Classical Music and Ethnic Diversity

Native American Music

Native Americans created their songs spontaneously for religious and community ceremonies. [Page 534]Classical composers of the Indianist movement in the 1880s began to carry out systematic adaptation of Native American music. Notable among these composers was Arthur Farwell, who founded the Wa-Wan Press in 1902. In its 11-year history, the press specialized in publishing Indianist compositions, including Farwell's Impressions of the Wa-Wan Ceremony of the Omahas for piano.

European Influence

Prior to the mid-19th century, masters of Anglo-Saxon descent in New England singing schools promoted Protestant hymns, psalmody, and liturgical music. Singing masters, chief among them William Billings, composed and published numerous collections of hymns, anthems, songs, and fuguing tunes. Influence of these compositions can be found in later orchestral works, notably William Schuman's New England Triptychs and Virgil Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune. This style spread to the American south and continued to thrive into the 20th century as shape-note singing and gospel songs.

The Anglo-Celtic Appalachian tradition was introduced by Scottish and Irish settlers, who brought their ballads as they migrated to Appalachia and the Mississippi Valley after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The Anglo-Celtic folk style commingled with local popular songs and African American songs and evolved into the Appalachian style. Appalachian tunes provided musical material for later composers including Aaron Copland, who used the tune “Simple Gifts” as the theme in his 1944 ballet score Appalachian Spring.

German-speaking settlers in the 19th century supplied the bulk of performers and teachers in American music schools and orchestras. These settlers highly valued musical literacy, and established choral societies and instrumental ensembles such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston.

Jewish Influence

The wave of Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century spurred musical exchange with American classical music. Liturgical music was infused with western styles, instruments, tonalities, and harmonization in some communities; liturgical music found an audience as concert pieces. The interaction is exemplified by the 38 commissions by Cantor David Putterman of New York's Park Avenue Synagogue, which were later compiled in the 1951 anthology Synagogue Music by Contemporary Composers.

Among the most prominent American composers of Jewish descent are Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Bernstein, and Steve Reich, each of them succeeded in drawing on their heritage in their western-style compositions. Among Schoenberg's serial works are his cantata A Survivor From Warsaw and the choral setting of Mima'amakim; Bernstein employed his own tonal language in his choral works Chichester Psalms and Hashkiveinu, as well as in Symphony No. 3 (Kaddish); Reich applied minimalist techniques to cantillation in his Hebrew psalms setting Tehillim.

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