Here's a memorable review from the American Record Guide
from Sep/Oct 2011, written by Lehman. The review is more
interesting than the subject:

Critical Convictions

Voices of Stone and Steel: the Music of William Schuman, Vincent
Persichetti, and Peter Mennin

by Walter Simmons, Scarecrow Press, 425 pages (+CD)

As Walter Simmons points out in the introductory chapter of
Voices in the Wilderness, his 2004 book on six American modern
romantic composers (May/June 2004), the narrative outline
directing the typical history of American concert music since
1900 starts with provincial, tradition-bound imitations of
European masters. As the new century progresses, American
composers begin to find their own voice and assert their artistic
independence and national pride. Copland, Harris, Gershwin, and
others begin to incorporate homegrown vernacular music-jazz and
folk tunes into their works. But by midcentury an influential
"new music" arrives from post-War Europe. Even Schoenberg´s
dodecaphony appears outdated to the proponents of this movement,
who claiming that tonality is "exhausted," that the old rhetoric
is irrelevant to a post-War world adopt the austere, cerebral
serialism of Webern as their touchstone. Stockhausen leads the experimentalists, Boulez the more severe and brittle
pointillists. The "new music" is quickly taken up by university
based composers and leads to an efflorescence of fragmentation,
relentless chromaticism, kaleidoscopic instrumentation, sudden
and extreme contrasts in dynamics and register, and all sorts of
new performance techniques. Melodic lyricism and tonal harmonies
- and the openly romantic emotion they convey - become passé,
even scorned.

Meanwhile, the turn-of-the-century innovations of Ives are
rediscovered and canonized as adumbrations of the newly ascendant
avant-garde, as are the somewhat later experiments of Cowell,
Ruggles, Crawford-Seeger, and Varese. All of these native
forerunners and European eminences are seen to lead, by an
inexorable teleological progression, to the dominance of serial
techniques and other kinds of "contemporary" procedures,
culminating in the 1950s and 60s in the rebarbative, complex,
atonal, special-effects-heavy works and their accompanying
ideologies of such commanding personalities as Elliott Carter,
Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and
Conlon Nancarrow. No matter that audiences hate the avant-garde
indeed, that´s a big part of its validation; its best-known
composers gain stature, fame, even notoriety; its lesser figures
get professional approval and academic tenure.

And what of the many unenlightened composers who continue to
write old-fashioned tonal music using the hallowed forms and
procedures? Their efforts are denigrated by musical ideologues
and taste-makers as quaint, anachronistic, or obsolete; their
place in the story of modern American music is diminished to the
merely incidental. Such music is, the up-to-date feel, at best
merely peripheral to the grand narrative outlining the
historically inevitable march to modernist supremacy; it is not
to be taken as "serious" or "important".

Worship of the newest thing is very old, of course. In the 20th
Century the high priest of musical modernism was Theodore Adorno,
whose early and harshly doctrinaire promulgation of the view that
tonality and traditional styles had outlived their usefulness (to
be replaced by strict Schoenbergian dodecaphony) was hugely
influential. Copland and other American "populists" merited only
disdain, Adorno felt, in their hopeless pursuit of outworn
ideals. By the late 1950s his dogmas had expanded their reach
(and intensified their exclusivity) in such French critics as
René Leibowitz and André Hodeir, the latter excoriating anything
not adhering to the brittle pointillism of Boulez and Barraqué,
specifically singling out (in his polemical screed Since Debussy)
almost all modern-era American music as hopelessly irrelevant and
reactionary. Most of it, he claimed indignantly, was no better
than the hackneyed rubbish spewn out by such dinosaurs as
Shostakovich.

Soon this denigration of tonal music spread to American critics
wanting to keep up with the latest fashions. See, for example,
the dismissal of Barber´s "easygoing, sentimental" and "amusing"
Violin Concerto in his 1966 High Fidelity review by the esteemed
critic Alfred Frankenstein. Eric Salzman´s widely used and
admired 20th-Century Music: An Introduction (1967, revised
edition 1974) endorsed this attitude with a bit more subtlety by
simply concentrating on avant-garde developments. Everything else
was secondary and therefore given only cursory (if any)
attention. Academic journals such as Perspectives in New Music
reflected the same bias for many decades. "New music" was atonal
music, as any issue from the 1950s or 1960s will illustrate. (An
added attraction was that serial techniques present seductive
opportunities for impressively abstruse analysis.)

The view that avant-garde music represents progress, that it is
the only proper goal of a natural and beneficial aesthetic
evolution, superseding hidebound tonal, traditional music,
remains persistent in American music criticism still, in for
instance Kyle Gann´s American Music in the 20th Century,
published in 1997. Even Alex Ross, in his eloquent and impressive
2008 overview of modern music, The Rest Is Noise - which is
particularly good in evoking the historical and cultural context
of 20th Century music - is nevertheless strongly skewed toward
"the progressive path from Debussy to Boulez and Cage" (as he
puts it). American experimental composers are given far more
space and attention than the more traditional figures, with the
clear implication that they represent the dominant and more
significant evolutionary strain.

Walter Simmons´s Voices in the Wilderness was the first in a
series of books with the overarching title 20th Century
Traditionalists intended to present a corrective to that story
about modern American music. Simmons explicitly rejects both the
teleological argument that "the evolution of the tonal system
proceeded according to a linear progression that led inevitably
to the dissolution of tonality" and the underlying assumption
"that music is fruitfully studied as any sort of linear
progression, with some hypothetical goal toward which all
contenders are racing". Simmons´s history of American music
instead places much more value on the intrinsic and particular
virtues, as well as the effect on actual concert audiences, of
the music written by the many American composers who (in
different ways) maintained their allegiance to traditional
melody, harmony, textures, and forms, as well as to the warmth,
engagement, and immediate, visceral effect these elements convey.
Those composers also, of course, made many innovations, as all
imaginative artists do, but for specific communicative reasons,
not in service of an ideology of "originality" for its own sake.
They refused to abandon the time-honored musical virtues of
shapely melodic lines, tonal-based harmonic tension and release,
clear formal logic, sensuous instrumental color, and the
expressive purposes to which these qualities have traditionally
been put their frank appeal to pleasure, their immediate and
obvious ability to arouse and ennoble human emotion.

Before going on I should add that just the fact that audiences
hated so-called "new music" doesn´t mean that all of it was bad.
Much was, of course - as indeed could be said of the music in any
stylistic idiom however new-fangled or old-fashioned. But "new
music" was, at first, almost impossible to judge, so
undifferentiated did it sound to its earliest audiences. With
time it became clear that the idiom´s trademark excesses and
extremes quickly degenerated into cliches and (unintentional)
self-parody, especially when taken up by the legions of Boulez´s
inferior imitators. Furthermore, its most devoted practitioners
tended to run out of worthy ideas and lapse into silence early in
their careers. Nevertheless there are many well-made and
expressive compositions that employ atonality and avant-garde
techniques, even of the iciest and most forbidding mode. I´m not
arguing that a more traditional, tonality-based music is always
or inevitably better - or somehow more "natural" or "proper" -
than more difficult "new music". There are no doubt certain
emotions that can only be conveyed by "contemporary" styles and
devices. My point is that individual works in any and all styles
should be judged, and their significance assessed, on the basis
of their merits and not on rigid a priori ideological assumptions
about what is or isn´t fashionable or privileged by an imputed
evolutionary inevitability. Nor should musical history be
distorted by such assumptions. We need to take a longer view; no
one today disparages JS Bach for being "old-fashioned" - which he
was, by the standards of his own time.

Just such a "longer view" is what Simmons tries to encapsulate in
the notion of "20th Century traditionalist". This, in Simmons´s
use of the term, is a wide, encompassing category. There are many
different "traditions" and so many different varieties of
"traditionalists". Fervent romantics like Bloch, Hanson, Barber,
Creston, Giannini, and Flagello (discussed in Voices in the
Wilderness) are one kind. Others are nationalist and populist
composers like Copland, Harris, Gershwin; "multiculturalists"
like Hovhaness and Harrison, who drew on exotic modes and tried
to transmit non-Western emotional states; neoclassic composers
influenced by Stravinsky and Hindemith like Piston and his
students Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, and Ingolf Dahl; "modernist traditionalists" like Schuman, Persichetti, Mennin, and Diamond,
whose bolder harmonic vocabulary expanded their range of
expressive possibilities; and so-called "new romantic" composers
like George Rochberg and John Corigliano who have since the 1970s
reasserted the late-romantic heritage of Strauss, Mahler, and
Puccini.

All of these in-one-way-or-another "traditionalists" adopted and
adapted in their works time-honored structural patterns and
procedures, including tonally-derived harmony and classic
outlines - passacaglia, fugue, sonata, theme-and-variations,
rondo, and aria and dance forms. That, after all, is a
considerable part of what it means to be a "traditionalist". But
each group had distinct and differentiating characteristics, as
of course did the individual composers themselves. For Simmons´s
second volume in his projected series he has singled out three
"modernist traditionalist" composers who came to prominence in
the 1940s and 50s - William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and
Peter Mennin - who he thinks exemplify (and indeed mark the
summit) of this particular strand in tradition-based American
composers of the past century. That all three were long
associated (as teachers and administrators) with the Juilliard
School of Music is a less important but by no means negligible
point of connection among them.

Though all three were heralded during the early part of their
careers as bold, strongly profiled personalities and brilliant
craftsmen (which they certainly were), they suffered from a kind
of two-sided neglect as more avant-garde figures came to
prominence. Like such renowned figures as Stravinsky, Bartok, and
Hindemith (whose music they learned from), they were more
"modern" and adventurous (especially in their use of dissonance
and chromaticism) than the more melodious, openly romantic Barber
and Hanson, but they abstained from the post-Webernian
pointillism and more extreme "contemporary" effects and
procedures of the avant-garde (including doctrinaire serialism).
As a result, typical concert audiences found them too difficult,
and on the other hand "sophisticated" audiences (such as there
were) found them too old-fashioned and lacking in cutting-edge
caché. As Simmons points out, their explorations of a more
searching and chromatic vocabulary and other recent techniques
were disdained by the cognescenti as merely belated attempts to
update their image, "while more conservative listeners failed to
distinguish their work from that of the avant-garde and viewed
such efforts as `selling out´". As a result "their work was
increasingly marginalized and supported by a dwindling number of
advocates". Hence the need for a reappraisal of their
achievement.

As in Voices in the Wilderness, each chapter in Simmons´s new
book offers offers a detailed biographical sketch, a description
of individual stylistic features of each composer, an assessment
of the important and representative works that identifies both
strengths and weaknesses, and a depiction of the larger social
and cultural context out of which the music arose. There are many
and extensive quotations from critical opinions (often at some
variance with each other) and hundreds of citations in the notes
for each chapter, as well as bibliographies and discographies for
each composer - and even a compact disc with works by all three
of them.

Among the many pleasures and sources of enlightenment offered by
the book are Simmons´s penetrating (and sometimes surprising)
comments about how the personalities of these composers were
reflected in their music. He is particularly sensitive to the
contradictions and mysteries that invest the complex relationship
between the artist and his creations. Schuman, for example, like
his music, was bold, assertive, confident of his own stature,
impatient with academic dogma. He had both the inclination and
assurance to compose large-scale, serious, imposing
compositions-especially symphonies. There´s no doubting the
importance and striking individuality of his best works: the
Third Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Fourth String Quartet all
show his declamatory power, lofty eloquence, nervous tension,
kinetic vigor, and the unmistakable stylistic fingerprints-the
dramatic gestures, plangent clashing triads, rich yet transparent
scoring, multi-layered polyphony-that make his music instantly
recognizable. His muscular sprung rhythms and optimism are felt
as "American", yet there is a strong tragic vein also in his
music - for example, in the Sixth Symphony and The Young Dead
Soldiers.

On the other hand Schuman is not, as Simmons notes, immune from
accusations of rhetorical posturing: some commentators have found
the sonorous but gloomy Eighth Symphony (which I love) more
grandiose and oratorical than authentically felt. It elicits
reactions "divided between those who hear it as a profound
abstract statement and those who hear it as...straining to sound
profound [with] parts that are stunning in their impact and
others...the backdrop for something striking that never occurs".
Curiously, even in his most pessimistic or post-tonal, chromatic
music, Schuman often ended his works - however peculiar and
incongruous this became - with a major triad. "One can only
speculate as to the meaning of this practice for the composer.
Was it a statement of loyalty to tonality? An inability to
relinquish hope, or a spirit of optimism?"

The precociously gifted, likable, easygoing, generous, witty,
astonishingly fluent, stylistically chameleonic Persichetti
presents a wonderful contrast to Schuman. There is no hint of
self-importance in the man or his music, and though he wrote nine
symphonies and many concerted works, big orchestral works don´t
dominate his output as they do for Schuman or Mennin. But
Persichetti´s facility and wide-ranging stylistic eclecticism
(ranging from clear tonality to highly-fragmented atonality),
along with a certain characteristic emotional coolness - a
"classic" rather than "romantic" cast - have exacted a cost: his
music lacks the strong individuality that would make it instantly
identifiable, and as a result it´s never gotten the attention
from press, listeners, performers, and recording companies that
Schuman´s music has. Nevertheless there are riches in
Persichetti´s oeuvre that as Simmons points out are among the
high-points in modern American music, including the cycle of 12
piano sonatas, the Concerto for Piano Four-Hands, the Third
String Quartet, and the Fifth Symphony. These works evince "a
summation of modern classicism" combining "a spirit of
spontaneous improvisation with the definitiveness of total
premeditation. The result is highly cerebral music with charm,
wit, grace, tenderness, and dynamism".

Mennin, the third of this New York triad, is a very different
sort of man and composer from both Schuman and Persichetti.
Stern, aloof, and aristocratic in demeanor, he was a deeply
private man. Behind his humorless, businesslike facade was an
uncompromising dedication to his aesthetic goals; a seriousness
and consistency of style, vision, and purpose; and a burning
intensity (darkening into febrile obsessive mania and deep
pessimism as he aged) that blazed forth in the rigorous,
densely-woven counterpoint of his muscular allegros and grave,
elegiac adagios. There is nothing frivolous about Mennin; he had
absolutely no interest in writing "minor" or merely charming
pieces, and his career exhibits a single-minded and "continuous
process of compression and increasing intensification of
expression" that, Simmons notes, recalls Bruckner (an astonishing
comparison I would never have thought of, but - whatever one
thinks of Mennin´s symphonies - a very acute one). One
consequence of Mennin´s aesthetic and stylistic predilections is
that he (unlike Schuman and Persichetti) doesn´t sound
particularly American, but instead is closer to such Europeans as
Rubbra, Holmboe, and Simpson (and ultimately to Beethoven),
composers who "develop abstract ideas logically and coherently,
while seeming to allude to or address profound existential
issues...without recourse to extramusical references, but as if
from a lofty, somewhat depersonalized perspective". Mennin´s
symphonies are tough nuts to crack, for me as for many listeners.
I still find them often impenetrable: too opaque and airless, too
filled up with notes, and too lacking in clearly shaped and
separated phrases that I can easily hold in memory. Still,
Simmons´s comments on his character helped me to approach them
with a more open mind - and I´ve come to admire Mennin´s 1957
Piano Concerto (recorded by John Ogdon) and his magnificent
(though not yet commercially recorded) 1963 Piano Sonata.

Simmons´s extraordinary ability to advocate for these composers
yet see them whole, with all their virtues, difficulties, and
failings, is a triumph of sensitivity and a lifetime spent in
thoughtful listening, research, and adjudication. He loves these
men and their music yet makes careful, nuanced discriminations
about them, raises questions about their accomplishments
(sometimes unanswerable), and gives full credit to the intricate
and unfathomable workings of personality and circumstance that
bring forth artistic creation. Together with the many detailed
and perceptive analyses of individual works (strictly verbal -
there are no music examples) it is this celestial balance of
judgement and mercy, knowledge and enigma, light and dark, that
makes Voices of Stone and Steel indispensable for anyone studying
or simply curious about the achievement of these three
distinguished and emblematic "modern traditionalist" American
composers.

Lehman

American Record Guide September / October 2011 pages 50 - 53

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

So you read the "Americn" "Record" "Guide"? That is a
well known admission and certificate of imbecility.

On Thursday, March 23, 2023 at 9:16:33 PM UTC-7, Pluted Pup wrote:

Here's a memorable review from the American Record Guide
from Sep/Oct 2011, written by Lehman. The review is more
interesting than the subject:

Critical Convictions

Voices of Stone and Steel: the Music of William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and Peter Mennin

by Walter Simmons, Scarecrow Press, 425 pages (+CD)

As Walter Simmons points out in the introductory chapter of
Voices in the Wilderness, his 2004 book on six American modern
romantic composers (May/June 2004), the narrative outline
directing the typical history of American concert music since
1900 starts with provincial, tradition-bound imitations of
European masters. As the new century progresses, American
composers begin to find their own voice and assert their artistic independence and national pride. Copland, Harris, Gershwin, and
others begin to incorporate homegrown vernacular music-jazz and
folk tunes into their works. But by midcentury an influential
"new music" arrives from post-War Europe. Even Schoenberg´s
dodecaphony appears outdated to the proponents of this movement,
who claiming that tonality is "exhausted," that the old rhetoric
is irrelevant to a post-War world adopt the austere, cerebral
serialism of Webern as their touchstone. Stockhausen leads the experimentalists, Boulez the more severe and brittle
pointillists. The "new music" is quickly taken up by university
based composers and leads to an efflorescence of fragmentation,
relentless chromaticism, kaleidoscopic instrumentation, sudden
and extreme contrasts in dynamics and register, and all sorts of
new performance techniques. Melodic lyricism and tonal harmonies
- and the openly romantic emotion they convey - become passé,
even scorned.

Meanwhile, the turn-of-the-century innovations of Ives are
rediscovered and canonized as adumbrations of the newly ascendant avant-garde, as are the somewhat later experiments of Cowell,
Ruggles, Crawford-Seeger, and Varese. All of these native
forerunners and European eminences are seen to lead, by an
inexorable teleological progression, to the dominance of serial
techniques and other kinds of "contemporary" procedures,
culminating in the 1950s and 60s in the rebarbative, complex,
atonal, special-effects-heavy works and their accompanying
ideologies of such commanding personalities as Elliott Carter,
Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, John Cage, Morton Feldman, and
Conlon Nancarrow. No matter that audiences hate the avant-garde
indeed, that´s a big part of its validation; its best-known
composers gain stature, fame, even notoriety; its lesser figures
get professional approval and academic tenure.

And what of the many unenlightened composers who continue to
write old-fashioned tonal music using the hallowed forms and
procedures? Their efforts are denigrated by musical ideologues
and taste-makers as quaint, anachronistic, or obsolete; their
place in the story of modern American music is diminished to the
merely incidental. Such music is, the up-to-date feel, at best
merely peripheral to the grand narrative outlining the
historically inevitable march to modernist supremacy; it is not
to be taken as "serious" or "important".

Worship of the newest thing is very old, of course. In the 20th
Century the high priest of musical modernism was Theodore Adorno,
whose early and harshly doctrinaire promulgation of the view that
tonality and traditional styles had outlived their usefulness (to
be replaced by strict Schoenbergian dodecaphony) was hugely
influential. Copland and other American "populists" merited only
disdain, Adorno felt, in their hopeless pursuit of outworn
ideals. By the late 1950s his dogmas had expanded their reach
(and intensified their exclusivity) in such French critics as
René Leibowitz and André Hodeir, the latter excoriating anything
not adhering to the brittle pointillism of Boulez and Barraqué, specifically singling out (in his polemical screed Since Debussy)
almost all modern-era American music as hopelessly irrelevant and reactionary. Most of it, he claimed indignantly, was no better
than the hackneyed rubbish spewn out by such dinosaurs as
Shostakovich.

Soon this denigration of tonal music spread to American critics
wanting to keep up with the latest fashions. See, for example,
the dismissal of Barber´s "easygoing, sentimental" and "amusing"
Violin Concerto in his 1966 High Fidelity review by the esteemed
critic Alfred Frankenstein. Eric Salzman´s widely used and
admired 20th-Century Music: An Introduction (1967, revised
edition 1974) endorsed this attitude with a bit more subtlety by
simply concentrating on avant-garde developments. Everything else
was secondary and therefore given only cursory (if any)
attention. Academic journals such as Perspectives in New Music
reflected the same bias for many decades. "New music" was atonal
music, as any issue from the 1950s or 1960s will illustrate. (An
added attraction was that serial techniques present seductive
opportunities for impressively abstruse analysis.)

The view that avant-garde music represents progress, that it is
the only proper goal of a natural and beneficial aesthetic
evolution, superseding hidebound tonal, traditional music,
remains persistent in American music criticism still, in for
instance Kyle Gann´s American Music in the 20th Century,
published in 1997. Even Alex Ross, in his eloquent and impressive
2008 overview of modern music, The Rest Is Noise - which is
particularly good in evoking the historical and cultural context
of 20th Century music - is nevertheless strongly skewed toward
"the progressive path from Debussy to Boulez and Cage" (as he
puts it). American experimental composers are given far more
space and attention than the more traditional figures, with the
clear implication that they represent the dominant and more
significant evolutionary strain.

Walter Simmons´s Voices in the Wilderness was the first in a
series of books with the overarching title 20th Century
Traditionalists intended to present a corrective to that story
about modern American music. Simmons explicitly rejects both the teleological argument that "the evolution of the tonal system
proceeded according to a linear progression that led inevitably
to the dissolution of tonality" and the underlying assumption
"that music is fruitfully studied as any sort of linear
progression, with some hypothetical goal toward which all
contenders are racing". Simmons´s history of American music
instead places much more value on the intrinsic and particular
virtues, as well as the effect on actual concert audiences, of
the music written by the many American composers who (in
different ways) maintained their allegiance to traditional
melody, harmony, textures, and forms, as well as to the warmth,
engagement, and immediate, visceral effect these elements convey.
Those composers also, of course, made many innovations, as all
imaginative artists do, but for specific communicative reasons,
not in service of an ideology of "originality" for its own sake.
They refused to abandon the time-honored musical virtues of
shapely melodic lines, tonal-based harmonic tension and release,
clear formal logic, sensuous instrumental color, and the
expressive purposes to which these qualities have traditionally
been put their frank appeal to pleasure, their immediate and
obvious ability to arouse and ennoble human emotion.

Before going on I should add that just the fact that audiences
hated so-called "new music" doesn´t mean that all of it was bad.
Much was, of course - as indeed could be said of the music in any
stylistic idiom however new-fangled or old-fashioned. But "new
music" was, at first, almost impossible to judge, so
undifferentiated did it sound to its earliest audiences. With
time it became clear that the idiom´s trademark excesses and
extremes quickly degenerated into cliches and (unintentional)
self-parody, especially when taken up by the legions of Boulez´s
inferior imitators. Furthermore, its most devoted practitioners
tended to run out of worthy ideas and lapse into silence early in
their careers. Nevertheless there are many well-made and
expressive compositions that employ atonality and avant-garde
techniques, even of the iciest and most forbidding mode. I´m not
arguing that a more traditional, tonality-based music is always
or inevitably better - or somehow more "natural" or "proper" -
than more difficult "new music". There are no doubt certain
emotions that can only be conveyed by "contemporary" styles and
devices. My point is that individual works in any and all styles
should be judged, and their significance assessed, on the basis
of their merits and not on rigid a priori ideological assumptions
about what is or isn´t fashionable or privileged by an imputed
evolutionary inevitability. Nor should musical history be
distorted by such assumptions. We need to take a longer view; no
one today disparages JS Bach for being "old-fashioned" - which he
was, by the standards of his own time.

Just such a "longer view" is what Simmons tries to encapsulate in
the notion of "20th Century traditionalist". This, in Simmons´s
use of the term, is a wide, encompassing category. There are many
different "traditions" and so many different varieties of
"traditionalists". Fervent romantics like Bloch, Hanson, Barber,
Creston, Giannini, and Flagello (discussed in Voices in the
Wilderness) are one kind. Others are nationalist and populist
composers like Copland, Harris, Gershwin; "multiculturalists"
like Hovhaness and Harrison, who drew on exotic modes and tried
to transmit non-Western emotional states; neoclassic composers
influenced by Stravinsky and Hindemith like Piston and his
students Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, and Ingolf Dahl; "modernist traditionalists" like Schuman, Persichetti, Mennin, and Diamond,
whose bolder harmonic vocabulary expanded their range of
expressive possibilities; and so-called "new romantic" composers
like George Rochberg and John Corigliano who have since the 1970s
reasserted the late-romantic heritage of Strauss, Mahler, and
Puccini.

All of these in-one-way-or-another "traditionalists" adopted and
adapted in their works time-honored structural patterns and
procedures, including tonally-derived harmony and classic
outlines - passacaglia, fugue, sonata, theme-and-variations,
rondo, and aria and dance forms. That, after all, is a
considerable part of what it means to be a "traditionalist". But
each group had distinct and differentiating characteristics, as
of course did the individual composers themselves. For Simmons´s
second volume in his projected series he has singled out three
"modernist traditionalist" composers who came to prominence in
the 1940s and 50s - William Schuman, Vincent Persichetti, and
Peter Mennin - who he thinks exemplify (and indeed mark the
summit) of this particular strand in tradition-based American
composers of the past century. That all three were long
associated (as teachers and administrators) with the Juilliard
School of Music is a less important but by no means negligible
point of connection among them.

Though all three were heralded during the early part of their
careers as bold, strongly profiled personalities and brilliant
craftsmen (which they certainly were), they suffered from a kind
of two-sided neglect as more avant-garde figures came to
prominence. Like such renowned figures as Stravinsky, Bartok, and
Hindemith (whose music they learned from), they were more
"modern" and adventurous (especially in their use of dissonance
and chromaticism) than the more melodious, openly romantic Barber
and Hanson, but they abstained from the post-Webernian
pointillism and more extreme "contemporary" effects and
procedures of the avant-garde (including doctrinaire serialism).
As a result, typical concert audiences found them too difficult,
and on the other hand "sophisticated" audiences (such as there
were) found them too old-fashioned and lacking in cutting-edge
caché. As Simmons points out, their explorations of a more
searching and chromatic vocabulary and other recent techniques
were disdained by the cognescenti as merely belated attempts to
update their image, "while more conservative listeners failed to
distinguish their work from that of the avant-garde and viewed
such efforts as `selling out´". As a result "their work was
increasingly marginalized and supported by a dwindling number of
advocates". Hence the need for a reappraisal of their
achievement.

As in Voices in the Wilderness, each chapter in Simmons´s new
book offers offers a detailed biographical sketch, a description
of individual stylistic features of each composer, an assessment
of the important and representative works that identifies both
strengths and weaknesses, and a depiction of the larger social
and cultural context out of which the music arose. There are many
and extensive quotations from critical opinions (often at some
variance with each other) and hundreds of citations in the notes
for each chapter, as well as bibliographies and discographies for
each composer - and even a compact disc with works by all three
of them.

Among the many pleasures and sources of enlightenment offered by
the book are Simmons´s penetrating (and sometimes surprising)
comments about how the personalities of these composers were
reflected in their music. He is particularly sensitive to the
contradictions and mysteries that invest the complex relationship
between the artist and his creations. Schuman, for example, like
his music, was bold, assertive, confident of his own stature,
impatient with academic dogma. He had both the inclination and
assurance to compose large-scale, serious, imposing
compositions-especially symphonies. There´s no doubting the
importance and striking individuality of his best works: the
Third Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Fourth String Quartet all
show his declamatory power, lofty eloquence, nervous tension,
kinetic vigor, and the unmistakable stylistic fingerprints-the
dramatic gestures, plangent clashing triads, rich yet transparent
scoring, multi-layered polyphony-that make his music instantly
recognizable. His muscular sprung rhythms and optimism are felt
as "American", yet there is a strong tragic vein also in his
music - for example, in the Sixth Symphony and The Young Dead
Soldiers.

On the other hand Schuman is not, as Simmons notes, immune from
accusations of rhetorical posturing: some commentators have found
the sonorous but gloomy Eighth Symphony (which I love) more
grandiose and oratorical than authentically felt. It elicits
reactions "divided between those who hear it as a profound
abstract statement and those who hear it as...straining to sound
profound [with] parts that are stunning in their impact and
others...the backdrop for something striking that never occurs".
Curiously, even in his most pessimistic or post-tonal, chromatic
music, Schuman often ended his works - however peculiar and
incongruous this became - with a major triad. "One can only
speculate as to the meaning of this practice for the composer.
Was it a statement of loyalty to tonality? An inability to
relinquish hope, or a spirit of optimism?"

The precociously gifted, likable, easygoing, generous, witty,
astonishingly fluent, stylistically chameleonic Persichetti
presents a wonderful contrast to Schuman. There is no hint of self-importance in the man or his music, and though he wrote nine
symphonies and many concerted works, big orchestral works don´t
dominate his output as they do for Schuman or Mennin. But
Persichetti´s facility and wide-ranging stylistic eclecticism
(ranging from clear tonality to highly-fragmented atonality),
along with a certain characteristic emotional coolness - a
"classic" rather than "romantic" cast - have exacted a cost: his
music lacks the strong individuality that would make it instantly identifiable, and as a result it´s never gotten the attention
from press, listeners, performers, and recording companies that
Schuman´s music has. Nevertheless there are riches in
Persichetti´s oeuvre that as Simmons points out are among the
high-points in modern American music, including the cycle of 12
piano sonatas, the Concerto for Piano Four-Hands, the Third
String Quartet, and the Fifth Symphony. These works evince "a
summation of modern classicism" combining "a spirit of
spontaneous improvisation with the definitiveness of total
premeditation. The result is highly cerebral music with charm,
wit, grace, tenderness, and dynamism".

Mennin, the third of this New York triad, is a very different
sort of man and composer from both Schuman and Persichetti.
Stern, aloof, and aristocratic in demeanor, he was a deeply
private man. Behind his humorless, businesslike facade was an
uncompromising dedication to his aesthetic goals; a seriousness
and consistency of style, vision, and purpose; and a burning
intensity (darkening into febrile obsessive mania and deep
pessimism as he aged) that blazed forth in the rigorous,
densely-woven counterpoint of his muscular allegros and grave,
elegiac adagios. There is nothing frivolous about Mennin; he had
absolutely no interest in writing "minor" or merely charming
pieces, and his career exhibits a single-minded and "continuous
process of compression and increasing intensification of
expression" that, Simmons notes, recalls Bruckner (an astonishing
comparison I would never have thought of, but - whatever one
thinks of Mennin´s symphonies - a very acute one). One
consequence of Mennin´s aesthetic and stylistic predilections is
that he (unlike Schuman and Persichetti) doesn´t sound
particularly American, but instead is closer to such Europeans as
Rubbra, Holmboe, and Simpson (and ultimately to Beethoven),
composers who "develop abstract ideas logically and coherently,
while seeming to allude to or address profound existential
issues...without recourse to extramusical references, but as if
from a lofty, somewhat depersonalized perspective". Mennin´s
symphonies are tough nuts to crack, for me as for many listeners.
I still find them often impenetrable: too opaque and airless, too
filled up with notes, and too lacking in clearly shaped and
separated phrases that I can easily hold in memory. Still,
Simmons´s comments on his character helped me to approach them
with a more open mind - and I´ve come to admire Mennin´s 1957
Piano Concerto (recorded by John Ogdon) and his magnificent
(though not yet commercially recorded) 1963 Piano Sonata.

Simmons´s extraordinary ability to advocate for these composers
yet see them whole, with all their virtues, difficulties, and
failings, is a triumph of sensitivity and a lifetime spent in
thoughtful listening, research, and adjudication. He loves these
men and their music yet makes careful, nuanced discriminations
about them, raises questions about their accomplishments
(sometimes unanswerable), and gives full credit to the intricate
and unfathomable workings of personality and circumstance that
bring forth artistic creation. Together with the many detailed
and perceptive analyses of individual works (strictly verbal -
there are no music examples) it is this celestial balance of
judgement and mercy, knowledge and enigma, light and dark, that
makes Voices of Stone and Steel indispensable for anyone studying
or simply curious about the achievement of these three
distinguished and emblematic "modern traditionalist" American
composers.

Lehman

American Record Guide September / October 2011 pages 50 - 53

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