User:Benitoelbonito/Prelim notes

Blitzstein, Marc. Writings

MB notes

Brant, Henry. “Marc Blitzstein” (1946)

• greater part of representative work composed since 1932; before that a “marked sympathy for the neo-classic methods”
• The Condemned (1932) is the first time his work has “a positive outlook”. “In The Condemned, Blitzstein’s work reaches a critical stage where his developing interest in expressing a positive social viewpoint is almost directly in conflict with the rigid, impersonal stylization of his musical and literary language. It is significant that during the next three years he composed no major dramatic work.”
• The Cradle Will Rock (1936) makes clear some principles:
  1. “The composer who wishes to interpret the vital urgencies of contemporary experience in musical-dramatic terms, will find his strongest expression in projecting the common realities of average existence, which is to say the ordinary behavior of the average person.” must be presented with “truthful realism”
  2. setting of text should target “‘average’ lower-middleclass type”: not blank verse, not long melodies. It should “reflect some part of the popular music which forms a conscious or unconscious part of such people’s experience – this music should connect somehow with an idiom in which the average person can whistle or sing, and the appropriate tone-quality is that of the untrained voice.
     1. But most popular songs are “slavishly” European harmonically, with simple forms, and narrow expressive range
     2. “Blitzstein decided to adopt certain of its characteristic features as raw material for a new kind of ‘common’ musical style, suitable for the dramatic expression of common experience.”
     3. New-classicism helped with harmonic problems, counterpoint
• orchestration is precise, shouldn’t be arranged freely. “a thin, neutral orchestral texture, bare of flashy colors or lush timbres, and favoring drab instrumental shades almost to the point of conventionality.”
  • but is inventive for special occasions
• mentions The Airborne

Copland, Aaron. Our New Music (1941)

• Text from 1968 is mostly the same, but with some differences
  • Copland didn’t foresee the gigantic rise of serialism – so Schoenberg chapter is redone
  • Also, ‘New Musical Media’ section redone as ‘The Present Day’
    • old: “The Composer and Radio”, “The World of the Phonograph”, “Music in the Films”
    • new: “The Generation of the Fifties”, “The Music of Chance”, “New Electronic Media”
• At end of section ‘The Present Day’ (which, in the 1968 version, is ‘The Depression Years’): “The new simplicity has left certain of our musical elite with a sense of being let down. They feel that it is a poor substitution for the excitement of the twenties, when each new year brought forth a batch of unpredictable works. But that period is hopelessly gone, and no amount of wishful thinking can bring it back. The last decade will be important historically, aside from the simplicity angle, only if it has produced works of solid musical merit. We are still much too close to it to say with any degree of certainty how the scoreboard will read in the future.” (123)
• At end of Blitzstein section, after explaining the problem of propaganda pieces limiting circulation “and therefore their effectiveness as propaganda”: “Blitzstein, being the perspicacious artist that he is, can be depended upon to face the problem squarely. When he finds the solution we shall be able to share our enthusiasm for his form of opera with millions of theatergoers everywhere.” (200-1)

Copland, Aaron. The New Music, 1900-1960 (1968)

• “we are dominated in music by the Romantic tradition of the 19th century.” (17)
  • “The entire history of modern music, therefore, may be said to be a history of the gradual pull-away from the Germanic musical tradition of the past century.”
  • “Modern music in a word, is principally the expression in terms of an enriched musical language of a new spirit of objectivity, attuned to our own times. It is the music of the composer of today – in other words – our music.” (18)
• In Depression, composers “began to sense the necessity for consolidating the gains made for their art through so many years of experimentation.” (80)
• Since Wagner, there was understood to be a gap between public understanding and developments in music (81)
  • for Modernists, this gap got ever bigger
  • “The only new tendency discernible in the music of the decade 1930-40 can be traced to this feeling of dissatisfaction on the part of composers at the lack of any healthy relationship with their potential public.
    • “many composers tried to simplify their musical language as much as possible”
    • “they attempted not only to make contact with audiences in the concert hall, but to seek out music listeners and performers wherever they were to be found … anywhere, in fact, where music was heard or made.”
  • traces this tendency to central Europe in 20s
    1. Hindemith’s Gebrauchsmusik
    2. Weill and Krenek
    3. Russia – Shostakovich
• “In earlier years the university was know as a citadel of musical conservatism. But now the whole picture has altered; younger composers with adventurous minds have found a home there – a job for themselves, performers for their compositions, and most essential of all, a captive audience.” (107)

Thomson and Blitzstein

• “No country’s musical life appears to be entirely mature until its composers succeed in creating an indigenous operatic theater.” (135)
• no real American opera for a long time
• “But now at last we have two composers – Virgil Thomson and Marc Blitzstein – who seem to have set us on our way toward having our own kind of operatic piece.” (135)
  • “I am not sure that what they have written is to be called opera, but it certainly is a form of musical drama that is thoroughly absorbing and attacks the primary operatic problem of the natural setting of English to music.”
• they’re different, though
  • “Thomson seems determined to win adherents through music of an absolute simplicity and directness.” (137)
    • related to Satie
    • excellent at setting text
    • discusses Four Saints
  • Blitzstein, early on, was “something of a problem child” (139)
    • didn’t know what he wanted to do until...
    • “His stage works belong to a category that is better called musical theater than opera.” (140)
      • “I myself should not like to see the musical theater accepted as a substitute for opera. But it certainly brings us closer to a realization of that dream of an American grand opera.” (140)
    • MB had “the inestimable advantage of being able to write his own texts” - ~ though he wanted a librettist
    • The Cradle was “clearly influenced by Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler.”
      • form “nothing new” – “mostly a reversion to a pre-Wagnerian kind of opera”
        • “with these differences, however:
          • the subject matter is entirely contemporaneous,
          • the solos and concerted numbers are in the manner of popular songs rather than operatic arias and choruses,
          • and the spoken dialogue and music are more evenly balanced.” (141)
      • “The whole is something of a cross between social drama, musical revue, and opera.”
      • “One innovation peculiar to Blitzstein was introduced: the musical sections, instead of being formally set with definite beginnings and endings, seem to start and finish casually, so that one is rarely conscious of where the music begins and the dialogue leaves off, or vice versa.”
      • MB had “a passionate love of design. One of the most striking characteristics of The Cradle is the extent to which every moment in the piece seems controlled.”
      • Copland thinks No for an Answer is where MB really matures (142)
      • “It is a thoroughly malleable style that can can be applied in the future to almost any subject matter.”
        • important because both are “works with a social message”.
        • ‘propaganda’ - Copland says he “purposely avoided a discussion of the so-called propaganda angle of Blitzstein’s pieces, because it in now way invalidates their musical effectiveness, and this is primarily a book about music.”

Cowell, Henry. “Charles Seeger” (1933)

• “Seeger is the greatest musical explorer in intellectual fields which America has ever produced, the greatest experimental musicologist.” (119)
• experimentation
• “Few composers, either in America or abroad, are entirely uninfluenced by him”
• “He is aristocrat and radical, but nothing between.”
• Intellectualism: “Probably his most important standpoint, however, is his open advocacy of the intellectual point of view in approaching music.”

Dietz, Robert J. “Marc Blitzstein and the 'Agit-Prop' Theatre of the 1930's.”(1970)

• MB has often been considered to be “a relatively minor disciple of the Brecht style of non-Aristotelian ‘epic theatre.’” - Brecht, Weill, Eisler
  • but examination reveals “that the similarities in style are superficial” between MB and the Brechtians
  • rather, it is their “doctrine concerning the role of the creative artist in society – especially as it was enunciated by Eisler – that emerges as the primary influence on Blitzstein.”
• The Cradle Will Rock (1936-1937), I've Got the Tune (1937), and No for an Answer were all influenced by 20s and 30s theatrical musical styles in the US and Europe.
• MB was of a generation of young composers looking for “new forms of musical expression”
• loved Broadway
• “In the theatre such artistic concern with the condition of society and the desire to use drama as a weapon in the economic, social, and political struggles led dramatists to turn, in whole or in part, to the techniques of agitprop theatre.”
  • origins in morality plays of church
  • popular in Russia, then Europe after October Revolution
  • introduced in US in 1930 by Proletbühne, “a worker’s theater active in New York City.”
  • goal of agitprop theater was to convince people “by means of agitation and propaganda”
• “The Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project, the topical musical revue, the Brechtian Lehrstück, and the whole non-Aristotelian 'epic theatre' movement developed by Erwin Piscator and Brecht all employed agitprop devices.”
• Morgan Himelstein: “To illustrate the Marxist doctrine, the agitprop was presented in stylized productions; it was loosely constructed of episodes; it offered satiric cartoons instead of characters; it had the actors speak directly to the audience; and it called on the audience to participate in the show. Agitprops could be performed either indoors or out.”
• Morgan Himelstein: “What was known as 'agit-prop' art, which a number of second-rate noses were turned up at, was a mine of novel artistic techniques and ways of expression. Magnificent and long-forgotten elements from periods of truly popular art cropped up there, boldly adapted to the new social ends. Daring cuts and compositions, beautiful simplifications (alongside misconceived ones) : in all this there was often an astonishing economy and elegance and a fearless eye for complexity. A lot of it may have been primitive, but it was never primitive with the kind of primitivity that affected the supposedly varied psychological portrayals of bourgeois art.”
• The Cradle is most agitprop-like of MB’s work:
  • episodic structure, no plot development?
  • satirical caricatures of characters
  • also, works with or without sets, costumes, etc.
• but The Cradle is usually not called agitprop; rather, it’s called “epic theater”, the Brechtian term
  • partly because of its style of performance
• MB, however, wasn’t so sure about that: ‘The “epic” theatre of the German playwright-director, Bert Brecht, has indeed moved forward in the development of a theatre of non-illusion, but this theatre has all the earmarks of becoming “arty.” It is inviting danger when the labor audience is allowed to feel that its artists are presenting lessons rather than entertainment.’
• Also, MB: ‘Most people overlook the fact that in its original Federal Theatre production, The Cradle Will Rock had been greatly enhanced by set-constructions, lighting designs, and orchestrations. But in the form by which it finally became known, the show hardly represented a full-blown or a true theatre production. It was really only a heightened reading and, as such, had no intended relation to the theories of Brecht or any one else.’
• Brecht referred to 'The Cradle' “as a modified and modernized folk play” (Dietz’s words?)
• “In Brecht's view, the more up-to-date revue stood in the same relation to the folk play as the 'song hit' did to the 'folk song.' Along with the works of several other playwrights, Brecht mentioned Blitzstein's use of the revue-derived-from-folk-play as a literary form in the United States. These plays, he observed, were no longer crude, but they were even more romantic.” (56)
  • similar description to agitprop: “Thus, when a folk play is used for political purposes, it is, in fact, an agitprop!”
• The Cradle is similar to a kind of “epic theater” piece: Lehrstück
  • tried “to teach a moral or economic lesson both to the performers and to the audience, the latter often a group of exploited laborers.”
• But there’s a difference: “in attitude”
  • “In spite of the fact that many labor unions supported its early productions, and in spite of the fact that it is a "didactic piece," the lessons to be learned from The Cradle Will Rock were by no means addressed to unions or unionists.” - for the middle class
  • “He maintained that it was the intellectual, the professional, and the small shop-keeper who had to see that ‘big business’ was treating each of them in precisely the same way as the laborer had been treated. Blitzstein was convinced that laboring men already knew how they were regarded by business and management and that they had learned to join the ranks of the ‘progressives.’ Now, Blitzstein suggested, the middleclass had to learn where its allegiance should lie.”
• “the differences can be best appreciated by keeping in mind that Blitzstein used music, either vocal or instrumental, so consistently that the result was ‘a play in music’ (his own description). In Brecht's dramatic theory, music, text, and sets were to retain their individual character, and the desired result of their being combined – but not ‘fused’ – was the teaching of the doctrine that the condition of society must be changed. At no time was any one element to be allowed to snare the feelings of the audience: the audience was to be kept at an emotional distance from the drama so that the members of that audience could maintain the perspective of observers at an event taking place before them.”
• “In The Cradle Will Rock the songs are so much a part of the whole that they cannot be regarded as alienating interjections.”
  • Copland admired the fact that beginnings and endings were so casual
  • so, The Cradle is too close to opera to be considered “epic theater”
• “The Nickle Under the Foot” is fairly simple; “We may…conclude that Brecht heard in "The Nickel Under the Foot" an effective theatre song and that Blitzstein, in his new enthusiasm for a proletarian kind of music, had proceeded farther in that direction of traditional commercial music than his creative integrity would later allow.”
  • “In short, the song that impressed Brecht in 1935 and that is least representative of Blitzstein's musical style before or after his ‘proletarian period,’ is the only example of music used in an ‘epic’ manner in The Cradle Will Rock. As with other musico-dramatic devices used by Blitzstein, this one was appropriate in that dramatic context-the reason, no doubt, why Blitzstein used it.”
• MB thought that “Trying to compose for the American musical theatre in the second half of the decade required…a courageous attempt at a new form.”
• “The need to continue to agitate and to propagandize on behalf of his particular social point of view motivated Blitzstein's return to the stage for further experimentation: No for an Answer was the most demanding work, in terms of large form, attempted by Blitzstein up to that point in his career.”
  • simpler melodies and harmonies, “without compromising stylistic integrity”
  • However, “The increased concern for musical-or operatic-validity, however, produced a vehicle which was much too cumbersome to function effectively as agitprop theatre, in spite of the fact that agitation was its goal and propaganda its function.” (65)
• remember that MB was not revered in either mainstream or avant-garde circles at the time. Recognition came from the big three operas between 1936-41, but those didn’t fit either category well
  • “Blitzstein saw himself as a contributor to the beginnings and the development of a truly unique kind of American lyric theatre; he never suggested that he had successfully established the style.”
• MB abandoned agitprop style later … until Sacco and Vanzetti, maybe

Downer, Alan S. “Review of Drama Was a Weapon: The Left-Wing Theatre in New York 1929-1941 by Morgan Y. Himelstein” (1964)

• anti-Communist shilling here – this is 1964 (see also Downer)
• “Behind the slogan that forms the title of this study, the Communist Party, U. S. A., spent a dozen frustrating years trying to possess the soul of the commercial American theater; in its innocence, the party seemed not to notice that the soul they were after long since had been claimed by the Mephisto of the box ofice. From beginning to end of their efforts they never understood that, on Broadway, dollars speak louder than Marx, and Engels can creep in only where angels fear to tread.”
• “Depending on the reader's point of view, Drama Was a Weapon is a pathetic tragedy or a grotesque farce. There stands the Party, leather-lunged and musclebound, and there lies the Theater, false eyelashes and all, bound to the tracks. Sweating, the Party tries to organize its supporters, but they won't pay their dues and it grows feeble from hunger; beating the tambourines of salvation, it tries to attract passers-by (only to discover a basic truth about theater – the members of the Group, for example, were a "collective" in performance, but wildly individualistic offstage); stumbling and swivel-hipped, it wastes its strength trying to keep up with directional shifts from Moscow. Meanwhile, the approaching train has halted, the Theater is unbound, and safely stowed away in a parlor car where no party hack could hope to reach her. And as the train goes on, the Party stands by the roadbed, shaking its head, or wringing its hands, or pathetically finding small details to call its own.”
• “Yet this is only to remind the reader that the drama has been, from its origin, a weapon, to support the old gods, or the Christian ethic, to cut down moribund ideals or outmoded ways of life. It is a true paradox that the drama as a collaborative (which is different from a collective) art, has found its highest justification, and acceptance, in fighting for, in celebrating, the rights and dignities of man as an individual.”

Dunaway, David K. “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers' Collective Years” (1980)

• “Charles Seeger found in the Collective not only social expression but a musical outlet.”
  • “For the first time in a half-dozen years, he began to compose, inspired by the possibility of giving music a meaning for the ‘audience beyond the seminar’.”
  • “he was, by his account, both disenchanted with the course of fine art music and scornful of folk and popular music.”
  • “By his departure from the group in November 1935, Charles Seeger was determined to use traditional American folk music to unify diverse sectors of America.”
    • “His evolution from an outspoken anti-folk song stance to a later exploration of folksong materials traces a larger journey of left-wing intellectuals toward folk culture in the 1930s.”
• wrote as ‘Carl Sands’
• “The overall goal of the Collective was to create a new music, simultaneously revolutionary in content and form, which would inspire class struggle and uplift the musical tastes of American workers.”
• Seeger “summarized his experience in the Collective” with Into the Streets anecdote

Dunaway Interviews Seeger

• He was a professor… How did he get involved in CC? In 1931, “Henry Cowell came in and said, ‘You know, Charlie, you were worried about the connection of music and society back there in Berkeley; there's a little group of good musicians who are moved by the Depression and are trying to make music that can go right out into the streets and be used in protests and at union meetings. I think you might be interested in it.’”
• gave talk to CC, they didn’t agree with him
• “I learned more Marx from that bunch than I ever did from [my San Francisco friend] Emil Kern, or from trying to read Marx. I learned that you've got to put your reason in your pocket when you start to talk about revolutionary change being automatic and inevitable … I, Seeger, know it isn't … If you were going to try to use music in the attempt to make history happen faster than it would otherwise – which is what we're all trying to do – you've got to shut up on some things. So I decided I would shut up. And I went into the Collective, as we called it, and worked with them for '32, '33, '34, and '35…”
• not interested in folksong before 1935
• no musicologists around, really
  • started a musicology society, but was involved with it completely separately from CC
    • neither group would approve of the other
    • but he didn’t see any contradiction
• “Shortly after I gave that talk to the Composers' Collective, I formulated this idea that I just talked about: you want to push history, you want to feel that you're the pushing [force] over against the constrainers – because that's what makes history, the constraint against rebellion… and this is the world of the pushers, not the world of students, which is a different matter. In the world of students, you can try to find the balanced judgment between the constraining conservative and the pushing radical.”
• URGENCY: “Oh, we felt urgency in those days. On both sides. The urgency in the New York Musicological Society was ‘We've just got to get at this business. Music's gone haywire, all over the place, and we can't say boo about it. We just don't know how.’ That was one urgency. The other was, ‘The economic and social system is going to hell over here. Music might be able to do something about it. Let's see if we can try. We must try. The musician who doesn't feel he must try is no good.’”
• “We thought we might be able to make things that were ‘Good Music,’ capital G, capital M, songs which the common people would sing to the revolutionary words. But we were still all of us under the old customary bias of ‘Good Music’…”
  • CC wouldn’t listen to folk music
  • But he started to
• “There was very little thought in the Collective of people singing our songs. The emphasis was on writing things for them to listen to… We didn't have much they could sing themselves, except songs with piano accompaniment, and there were lots of those. The rounds that I kept handing in, anybody could learn after they'd heard them a few times.”
  • (sings song about Henry Ford)
  • “One or two of the songs were more difficult.” but most were simple
  • “Siegmeister's rounds you could sing, especially ‘There Were Three Brothers Named DuPont’.” (sings) – also J.P. Morgan song
  • “My emphasis was that we must write for singing, but I don't think the others took this over much, except for the solo songs in the Workers' Songbooks.”
    • “we'd circulate around the piano, which is the last thing we should have done. We should have sat around and sung to banjos and guitars and ukeleles, no piano in sight. Piano is a killing thing. It so dominates the voice that it just takes over.”
• “That was one of the things we tried to do in the Collective: to use ordinary fragments of technique in an unusual way, because we thought that was revolutionary and therefore suitable for the workers to use.” – as opposed to Broadway
  • “Eisler did quite a number of songs for street singing … and gave them just a little unusual twist, so that the workers can sing them. The music was in their idiom, but has something in advance of their idiom that brings it up.”
• long history of protest songs
• “we had lost our basic musical vernacular” - as opposed to Europeans, who could balance concert and folk traditions
  • lost connection to folk music
    • Eisler “looked down on folk music, but folk music is the basis of his composition.”
• “Everything we composed was forward-looking, progressive as hell, but completely unconnected with life, just as we were in the Collective.”
  • Seeger “wrote a lot of little rounds, but nothing we did there ever reached the people in any form.”
  • “The nearest we ever got to a public hearing was in Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, which was a marvelous work, but just for the leftward-minded in the city. The right wing-minded wouldn't go there in the first place, but if anybody ever got there, they would get up and get out just as quickly as they could.”
• DD: “Why did you castigate folk songs at the same time you taught them at the New School?” CS: “Yes. Well, you see, I was still in the Composers' Collective, breaking through my bias of music as fine art. Other music was music, and popular music was low, the fine music of the great masters in its last stage of decay. The idea hadn't come that there was something going on from below.”
  • “I was just a split personality.”
  • “So I wrote some of those columns for the Worker as if I knew everything; whereas I really was in a state of just barely beginning to learn. A little learning is a dangerous thing, unless you can go on and learn something else from it.”
• “I began to see the point: people make the music that they want to make.”
• “No one had any idea what would be the nature of revolutionary music, you see, and it took me a long time after this to realize that there's no such thing as revolutionary music.”
  • “Music doesn't take any cognizance of the dichotomy between what is revolutionary and what is not revolutionary. To change musical technique is not revolutionary, outside of music.”
• “You've got to make these people like you, you've got to have them trust you or else you'll never get anywhere with them. The first thing for you to do is to find out what music the people can make. Then put that to the uses for which you're sent to the community-to make the people in that community get along with each other, instead of fighting…”
  • “don't give them a songbook, don't teach [the children] songs you like, but find out what songs they like to sing, and get them to sing them. Find out what their singing games are and encourage them to sing and play them, instead of looking down on the games and forbidding them as some of their parents had been doing.”
  • Pete Seeger “could see that we in the Collective were not [achieving results] because we were still looking at things from above down. By the inabilities of his father to do anything else, Peter began to look at things from below up.”
  • “music must serve. That you must use the music that the people have in them already.”
    • “Work from below, work from within. Bore from within. It's the only way you'll last. That was all from the Collective: I learned it there. It's partly common sense, but we learned it bitterly.”

Dunaway, David. “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers Collective of New York” (1979)

• CC: 1931-6 - “deliberated on revolution in music and the composition of mass political song”
  • a “search for an American song of protest”
  • went from “anti-folksong stance” to supporting folk music
    • part of larger trend “toward folk and popular culture in the ’30s” in the left
  • “ultimately unsuccessful in producing any widely-sung political song”
  • but should be seen as precursor to groups like Almanac Singers, People’s Songs, and topical song movements in the 1960s and 70s.
• Little written about CC, as a result of “extreme-left tenor of the group’s political statements, the pseudonyms used by a majority of Collective members, and the isolation of the Communist left in the early 1930s.”
  • most source material comes from:
    • interviews with membership
    • their publications
    • writings by Carl Sands and L.E. Swift (Elie Siegmeister) in papers and magazines
• offshoot of Pierre DeGeyter Club, which was part of Workers’ Music League, which belonged to US Section of the International Music Bureau.
  • CC was formed “as a special interest group of musicians in the Pierre DeGeyter Club who wanted to discuss not only the politics of music, but technical elements of its composition.”
    • specialist group to get away from all the untrained folks in PDC
    • CC was only place for these composers to discuss connection between music and politics; musicology as a discipline didn’t think about such things
• Cowell, Norman Cazden, Seeger, MB, Wallingford Reigger, Lahn Adohmyan, Elie Siegmeister, Earl Robinson, and “at least a dozen” more
  • also, Copland and Antheil visited, Eisler spoke several timers
  • they had the “finest traditional musical training”: Harvard, Columbia, Juilliard, Eastman
    • MB and ES (others?) studied with Boulanger
  • not amateurs
  • “Taken together, the Collective represented a sizeable portion of the talented New York-based composers in America in the 1930s.”
• one member: ‘We felt urgency in those days’ to do something about the declining social situation
  • “made the composers into renegades from their upper-crust training: the counter-culture of the philharmonic.”
  • dual lives- professional composers, then leather jacket-wearing radicals
• Seeger and Siegmeister “knew their musicology before the subject was recognized as a discipline.”
• so, dual interests: mass songs, but they were ‘under the bias of “Good Music”.’ (CS)
• European training, high-music interests fueled anti-Americanism – “America’s diverse customs and music seemed distant and provincial when compared to Debussy and Wagner.”
  • CS: ‘None but a musician widely trained can realize how low and uncritical is the present level of American taste.’
  • So CC people looked to Europe for “musical solutions to social injustice”
• meetings were irregular, informal, members sitting around an upright piano
  • comments from group “from two perspectives”:
    • “possible social and political impact”
    • “some specific discussion of the musical techniques involved”
• “overall intent” of CC:
  1. “to provide musical direction for workers’ choruses in New York City”
  2. “to use existing academy-trained talents to create mass song” e.g. The Internationale
• they “knew they were not the first to compose radical songs.”
  • phrase “songs of the people” used in 1915
  • Songbooks from IWW provided “successful examples of how to compose a popular song with revolutionary lyrics
• connection between folksongs and left not yet present!
  • History of protest songs based on “hymns, national patriotic songs, and popular tunes.”
  • “the Wobblies had no interest in folk music per se.”
• you might think CC would use popular and show tunes;
  • but they didn’t like these, generally: viewed them “as a degeneration of classical standards”.
• “they sought not only to raise political consciousness, but to uplift musical taste.”
• distaste for folk music influenced by historical context: formed during the Communist International’s Third Period - “militant sectarianism” vs. “later, open ‘Popular Front’”
  • first CC “characterized folk songs as ‘defeatist melancholy, morbidity, hysteria and triviality,’ qualities proletarian music should exclude.”
    • this despite a commitment to not just ‘teach the masses, but to learn from them’ (italics in original)
• exposure to folksong mostly through foreign ethnic groups
• there were radical folk songs being sung, but CC didn’t take them seriously
• “chose instead to compose in classically-derived musical forms, but presented them differently, hoping this would prove revolutionary.”
• if unusual chords, usual patterns; if unusual patterns, usual chords
• Eisler’s music very influential on CC
  • Eisler believed “that the classics of music were outdated, a product of ruling class culture.”
    • “symphonic music was a luxury in times of great unemployment”
    • song should be “politically progressive in content and universally understandable” but also “musically progressive”
    • folk music is ‘a badge of servitude’
  • when CC began to use folksongs, they came to view this line as ‘schizophrenic’
  • Eisler’s succeeded – but his style was German, not that unlike German folk songs
    • ~ CC writing Germanic music failed in US
• also influenced by Russians
  • though the Mighty Five were familiar with and liked Russian folk music
• ironically, hillbilly music getting huge in early 30s
• Worker’s Songbook in 1934
  • define protest song as ‘well-known and popular bourgeois tunes to which revolutionary words have been set’
    • thought that they were of “limited use” due to their bourgeois roots
    • so dismissed Wobblies, the New Theatre movement
• MB is the only one who like Gershwin, Berlin, etc.
• Into the Streets May First
  • Compland/Seeger anecdote
• WS#2 in 1935 - “little change in the Collective’s disregard for folksong.”
• mid-1935, they realize it ain’t working
  • “the Collective had tried to create workers’ culture without any background or expertise with workers.
  • Abandoned opposition to folksong
• coincides with Americanization of Communist left
• Music and Society (1938) – “Siegmeister asserted that the task of today’s composer was to break down the division between art music and folk/popular music.”
• Songs of the People – nearly half of songs are labor and folk-political “set to popular, folksy tunes”
• Seeger, Cazden – musicology; Cazden, Haufrecht – collection
• Seeger “went on to administer programs of folk and social music for the Federal Music Project.”
  • part of a group of government organizations that “may have composed to phalanx of the functionalist school of folklore”
  • later Seeger says, “Music must serve. You must use the music that the people have in them already.”

Engel, Lehman. The American Musical Theater (1975)

Engel, Lehman. The American Musical Theater (Revised Edition). New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1975.

• tells story of premiere (146-7)
  • publicity
• LB did it in 1947 with NYSO but no costumes or scenery. (147)
  • "led to another piano-accompanied, unstaged run of about three weeks."
• first performance with orchestra, scenery, costumes: Feb. 1960 (147-8)
• "The French would call it ope^ra comique. It is in every sense a unique work. Its musical forefather is Kurt Weill, and its theatrical inspiration is Bertold Brecht, but its true style was distilled out of American vaudeville and minstrel shows." (148)
• "The words and lyrics are as monosyllabic as possible, and the songs are, at least outwardly, as plain as folk music. From the inside, however, the music has a subtle complexity ... The simplicity seems to be indicating where the music is going and what is going to happen -- but not quite. It announces its intention to be banal, but this avowal is only flirtatious -- the girl who leads you to her bedroom and, without warning, closes the door in your face."
• "The story's concern with the rise of unionism makes it a period piece today, but that fact in no way diminishes the work's humor, pathos or excitement."
• The individual scenes of The Cradle are vignettes, like vaudeville 'turns,' strung together on Mr. Mister's attempt to foil the union and Larry Foreman's idiot-bright determination--triumphant in the end--to organize the workers."
• prostitutes scenes are "satirical in intent and funny". sad ones "touching". pastiche... shocking to go from explosion to art for art's sake (148-9)
• "The Cradle Will Rock is a unique work cast in a unique form. The vibrancy and sting of its humor, the genuinely colloquial quality of its music, its pathos, and its general vitality make it a milestone in American musical theater." (150)

Engel, Lehman. This Bright Day (1974)

Engel, Lehman. This Bright Day: An Autobiography. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1974.

• first worked with Orson Welles on The Cradle (81)
  • MB asked him to conduct it
• "Marc was an original. His mind and talent were theater-bent and leftist-politically saturated. He was nervous, full of laughts (often derisive), somehow 'tight,' impatient, and--it was always my feeling--bent on self-destruction or failure. His lyrics were brilliant and were served well by his music. Often his music was almost brilliant, but when it became too promising, Marc seemed to need to prevent its successful conclusion: hew would do just anything to frustrate a desireable resolution. Or so I always thought."
• The Cradle is "satirical of the rich and powerful and strongly advocated labor untionism. It was considered radical, even Communist-tainted, and it became a cause ce^le`bre." (83-4)
• "there was something that Orson did not know, and perhaps there were few of us then who realized it: with Orson's scenery -- realistic, heavy, and cumbersome -- no longer a participant, and with the audience relying only on its own imagination, the show was better, and Orson -- serendipity at work -- was never to be debited with thtis cluttered nightmare production." (84-5)
  • "The funny scenes were funnier, the poignant ones more poignant. ... Everything actually gained in this kind of presentation. I have seldom seen such enthusiasm." (85)
• 1960 production with scenery, costumes (273-4)
  • "I felt that the work held up remarkably as a thoroughly original 'period' opera."

Goldbeck, Eva. “Principles of ‘Educational’ Theater” (Dec 31, 1935)

• “Eisler’s mass-songs made him the foremost proletarian composer of Central Europe. Now Eisler is ‘the most forbidden composer in the world’.” Brecht is most popular writer similarly.
  • Both German, upper-middle class, academics.
  • Both artists with “scientific approach”
  • Eisler radicalized by war: politics produced art.
    • Thought Schoenberg’s 12-tone system “was like a wall at the end of a centuries-old road”
    • abandoned Shoenbergian Sprechstimme in favor of “the voice of the masses”
  • Brecht: art produced politics
    • from writing plays, became Marxist
  • Fundamentally, both “are teachers.”
• “Whereas the old theater tries to get below the level of the mind and to use brute emotional force on our subconsciousness, the epic theater tries to make our own reason awaken and direct our emotions.”
• “The theater of entertainment, though provoking a show of excitement, really keeps us passive; the theater of education wants us to remain as calm and collected as possible, in order to rouse us to ultimate action.”
• old actor identifies with character; new one interprets, criticizes comments on character
• examples: The Three-Penny Opera (Weill), The Good Soldier Schwejk (Piscator), Saint Joan of the Stockyards (Brecht)
  • The Standard (Die Massnahme) (Brecht, Eisler): “the first that carried the principles and methods of the epic theater into the operatic field on a grand scale.”
• the lesson “always occupies ‘the center of the stage’”
  • “but the form can be adapted to any field of productoin”
  • also combines forms of production
    • unlike Wagner, it’s “based on a ‘dissociation of elements.’”
      • in epic theater, separate arts are “independent elements”
      • Eisler’s simile: like a piece of counterpoint
• previously music (like theater) was used “mostly to induce the ‘state of trance’; but now music *mploys the emotional base only and always for practical purposes.”
• must suggest interpretation
• “The one thing educational art must always be is a call to action.”

Hale, Edith. “Author and Composer Blitzstein” (Dec 7, 1938)

• he’s self-assured, not rehearsed, sense of values
• on being born in Philadelphia in 1905, during Russian revolution, MB: “Of course I was rocked in the cradle of liberty.”
• names Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Schoenberg as important influences
• MB: “artists suffer, workers suffer, people suffer” - identifies artists with proletariat
  • ‘There seemed to be two ways out for the sensitive artist: one to live in a world bounded by g clefs and Bach and the small talk of musicians – a world of half-notes; the other I took. Feeling that sharo, acute discontent, I analyzed, dissected. Then began a slow social growth, and finally I saw the relationship of the world to my music. I had been composing in a vacuum. I realized that this world I never made needed change and, as an artist, I could use my trade (?) as a weapon in that struggle.’
  • “he realized that his music had to be used in a new way - ‘where it could reach people who understood my problems.’”
• The Cradle is ‘a middle class allegory for middle-class people – to shove those into progressive ranks who stood on the brink; to rescue those who were about to die by joining so-called “liberty” committees.’
• doesn’t like word ‘operetta’ to describe music; prefers ‘a play in music’. A la Wagner...
• ‘You can’t separate music from thinking. … You can’t separate what people do from life around them. For a rich and full life, they will discover the more you help and give of yourself to the progressive forces in society – in terms of what you do – the more you will be able to find a place for yourself in the conception of society that is really just budding.’
  • ‘we should concentrate on building up strong cultural fronts. Good works of art are germs of new things, roots of an era. If you’re an artist, you must know the horrible death culture suffers under fascism and you must use that art to fight fascism.’

Hicks, Michael. “The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell” (Spring, 1991)

• imprisonment apparently less about left-wing politics than about homosexuality
  • crusade against sexual deviance in 1930s
• Prison exposed him to many kinds of music – ethnic and so on
  • also, forced him to compose without piano (earlier)
• later led bands, taught classes there
  • although apparently the prison population that liked “classical” music wanted serious work
• Percy Grainger (racist, I now know) helped him – saw it as “the State usurping the privileges of the Artist.”
  • many others abandoned him
• he didn’t seek help of Copland or Blitzstein, who were also gay

Hunter, John O. “Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock as a Document of America, 1937” (1966)

• Doesn’t want to evaluate it as art; rather, to explain it in terms of its historical context
• Matured artistically during Depression
• but says Blitzstein not “ideologically oriented in a sophisticated sense”
  • “Blitzstein was a humanist who believed that he had to help effect social change, but he was not a Marxist revolutionist.”
  • could this be why he was the only one in the Collective interested in popular song in the beginning? (c.f. Dunaway)
• cites sympathetic audiences for MB’s success – pro-union themes
  • suggests characters, etc., were based on current events
  • “‘The Cradle’ was the ‘big charm number of the year’ because the audience was already charmed by the ideals behind it.” (the ‘big charm’ c.f. VT in “In the Theatre” in Modern Music XV, 114.)
• “Blitzstein preferred to think of it as opera.”
  • but in his interview in DW he says he prefers “a play in music” (over “operetta”, at least) (c.f. Hale)
• compares mid-30s to 60s
  • is this whole article an apologist reading of Blitzstein, trying to rescue him from charges of Communism?

Lierberman, Robbie. “My Song is My Weapon” (1989)

• concern is “with the political uses of art”
• “the politics of culture of the movement were inextricably linked and that this link was an essential, yet relatively neglected, component of the story of American Communism.”
• “The CPUSA was dominant on the Left in the 1930s and 1940s, until a combination of cold-war repression and the Communists’ own sectarianism led to the end of the movement’s political influence in American life.”
• “the Old Left’s use of folk music, focus on issues, hootenannies, and even specific songs … helped lay the foundations for the culture of protest that developed in the 1950s and 1960s.”
• Larry Goodwyn’s ‘movement culture’: “offers people hope and a vision of an alternative to the ‘received culture.’ The movement culture yields ‘a mode of conduct antithetical to the social, economic, and political values of the received, heirarchical culture.’”
  • Populism not analagous to Communism
    • but “The Communist movement culture, like that of the Populists, offered hope and a vision of an alternative social system to its participants. It played a critical part in building and maintaining the ‘idividual self-respect’ and ‘collective slef-confidence’ necessary to challenge the ‘received culture.’”
• Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’
  • Raymond Williams reading of it
    • Communist movement culture, then: a ‘couter-hegemony’
    • “Much of the most accessible and influential work of the counter-hegemony, argues Williams, is historical – the recover of discarded areas and interpretations that challenge the hegemonic’s selective tradition.”
    • “Counter-hegemonic activity may also be ‘emergent,’ according to Williams.” (xix)
• “Songs and singing were important within the Communist movement and, indeed, sometimes reached people outside the movement. The composers and performers also merit attention because their experience challenges the characterization of American Communism as cynical, manipulative, and destructive.”

• “Proponents of proletarian culture tended to ignore its defects. Ideological purity and the subordination of aesthetic concerns to political ones certainly had a detrimental effect on some creative work.” (27)
  • “At the same time, the inspiration and commitment many artists discovered through their connection with a movement and a shared vision led to substantial artistic achievements.”
  • “Questions of the social commitment and responsibility of artists became an accepted part of cultural life, while the themes addressed by artists and writers were significantly broadened.”
• “Artists identifying with the working class as the agent of an imminent revolution believed they were contributing to the creation of an exciting new world.” (28)
• CC (28)
  • didn’t like folk music
• until late 30s
• 1940s: ES “could describe folk song as ‘the natural expression of our people who “don’t know anything about music,” … the deepest, most democratic layer of our American musical culture.’” (31)
• WS1 – no folk songs; WS2 – 2; Songs of the People – nearly half
• “The movement’s transition from an interest in proletarian music to an interest in folk music was anticipated and encouraged by Communist cultural critic Mike Gold. The shift was marked by Gold’s review of the songs of Ray and Lida Auville, southern mountain ballad singers. Gold compared the Auvilles’ songs with the work of the Composers Collective, finding the music of the former more valuable and progressive … ‘They write catchy tunes that any American worker can sing and like, and the words of their songs make the revolution as intimate and simple as “Old Black Joe.” Is that so little?’” (35)
• workers’ choruses “helped popularize folk song in left-wing circles”
• “The Left’s interest in folk songs partly sparked, and partly coincided with, a widepread [sic] interest in collecting and preserving American folk material.”
  • “Left-wing cultural workers found that, for the first time, they had the simultaneous support of the Comintern, the CPUSA, and significant sectors of the American government and public.” (36)
• CC members ended up doing a lot to popularize folk music (36)
  • Seeger
• Lawrence Gellert’s Negro Songs of Protest became popular (38)
• Seeger switched to view that if music did good things for people, it’s good (39)
• Americanism “was in one sense merely a new tactic for reaching out to the American people, an attempt to counter the prevailing view of communism as a foreign movement and ideology.” (40)

Nathan, George Jean in Scribner’s. Review of The Cradle Will Rock (March 1938)

• Drawn caricature of Nathan in the article – fat, wearing a suit, smoking a pipe
• Cradle is an “opera in déshabillé”
• “emphasis was laid by the reviewers on its ‘excitement.’”
  • they ignore “defects” - they say they don’t matter
  • “There are different kinds of dramatic excitement and the species engendered by Mr. Blitzstein is hardly to be distinguished, either critically or artistically, from a theater cry of ‘Fire!’”
  • yes it’s novel, yes it’s a “defiant shout of labor propaganda”
    • “But excessive noise, whatever its quotient of meaning, is exciting only to admirers of melodrama, jazz, Negro revival meetings, aviation movies, and the novels of Zane Grey.”
  • on the score: “It is, the one or two reviewers who know the slightest thing about music agreed, of no distinction.”
  • wonders why its “a more critically and artistically exciting event in the theater than something, quietly calm, like Der Rosenkavalier or – if you want the greatest dramatic plea for labor ever written – Hauptmann’s The Weavers.
  • “So far as The Cradle Will Rock goes, it strikes me as being little more than the kind of thing Cole Porter might have written if, God forbid, he had gone to Columbia instead of Yale.”

Oja, Carol J. “Composer with a Conscience: Elie Siegmeister in Profile” (1988)

• During Depression: “Under pressure of social and economic conditions, the musical avant-garde of the 1920s disbanded, and an era of conservatism set in. Music was put to the service of ‘the people’ – as a rallying catchword of the period put it.”
• After WWII: “Composers were free to experiment with new approaches to absolute music, and they did so with gusto. Social activism receded into the past.”
• “Elie Siegmeister’s career cut across the grain of this pattern.”
  • “Like many of his contemporaries during the 1930s and early 1940s, he wrote music for the common folk.”
  • “Yet, unlike them, as the 1950s dawned, his commitment to art of social significance not only continued but became the basis for a life's work.”
• “while experimental ideas have been the center of critical attention, there has been a strong countermovement among composers who favor traditional musical attitudes and materials. Siegmeister's role in this movement has been important.”
• teachers were Riegger, Boulanger (5 years with her)
  • unlike Copland, Thomson, Piston, Siegmeister didn’t like her so much
    • both aesthetically
    • and politically: ES had a “liberal agnosticism”
• Upon return, in 1933 he published “two boldly assertive and related articles – ‘Social Influences in Modem Music’ and ‘The Class Spirit in Modem Music’ – in the leftist journal Modern Monthly. Together, they constituted an intense Marxist-flavored polemic that examined the response of contemporary composers to social and political conditions. Although he found most new music to be ‘bourgeois,’ two works were singled out as revolutionary for infusing a proletarian spirit into the fine art sphere: La Creation du monde and Le Sucre du printemps. Milhaud, wrote Siegmeister, ‘treated the folk material of jazz without any condescension, and in a deeply-felt way’ Stravinsky's achievement was similar: ‘[Le Sacre] broke down the barriers that separated the cultivated European musical tradition from the music of primitive people.’ For Siegmeister both works demonstrated how composers could achieve expressive power and social responsibility by reaching outside the boundaries of European concert music.”
• 1933 wrote “The Strange Funeral in Braddock”
  • “It was performed repeatedly in New York during the 1930s and in 1936 was cited as a model of the kind of solo song that composers engaged in a social struggle should be writing.” (apparently by MB, though Oja says its anonymous)
  • “based on a ‘proletarian chant and recitation’ by Michael Gold, a leading figure in the American Communist party and a columnist for the Daily Worker.”
  • “‘The Strange Funeral in Braddock’ reveals several sources of influence and inspiration on the young Siegmeister.”
    • “Its performance style recalls that of proletarian chants at mass meetings.”
    • “The percussive ostinatos and strident yet tonic-centered harmonies evoke the musical language of the 1920s – especially as found in Paris.”
    • “And it owes something to at least two works by Charles Ives: General William Booth Enters into Heaven, with its opening drumlike accompaniment, narrative style, and reiterated refrain, and Charlie Rutlage, with its colloquial speech-song.”
• in the Young Composers’ Group (Copland sort of ran it, Brant, B. Hermann were in it) – composers in their twenties
  • “Herrmann, for one, frequently blasted Boulanger and her musical values, as Siegmeister remembers: ‘I enjoyed hugely [Benny's] invectives against the “old lady” – or possibly he called her the “old witch” or “bitch” – in his colorful way of talking. Benny's mocking diatribes against the “Frenchy-Frenchy,” “tiddeldywinks” music confirmed my own feelings and helped me to throw off the yoke of preciosity and “uppity” elegance she still held. Benny helped me get over this illness.’”
  • anti-French sentiments coincide with discovery of Ives
• in CC
  • “The Collective’s founders were Jacob Schaefer, Leon Charles, and Henry Cowell”
  • “With economic hardship everywhere they reached deep into their consciences to reconsider the validity of ‘art for art’s sake.’”
  • “The Collective's membership was continually changing. Charles Seeger was prominent from beginning to end, as was Marc Blitzstein. Others, like Cowell and Copland, were active only at the outset.”
  • ES’s works performed with group
    • “conducted the Daily Worker and Manhattan choruses, whose members included housepainters, models, mechanics, office workers, and manual laborers.”
    • ES: ‘They paid only a quarter to hear us but insisted on getting their money's worth. After the official program was over, the fireworks usually began. Members of the audience would rise and fire questions at the composers: “Where is the melody in your work?” – “Why did you write that composition?” – “What has your music to do with us?” Those questions sometimes made me angry, but after it was all over I realized that we had gotten the most honest and direct music criticism of all.’
  • music for workers’ struggle: “Michael Gold, writing in the Daily Worker in 1933, articulated the need for such music: ‘Why don't American workers sing? The Wobblies knew how, but we still have to develop a Communist Joe Hill.’ In February of that same year, a seminar, ‘Historical and Theoretical Factors in the Composing of Workers’ Songs,’ was taught by Henry Cowell and Charles Seeger at the Pierre Degeyter Club.”
  • WSB 1 & 2
    • “According to the first book's introduction, the composing process was truly collective: ‘[The Composers’ Collective is] a group in which conservative and radical musical thought and taste meet in free and vigorous clash upon the question of the definition of a musical style “national in form, proletarian in content.” Hardly a work comes through this critical fire without bearing the mark of modifications or alterations, proposed by colleagues and accepted by the composer.’”
    • 1: L. E. Swift (Siegmeister), Lahn Adohmyan, Janet Barnes, Carl Sands (Seeger), and Jacob Schaeffer
    • 2: also Aaron Copland, Hanns Eisler, J. Fairbanks (Henry Leland Clark), J. C. Richards (Wallingford Riegger), and Stefan Wolpe
    • “Siegmeister’s contributions included arrangements of two ‘negro songs of protest,’ a number of workers’ rounds, and several songs.
    • “The Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die” in #1 was very popular
  • “By the mid-1930s the Collective began to weary of its search for a style that would both appeal to the working folk and, at the same time, satisfy composers. According to Siegmeister there were two opposing viewpoints: ‘One group felt that the music should be extremely simple in the so-called mass song; another wanted the music to be revolutionary because the movement was revolutionary.’ This tension is apparent in both volumes of the Workers’ Song Book, where the styles vary widely, and in reviews of them, where opinions flared.”
  • “Siegmeister’s ‘Scottsboro Boys’ was one song that provoked very different reactions.”
    • “When Ashley Pettis compared ‘Scottsboro Boys’ to another mass song by Siegmeister, he implied that the composer had achieved a balance between accessibility and modernity: ‘[“First of May”] possesses a fine, marching swing, and has an interesting combination of “modem” revolutionary harmonic color with a melodic “catchiness” which shows the skill and experience of the composer of the “Scottsboro Song.”’
    • “On the other hand, when Aaron Copland reviewed ‘Scottsboro Boys:’ he acknowledged its popularity but criticized its musical style:”
      • “The music is effective only in a rather flat-footed and unimaginative fashion.”
      • Copland’s ITSMF “tended to be revolutionary in its music as well as its subject matter, especially through the use of bichordal harmonies.”
• When CC was winding down, members took different routes
  • Siegmeister “tried to reconcile folk music with their experience as composers of concert music, performing artfully constructed arrangements and interpolating into their symphonic statements tunes from oral tradition.”
    • “For Siegmeister this shift toward folksong was the culmination of his years with the Collective; at the same time the shift helped define the mission that would inspire him on the road ahead. His commitment to music for working folk was to remain strong, but more and more he would find his audiences not only in proletarian picket lines but in the parlors of homes across America.”
  • but he was interested in folksong before CC
  • Carl Sandburg, Aunt Molly Jackson
  • folksong “united his political ideology with his professional life as a musician.”
  • collector: informants included AMJ, Leadbelly, and Cisco Huston
• Music Lover’s Handbook
• later work maintained “a connection to the proletarian cause”
  • “But he was moving to a new stage in his career where social concerns would unite with musical composition through the interpolation of folksong into instrumental writing.”
• orchestral works: Ozark Set (1943) and Western Suite (1945) were popular
  • “When Virgil Thomson reviewed Toscanini's performance of Western Suite, he enthused over Siegmeister’s use of folksong”
• “Although Siegmeister eventually left the folk tune corral, he carried three important traits from this experience into his later work: tuneful melodies, translucent orchestration, and an extramusical program.”
• joined faculty at Hofstra

Oja, Carol J. “Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock and Mass-Song Style of the 1930s” (1989)

• “Like Porgy and Four Saints, The Cradle’'s genius came from freely drawing upon a variety of musical traditions. It was an early experiment in challenging conventional boundaries between opera and musical theater and in cleverly parodying American vernacular music and speech.”
• “Advance press releases for The Cradle stressed its hybrid character right from the start, billing the show as ‘a combination of opera, ballet, dance music, vaudeville, modern dance, revue, and silly symphony technique.’”
• Oja is interested in roots of The Cradle with mass songs: “one particular network of tributaries will be traced, that of the mass songs-also called workers’ songs-that emerged during the 1930s, largely through the efforts of the Composers’ Collective of New York.”
• “The Cradle is a direct descendant of these songs, not only in its agitating spirit and leftwing sentiments but also in its surge to a rousing fortissimo finale – so typical of proletarian music and poetry – and in the musical style of two numbers in particular, ‘Joe Worker’ and the anthem finale, ‘The Cradle Will Rock.’”
• CC “met weekly for ‘free and vigorous clash upon the question of the definition of a musical style “national in form, proletarian in content.”’”
  • early CC put on “a seminar titled ‘Historical and Theoretical Factors in the Composing of Workers᾽ Songs,’ taught first by Henry Cowell and then Charles Seeger at the Pierre Degeyter Club in New York.”
  • “The mission of the Collective was to devise a musical style that would appeal to the masses at the same time as it would permit satisfying personal expression.”
    • “Since a revolutionary repertory could not be composed overnight, members at first drew upon existing pieces. For example, Blitzstein's Scherzo for piano of 1930, a fastpaced, dissonant work written before its composer became absorbed in politics, was given a new, self-parodying title, ‘Bourgeois at Play.’”
    • “One of the Collective's main goals was to write mass songs, which were directed to the ‘workers’ and ‘people’s’ choruses that were springing up in unions and factories all over New York.”
      • “The tone and structure of these songs related to poems called ‘proletarian chants or recitations’ that were being written at the same time.”
      • “Their purpose was to increase the repertory of music deemed suitable to the revolutionary cause; at the time, the American contribution to that repertory consisted largely of contrafacta to folk tunes and hymns.”
  • group critique
• mass-song style:
  • primacy of words, message
  • syllabic text settings
  • homophonic, hymn-like texture
  • frequent open octaves, fifths in bass
  • loud: forte/fortissimo
• Blitzstein’s attempt at Into the Streets May First has these traits
  • his also is like Copland’s in other ways
• Eisler’s influence on many of the CC – both theory and music
• Downtown Music School – leftwing
• MB tried again at mass-song with a setting of Eva Goldbeck’s “First of May”
• “Send for the Militia” - a ‘sketch’ in a revue “Parade” (May 1935)
  • most music not written by MB (Jerome Moross)
  • revue contains generic characters a la The Cradle
    • including archetype for “Mister” family: Mr. Capitalist and Junior capitalist
• during this time, composed “occasional popular song”
• CC becoming more receptive to abandoning modernist style
  • because it wasn’t working… Earl Robinson: ‘Most of the composers [in the Collective] attempted to be original, and they were by no means near where the working class was. One of the members, Jacob Schaeffer, who had a big Jewish chorus, would counsel them to be simpler, because his chorus couldn't sing anything they wrote.’
  • “Once its members acknowledged that their modernist idiom was not communicating to the masses the group began to lose momentum, and at some point in 1936 it disbanded.”
    • “Many Collective members went on to work with American folk song. … Indeed, the discovery of folk song was an important outgrowth of the Collective, and its effect, especially through the work of Earl Robinson and Charles Seeger, was so strong and far-reaching that the Collective has been partially credited with the birth of the folksong movement in the late 1930s and early '40s.”
• MB’s legacy also important
  • “Following in Blitzstein's path, both Bernstein and Sondheim have written works that defy categorization as ‘opera’ or ‘musical theater,’ that delicately balance complexity with accessibility, and that use the Broadway stage as a medium for exposing the underside of society.”
• 1936: MB “wrote an article for New Masses that clearly articulated his steadfast allegiance to the Collective's original goals.”
  • After Michael Gold criticized CC for its Modernist style (Gold 1936): ‘It is sectarian and utopian to use Arnold Schoenberg or Stravinsky as a yardstick by which to measure working class music’
    • footnote: “Two years earlier, Gold had also taken an antimodernist stance in reviewing the Collective's compositions: ‘When one sings, 'We must unite! We must fight!' is there any excuse for employing a melody full of geometric bitterness and the angles and glass splinters of pure technic?’ (Gold 1934).”
  • “For Blitzstein, left-wing composers were part of a historical continuum that included those very figures.”
  • “When Blitzstein sat down to write The Cradle Will Rock he fused his training as an art-music composer with his experiences in the Collective and his newfound acceptance of Broadway idioms.”
• traces development of “Joe Worker”
  • original “Poor People” has many elements of mass-song style
    • more added in traits of mass-song style – range of bass wider, quarter note pulse, etc.
      • “By the published version, ‘Joe Worker’ has become a thoroughly muscular tune.”
  • “In ‘Joe Worker,’ Blitzstein has also subtly imbedded references to popular and folk tradition. For example, although verse-chorus structure is found in many songs by the Collective, its presence in ‘Joe Worker’ owes as much to popular song tradition. From its first draft, the verse of ‘Poor People' opened with self-conscious, direct address, a device often used in lyrics by Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin.”
  • added ‘thumps’ of Afro-American work songs
• “Like Mr. Musiker, Marc Blitzstein started life with many musical ideas, but until he encountered the masses they had little purpose. Through his involvement in the Composers' Collective, his experiments in writing workers' songs, and his acceptance of Tin Pan Alley's gestures, Blitzstein's compositions grew richer in substance and communicability. With The Cradle Will Rock, he not only produced a landmark work of the Depression years but achieved the Collective's original objective of finding a style that could appeal to a wide audience-a style that was both ‘a new one’ and ‘a true one.’”

Pettis, Ashley. “Marching With a Song”

• appeared on the page before Copland’s setting of “Into the Streets May First”
• “music and music making of a nature which helps to unite and inspire masses of workers”: “The necessity for this kind of music as a weapon in the class struggle daily becomes more apparent.”
• “we are witnessing in America the gathering together of groups of workers for the making of music which is expressive of their lives and aspirations.”
  • though usually derived from foreign-written music, it has “universal content”
  • workers choruses in various cities
  • “revolutionary songs improvised by the Negroes in the south, in conjunction with white workers.”
  • Pierre Degeyter Clubs
• “The functions of these groups are expanding daily...so that the activities of our musical craftsmen are becoming indissolubly linked with the lives of the workers in making available the best music to workers’ organizations.”
• “The New Masses feels that the time is ripe for the development of music by the various composers of America for the constantly increasing number of singing workers; a music which is characteristic of them; truly representative of their awakening consciousness and growing power; of their determination and hopes.”
  • Alfred Hayes’ poem Into the Streets May First sent to Composers’ Collective
  • “The general quality of the musical settings was so high that it is greatly to be regretted that all these songs are not available for workers’ groups throughout the country.”
• “The creation of new mass songs in America is...only in its inception.” So, a variety of styles:
  • Carl Sands: familiar, not experimental
  • Adohmyan and ‘XYZ’ “are perhaps too sophisticated and ‘modern’” harmonically for workers
    • not that these experiments should be discouraged
    • but at this stage: “so that the most unsophisticated singer may be drawn into singing – in order that ‘he who runs’ may sing!”
  • Swift and Freed were too long, but still good
  • copland’s won:
    • “its spirit is identical with that of the poem.”
    • his harmonic experimentation doesn’t disrupt the singer
    • “Some of the intervals may be somewhat difficult upon a first hearing or singing, but we believe the ear will very readily accustom itself to their sound.”
• concert this saturday features the setting: 800 voices!

Peyser, Joan. “The Trouble Time of Marc Blitzstein” (1966)

• in Jan 1933 dismissed Weill’s “super-bourgeois ditties” (c.f. MB 1933)
  • but “suddenly, he changed.” - after marriage to Eva Goldbeck, “the political ideology he had always been attracted to was now crystallized and was reflected in his behavior, his literary pieces, and his music.”
  • repudiated earlier criticism of Weill
• on premiere of The Cradle: “For Marc Blitzstein it was the perfect moment, everything converged brilliantly: moral conviction, natural talent, psychic energy, and public taste.”
• “In 1938 he joined the Communist Party. His ideological commitment was firm and the formal aspects of composition were of secondary importance.”
• in the face of serialism, etc., many of his colleagues abandoned their commitments; “Blitzstein stayed with the crisis until the end.”

Robbins, T. Cradle Will Rock: The Movie and the Moment (1999)

• chronicles the Federal Theatre and Diego Rivera’s mural in Rockefeller Center
• celebration of liberalism: “I truly believe that the Roosevelt administration saved democracy in our country.” (2)
• treats The Cradle premiere as a victory
  • mostly focusing on artists’ rights

Seeger/Sands

notes

Shout, John D. “The Musical Theater of Marc Blitzstein” (1985)

• “as a composer he rarely rates mention in considerations of twentieth-century music”
• “I’ve Got the Tune is the quintessence of Blitzstein” - “a caustic autobiographical celebration”
• emphasizes anger at establishment
  • MB on Triple-Sec: ‘one of those screwy, modernist things in which, through stage devices, the audience is suppose[d] to get drunk. It had a philosophy. I was slamming the smug people and traditions I had been brought up with. It was a philosophy of denial of their values. … I had been trained as a composer-pet of certain circles and I was tired of it.’
  • this was before he was a leftist
    • so The Cradle, etc., was “what he wanted to write”
• after MB’s death, Copland said his life ‘exemplifies a truism that bears restatement today: every artist has the right to make his art out of an emotion that really moves him. Those of our composers who are moved by the immense terrain of new techniques now seemingly within their grasp would do well to remember that humanity's struggle for a fuller life may be equally valid as a moving force in the history of music.’
• “in the agit-props, musical subtlety is as anathema as dramatic nuance. But all the same, he does not want his music to soothe.”
• “Cradle is a kind of radical totem: the ultimate Depression drama, conceived in outrage, performed in defiance, discredited by conservative critics…and lionized just as strongly by the Left.”
• about the genre of The Cradle: “some, he says, called it ‘that Blitzstein – uh – thing.’”
• ‘The Cradle is an allegory about people I hate. My new play, No for an Answer, is about people I love.’
• “the play was a failure in its time and has attracted little attention since. It is not difficult to see why. Despite its effectiveness as political statement and its originality as musical theater, No for an Answer suffered from an overabundance of many of the same features that make Cradle seem overbearing, and audiences, then as well as now, were not willing to tolerate them.”
• “Like Cradle and Mahagonny, Regina is an indictment of capitalism, but it can be taken as a general indictment of greed. He found in the Hellman play the same insidious warning that recurs in his other work: capitalism need not corrupt, but its powers are vast (the good people here – Alexandra, Addie, and Birdie – are, for reasons of youth, race, and simple ineffectiveness, ineligible for but not immune to the lure of money and power); once hooked, one loses all control.”
• “For about the first half of his career as a musical theater composer, Blitzstein remained uncertain whether he wanted to be a popular artist. He was split between his training and his distaste for "musical snobbery," and his work was neither fish nor fowl. The Cradle Will Rock, No for an Answer, and Regina were not orthodox examples of anything; nor were they much like one another. Blitzstein remained an artist in search of a form”.
• After failures of 1950s (Reuben, Reuben and Juno): “By the late 1950s Blitzstein seemed to have outlived his usefulness and his limited talents.”
• About Sacco and Vanzetti: “as late as 1963, he wanted them to illustrate ‘1) the individual vs. society anywhere; 2) the nature of man himself; 3) the fight of man to rise above animal in this respect, and in others.’”
• “What this may indicate is that a less politically committed artist might have finished what could have been a powerful – if uncontroversial – opera. But whether for aesthetic or ideological reasons – and the two were not absolutely distinct in Blitzstein's mind, nor in the mind of any polemical composer – he wanted the play of fate and the complexity of character to stand equally with whatever political comment he had to make or whatever satire he might finally have conceived.”
• “‘Sacco and Vanzetti’ was conceived as Romantic grand opera”
• time for a "compliment": “Blitzstein's effect on contemporary music, even on contemporary lyric theater, has been limited; nor does he have much of a vocal cult following. What remains impressive is his refusal to follow the predictable course, and here he may be useful as a model, however few of his works seem to have been satisfactorily completed. Musical theater remains a conservative arena with only the most timid innovations appearing in one work or another. Minds like Blitzstein's, in this context, are rare, and although he does many arresting things, it is especially those who are interested in breaking ground in the lyric theater who would do well to attend to his intentions and his creations.”

Thomson, Virgil. American Music Since 1910 (1971)

• opera “to break new stage ground” (8):
  1. 1934 – VT’s own Four Saints
  2. 1935 – Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess
  3. 1937 – MB’s The Cradle Will Rock
• Copland a “diplomat” who sought solidarity with his colleagues (49)
  • head of League of composers
• Copland, VT, MB, Lehman Engel founded Arrow Music Press, “a cooperative publishing facility” (50)
  • with others founded the American Composers’ Alliance, “a society for licensing the performance of ‘serious’ music, a need at that time not being met by existing societies.”
• Copland didn’t view MB as one of the five “strongest of his generation both as creators and as allies for combat” (51)
  • Copland, Sessions, Harris, Piston, VT
• Weill’s work not important to Copland like it was to MB (55)
• The Cradle was part of a series of works in the 30s that seemed to suggest a “firm fecundity comparable to that of Europe’s great men” in America
• VT doesn’t really mention Composers’ Collective or politics at all
• CC composers are hardly mentioned, besides himself and Copland
  • no one’s involvement in CC
• this book is entitled American Music Since 1910; he includes Mexico, Latin America in the scope

Interestingly, in the introduction, Nicholas Nabokov cites Adorno’s analysis in “On the Aging of New Music”; he agrees that “Music should get itself defrocked”; the composer “should not compose for eternity, but for fleeting occasions and for the fun of it.” (xiv-xv)

• • but Thomson (who wrote most of the book afterwards) ultimately, in his diss to the CC, privileges exactly those composers who were canonized, who “composed for eternity” - c.f. MB being forgotten because of the datedness of his work

Thomson, Virgil. “Socialism at the Metropolitan” (1935)

• About Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth. He likes it.
• “Populism in art is no new esthetic.”
• “Anybody who thinks he can dispose of populist art by calling it vulgar or lewd had better do the same.”
• “Populism is a product of socialist political thought”.
• “The subject-matter of populist art and its lack of stylistic treatment have always been found revolting by soft or fake-sensiteve minds in the upper classes of society. Rarely so by the working classes, who have always loved it”.
• Shostakovich has “an attitude, an esthetic point de vue” which corrals the various action: “he is thus able to incorporate everthing that could in any way help to point or emphasize his story without the whole thing becoming a vaudeville show.”
• Public loved it; critics “hedged”. “In fact, the degree of approval expressed by them was in pretty close proportion to the political leftness of the respective newspapers for which they work.”
• “there is a kind of passionate objectivity in it and a kind of idealistic purity that cannot be faked or learned. It is serious musical theatre and effective musical theatre. For educated people to protest at this late day about the rough-and-ready tone of socialist art is really just a shad more than stupid.”

- - - Other notes - - -

• V. Thomson criticizes ending to Cradle p. 112 of Modern Music 15 - “fairy tale”, “opium”, though he applauds it as a whole in a response to Alfred Einstein