It might or might not make you feel any better to know that when I hear about Iowa I think of John Irving and wrestling.
First let's see you back that up. Second, traveling state to state is equivalent to traveling country to country in Europe. It's a size thing. I wonder how many in your country have travelled outside Europe.
Ralph Vaughan Williams comes to mind. His English Folk Songs Suite for brass band is one of my all time favorites.
I don't think the American school of 20th Century classical music can afford to spot anything, but just off the top of my iPod, Vaughan Williams, Walton, Bax, Holst, Bantock, Delius (up in the air whether Britain gets full credit for him), Arnold, Finzi, Warlock, Ireland, Maxwell Davies, Bridge ... I think there are a few others on there as well. As for Americans, once you get past Copland, Gershwin, Hanson and maybe Hovhaness (and Bernstein, if you really want), there is slim pickings. Lots of ivory tower deconstructed crap, mind you - but will anyone really give a hoot about Glass, Cage, Reich, etc., years from now? Or even now, for that matter.
In the past 100 years England's had some pretty big time composers: Ralph Vaughn Williams, Benjamin Britten, Edward Elgar and John Tavener. The US though has had some heavyweights of their own: Philip Glass, Steve Reich, John Adams, John Cage, Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland. I'd say Vaughn Williams, Britten, Elgar, Copland, Bernstein and Barber were kind of carrying things along as they stood and didn't really push the envelope too much. Reich, Glass, Cage and Adams have absolutely blown the doors off of classical music in the last 30+ years. I'd put Tavener in the same boat with them as far as innovation goes (albeit of a different sort. Advantage: United States The last 100 years is what keeps it even remotely close, if you made it the last 50 years, it wouldn't even be a discussion. Not much huge from Elgar outside of his first symphony and his cello concerto. I've never seen anything by Britten performed live though I do like his works for cello (his operas are overrated in my opinion), Vaughn Williams certainly gets credit for Fantasian on Greensleeves, Lark Ascending, and his symphonies, but that's about it. Tavener's the biggest thing to come out of England in the last 100 years and to steer the topic back on course, he's incredibly religious. Bridge, Bax, Walton etc are all good, but are really only frequently played in the UK. Glass, Adams & Reich's works are frequently performed now (all over the world), so I certainly don't think they can be dismissed presently...and if people are still listening to Schoenberg 80 years later, those three are virtually guaranteed to be in heavy rotation in the future. Adams was the San Francisco Symphony's composer in residence for quite a while, Reich's most famous works are still being recorded in numerous versions (Music for 18 Musicians, Drumming, etc.) and Glass is all over the place between his soundtrack work (which is too huge to list here) and his more "serious" concert pieces. They're all in high demand. Heck, I've seen stuff performed live by all three even in Alabama for goodness sakes and it was all well received. Heck, the US can even half claim Tan Dun along with China. edit to add: We're both so far behind the Russians in the last 100 years though that it's almost laughable.
Oh, well, sure - I mean who cares about little old symphonies. I mean really, I guess Bruckner gets credit for his symphonies, but that's about it. What's a pathetic symphony compared to the brilliance of 4'33"!!
Notice a total lack of defense of Cage in my response. Besides his work for solo prepared piano, I'm not much of a Cage supporter. I'm just saying Vaughan Williams is a laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate romantic (d. 1958) and while many of his symphonies are indeed the works of a master, they aren't particularly groundbreaking and didn't particularly contribute much to the development (or decay as some might say) of music in the 20th Century. To me, Vaughan Williams and others like him are kind of like the White Stripes, they kick ass, but they're not exactly breaking new ground.
A problem with modern art in general is that there's too much focus on breaking ground and not enough on producing quality art. I will venture to guess that the only music from last century that will survive into the next millenium is that which actually....sounds good.
Aaah? Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Bulgakov, Hesse, Mann, Brecht, Pirandello, Sartre, Camus, George Bernard Shaw, Beckett... etc. etc.
The key word in your post is "claim". Many people (and by "people" I mean Americans) decry the "death of religion" (and by religion, of course, they mean "Christianity") in western Europe compared to its seeming strength in the USA. They cite that more Americans attend church on Sunday and claim to believe. And that is true. I'd argue, however, that there is a difference but that the difference is that the Europeans are simply more honest about no longer believing than Americans. *insert disclaimer about the nature of statistical social arguments and why jumping in with anecdotes is dumb* Because Europeans no longer believe, they no longer go to church or cling to outward showy forms of group affiliation. Americans more closely resemble Jesus's portrayal of the Pharisees: raising their hands and trying to ape holy ecstacy on the jumbotron at the edge city megachurch but then immediately forgetting what Jesus said the instant they leave the church building while they get in their cars and cut each other off in the parking lot. When you watch what people do rather than simply buying what they say, it becomes obvious that people believe more in the dollar than in God and more in Bush, Clinton or Greenspan than in Jesus. This is how you get pro-war "Christians", for example. For my money, the only groups that really try to live Christianity are the anabaptists and even they have their problems.
Fair enough, Nic - I won't lampoon you with Cage. But "breaking new ground" is not necessarily a requirement in my book for greatness. Sometimes, pushing the edges of the envelope just means that your mail will be returned to sender as undeliverable. For me, that describes much of what you lauded in American composition. For Americans, I'll take Hovhaness and Hanson (admittedly, the bulk of his work was in the first half of the last century) over Reich and Glass any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
perhaps it's because Americans are less cynical than people here. To question authority, to the point of expecting authority figures to lie, is normal. People are also a lot less open about it here, as to be openly religious is practically regarded as a kind of mild insanity. As for the threadjack, it's all very well totting up lists of famous contributors to the world of culture, but how many (on either side) actually pay any attention to their works? If you are going to argue about how cultured any population is then you need to look at the mainstream culture, not the top end, because the top end isn't representative. As for travelling round, yes there may well be as much to see in the US as in Europe (I'd be surprised if that's actually true, but that's a different issue) but there is something you get from being in a different country that you just won't ever get from staying in the same one. Sometimes there are huge differences, but usually it's just the accumalation of little differences that just makes it a more enriching experience. To believe there's no need to go to another country is kind of sad. People here are just as bad. Plenty from here just go on beach/clubbing holidays and never stray from the resorts, or want to. It's as if they fear the unknown, as don't want to move beyond their cosy world where everyone speaks English, the bars all serve beers they know from home, have sky sports, and serve 'proper' food. If that's what they like they shouldn't be condemned for it, but it seems a shame to shut your eyes to so much else. Curiously, those who never go overseas tend to have the strongest negative views of foreigners. Which way round the cause & effect is there, I don't know.
Exactly. There is a reason that Billy Budd and Peter Grimes (to use the "overrated opera" example) are still performed in companies around the world, while Nixon in China, Tender Land, and Akhanatan go years between productions. Even the overly hyped recent American operas, Corigliano's Ghosts of Versailles and Bolcolm's McTeague, for example, have virtually disappeared from the rep after less than 15 years. At the risk of going back on-topic, look at the 5 mystical songs or the 4 hymns for tenor, for example, both by Vaughan Williams. Yes they are pretty standard from a music theory standpoint. But the way the music and text interacts creates a far more spiritual experience than, say, Bernstein's Mass, which is for all intents and purposes a show piece. This I think mirrors the attitudes of European, and European church-goers in particular, and Americans. Americans like the spectacle. It's all about the performance of the service and not the content. Sorry for the ramble.
I forgot to mention that the values of consumer capitalism have wreaked havoc on more faiths than Christianity and has done so all around the world and not just in the USA and western Europe. This is one reason why Hindu and Muslim countries seem so damn different from us, including the "red states" - India and the Muslim countries as a whole have not been thoroughly secularized yet, still actually believe and therefore seem so terribly odd to us. It's like looking at medieval versions of ourselves. If a criticial mass of their societies ever achieve the material affluence and imperial power of "the West", I suspect that they will follow the same path of secularization as we have. Poku knows that "Muslim" elites like the House of Saud and the various royal houses elsewhere on the Arabian peninsula now believe more in Machiavelli than in Mohammed. In addition... Damn. I just wrecked the threadjack and went back on topic. I hate when I do that. So... The idea of national or even ethnic artistic cultures is rapidly becoming obsolete in the "global marketplace" and survives merely as a marketing tool or political weapon for deluding nationalists. American and European DJs are mining Asian and African beats while the Japanese and Koreans are now writing better popular music and TV soap operas than we are and their cinema looks to be headed the same way. And these days, you cannot necessarily tell the ethnicity of a painter or sculptor just by looking at his or her work. I don't know enough about current literature to make comparisonas but I assume it is the generally same in that arena as well.
Glass and Reich are ivory tower deconstructed crap? Who knew? I always thought they were two of the composers who re-introduced tonality to art music after a (much too long) reign of the ugly Schoenberg school. Not only that, but they brought big crowds back to the concert halls. When Glass and Reich started out the masses loved them but the academics hated them ("How dare they not write twelve-tone compositions!")
Good point. I knew an older guy that had a degree in composition that worked in a record store. He started giving me crap when I bought a Steve Reich CD once because he said he was "the biggest scam artist of the 20th Century," and that not all of the money Reich & Glass have made put together could drive him to write such crap. He was more of Penderecki/ Lutoslawski/noise kind of guy. I saw the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra perform Glass' Tirol (piano) concerto a few years back and was myself amazed at how Glass' stuff has become less "in your face" and even perhaps more "traditional." Many an anti-modernist in the room seemed to really enjoy it too (I knew a ton of the crowd as a promoter in the area.) I've seen the crowd in the same concert hall walk out on Takemitsu and grumble during Rautavaara. I think Glass and those guys are here to stay. I'll definately give you Cage as ivory tower, but not Glass, Reich and Adams.
Some of Glass's earliest work (when he was still close to Reich, in fact) involved pinning pieces of the score to the walls and having the musicians move around from page to page. I never said he was Schoenbergian, but his repetitious minimalism and occasional use of gimics is why I lumped him in the group. Although over the last 10-15 years he had become more accessible, more traditional (but then, that's not exactly pushing any envelope anymore, is it?), his more recent work still leaves me unimpressed. More listenable, but still without any impact (ex. - his Sym. #6, Plutonian Ode). I think fame attached to him originally not because his music was accessible, but because at the time (60s, 70s), it fitted the desire for modernistm, and in my assessment at least, the intellectual over the musical. I'll give him credit, at least, for retreating from that road of late. But hey, musical taste is ultimately personal, so if you love him, I've got no problem with that. (By the way, of modern American operas, I could see Adams' Nixon in China becoming a repertory piece before Glass' The Voyage - once again, partially because the latter's libretto reflects, IMO, intellectualism and gimickry rather than confidence in musicality and drama).
This reminds me of a friend of mine who told me that her composition professor began his course as follows, "What I'm about to tell you is the most useful thing you'll learn in this class.....Welcome to McDonald's, may I take your order, please."
Pretty interesting threadjack. Two things people haven't brought up but should have: 1) HL Mencken, and 2) aluminum only has 4 syllables.
Along with Schoenberg, throw in damned near every post-war serialist of any note. Hell, I'd put New Jersey's contributions to post-war art music (if only for Princeton University) up against the UK's, and I grew up singing Britten, Vaughn Williams, Elgar, Rutter etc. I suppose I'd have more sympathy for things UKish in this discussion had I not been forced to sing Lloyd Webber's Requiem, with his harpee-esque wife doing the soprano solo. True consensus among English and American choristers: Pure, unadulterated garbage.