Exploring a U.S. Choral Voice

In 1780, future U.S. President John Adams famously wrote to his wife, Abigail, “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”  In a way, this prophetic view by Adams tracks the maturing of the choral voice in the newly formed United States of America of Adams' day, up until today.

Between 1800 and the mid-nineteenth century, major cities in the Eastern United States began their movement past "politics and war", and were able to form professional music organizations such as Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, which concentrated on full-scale performance of choral music with orchestra; and the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society, which focused on symphonic repertoire. These societies received their material from the finest of European composers of the time.

It is a little disorienting to realize that during this time, Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte was now living in New York City and making a living as a grocer, and Napoleon’s older brother, Joseph Bonaparte, former king of Spain, was living in New Jersey. Lines were beginning to blur, but it would still be a while before any U.S. iconoclasts would have the opportunity to study “painting, poetry, music…” as Adams projected.

However, by the turn of the next century, the first musician’s union was formed, not in New York or Boston, but rather, in Memphis, Tennessee, and on the printed charter, pictured in the laurel banner that drapes the document, alongside the classical German composers of Wagner, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Haydn, we see the portrait of Dudley Buck.  Yes, Dudley Buck. This signals a new age in the growth of a U.S. voice in choral music, as a New England choral composer is given a place along side the trinity of the “Three B’s”. We now witness our own composer's Mt. Rushmore beginning to develop as we add “Buck” to the German list of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.

If and when a U.S. voice was to emerge in choral composition, it would emerge through transplanted Romantic European traditions, Americans studying abroad, European Impressionism, revolutions in industry and technology (think of the piano as industry and technology), Twentieth Century American optimism, and many, many other threads and influences. As Wynton Marsalis describes American blues music, “It's like gumbo in New Orleans, you know. We put everything in there, shrimp, chicken, you can even put chitlins in there if you want 'em–you can put what you want in there, you know what I mean, and it's going to taste good because it's going to be a part of it, but you got to have that roux, and the roux is the thing that makes it a gumbo….”

So, it is a good thing for ACDA and Choral Journal to explore aspects of the “roux” of American choral music in next month's publication and in upcoming symposia. Sometimes its easy to recognize the parts, but it remains an ongoing challenge, as well as a worthy pursuit, to identify the “roux” of an American voice in choral composition.