felt alienated from the dominant culture. Having less compulsion to prove macho bravery, maybe these gay men felt freer to cultivate a nurturing "feminine" side.

They wanted to create an American music recognizably new, yet rooted in history, something fresh rather than frightening. Call that "feminine" if you will; it reached enthusiastic audiences that would never warm to the asperities of Elliott Carter.

Whatever the confluence of ingredients, Thomson, Copland and their successors sparked a real explosion of American music, much of it very good. In Copland's case, at least, it was a product of an openness and generosity and inclusiveness hard to imagine in our angrily partisan times. He composed music to unite, not divide.

He was, in short, a liberal, in the oldest and best sense. Adds Botstein: "Copland's music is the echo of the American flag."



E-mail scantrell@dallasnews.com

(c) 2005, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.