Euro American Musics
As nineteenth-century European piano works, songs, and small choral pieces proved increasingly popular in America, American editions proliferated – this collection provides access to many of them.
As dance and club music from Europe continues to gain more mainstream acceptance, producers such as Guetta are turning toward Europe for inspiration while composers in Europe look toward America as potential new audiences.
The Composers
Helmut Lachenmann provides a striking example of how Europeanness can pervade an artist’s work to an extent that makes translation impossible; more frequently (as Iannis Xenakis and pioneering American minimalists show), Euro American musics engage in an exciting dialectical historical progression across borders and cultures.
This collection comprises piano music, songs and choral pieces by European composers who first gained fame in America during the middle third of the nineteenth century. There are also operas published for both singers and pianists: singers could buy complete scores while pianists could purchase arrangements ranging from simple dance-and-march versions of principal tunes up to orchestral or chamber medleys.
This collection also showcases composers who bridged America and Europe, such as Ives. His “Three Places in New England” uses innovative musical devices to evoke specific locales as well as historical and social contexts such as Augustus St. Gaudens’ monument in Boston Common – to which Ives paid homage in one movement dedicated to Colonel Show and his colored regiment.
The Audience
An enormous gap still separates European music traditions and American audiences, not simply due to the gap between classical and popular genres. Even with alternative distribution models and performers living out of hotel rooms, it remains difficult to bridge this divide.
Scholars such as Dena Epstein have conducted extensive studies of how European musical traditions have had an influence on African American musicians and communities, specifically how Scottish traditions of lining out verses have permeated Southern black American church music through generations.
Since 2000, American audiences have seen orchestras serve as an outlet for premieres of new European works. A glance through the American Symphony Orchestra League list of premieres since 2000 shows an ample representation from European composers (Rihm, Lachenmann and Boulez) along with American works. Chamber music ensembles also take advantage of this dynamic by including works from Scandinavians (Saariaho, Lindberg and Einojuhani Rautavaara), Baltic composers (Erkki-Sven Tuur Arvo Part Peteris Vasks) and former Soviet citizens (Gubaidulina).
The Issues
American music’s mainstream, as represented by major orchestras and opera houses, may not be dying but its capacity for self-perpetuation seems to be diminishing. Composers with European cultural baggage that doesn’t readily translate to American audiences seem increasingly likely to populate this field.
At the other end of the Atlantic, musical traditions have also flourished unimpeded in America despite efforts at segregation; examples include Scottish hymn lining or responsorial psalm singing by clergy and choir in churches as well as an ancient form of responsorial psalm singing known as responsorial psalm singing that takes on new forms through revivalist movements like hip hop music.
European compositional styles still make an impactful contribution to American musical composition, even when translated poorly into its context. A look through American symphony orchestra premiere lists since 2000 shows this. Many European composers–particularly those favored by prominent figures in their fields such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Christoph von Dohnanyi and Oliver Knussen–have had their works commissioned and premiered by American orchestras.
The Future
Studying music provides a gateway into world culture. While certain academic musical traditions remain mired in Eurocentric bias, others are adapting and moving toward the future.
Some, like Iannis Xenakis’ symphonies and Helmut Lachenmann’s minimalist masterpieces, will retain their European identity; others, however, will adapt Euro styles into American packages, enabling younger Americans to reclaim a cultural heritage begun but not necessarily defined by Sibelius.
Future made waves with his hit mixtape Monster, an emotional outpouring from his subconscious that propelled his artistry into new levels of artistry. More recently with HNDRXX, Future further embraces his future by exploring the concept of love-rap. While its opening suite of songs seems bitter and mournful at times, later Future transforms himself into an irresistibly romantic Casanova – this fluidity defines music’s future; available data suggests Europe as being far more open to music from beyond its borders than America is.
