A Contemporary Role for American Music Libraries

Abstract

THE American music of our time, as by now should be unmistakably clear to all of us, belongs to the development of American thought, not to the development of our entertainment or to the gratification of more or less deep-seated socio-psychological drives. Whether this has always been true about music is, no doubt, debatable. But that our own music has persistently had this function, whether we approved of it or liked it or not, is indisputable. The fact is that the intellectual vitality of our music has created, now at last, a really strong and unmistakable national character for American composition. And this is the case whether or not we, or even our composers, necessarily believe that this is a healthy condition for musical development. In this way, American music has been like every contemporary field, where the coming to terms with the intellectual necessities of the twentieth century has liberated limitless new possibilities. And the natural result of this is an internal vigor and excitement in the compositional profession itself; not only are gifted people increasingly attracted to it, but their enthusiasm and energy is creating a wholly new and full musical life within the university, a life in which the composer himself, at least, can fully realize his musical ideas and aspirations. But just because it is a field whose most vigorous contemporary aspect is its unbounded intellectual adventurousness, our new music is being led, by the very strength of this new direction, further and further from our culture's awareness. Composers, after all, whatever their feelings as social human beings, reach professional and artistic fulfillment in composing their music and hearing it played. They have now even ceased to impinge on the general consciousness by their professional distress, for they have found that they can satisfactorily generate conditions under which this fulfillment can be reached on their own, without waiting any longer for society's benevolence. In the past, they at least reached society's awareness by appealing to its social conscience, an area much more sensitive than its musical or cultural conscience. But now that we cannot even jog our consciences by asserting that it is our duty to support our composers whether we like their work or not, we are forced to confront the much more disquieting necessity of deciding whether or not we need composers. The choice is clear: either we provide an intermediary link through which the composer's work continues to be made publicly available for society's benefit, or we permit music to slip from our grasp, to develop out of our hearing and observation to the point where we of the intellectually