Fry versus Dwight: American Music's Debate over Nationality

Abstract

The central debate of nineteenth century in American arts-literature, painting, architecture, and music-was debate over nationality.1 Modern scholars, mesmerized by iddes fixe of New Criticism, certain that one right way to evaluate arts is in terms of results detached from intentions, find subject of nationality boring. Irrelevant. They fail to appreciate not only undercurrent of humor in debate but, more important, its significance to shaping of American consciousness. A nation eager to define itself, anxious to compete with greats of evolved in heat of argument two alternative programs of action to present to its future artists. On one side of debate were those who wanted an art free from dependence upon past, free from the courtly muses of Europe, capable of ushering in a and distinctive American identity. In urging expression of such nationality in literature and arts, Ralph Waldo Emerson's role was crucial. These shores you found. I say you have led States there-have led me there, Walt Whitman said to Emerson in an open letter of 1856, speaking of a new moral continent without which, I see, physical continent remained incomplete.2 Emerson's American Scholar address of 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes labeled our intellectual Declaration of Independence, came to mark moment when quest for nationality in arts began in earnest. Over years since then, historians of literature, painting, and architecture have put forth claims for many others who preceded Emerson in declaring cultural independence,3 their arguments only serving to underscore Emerson's symbolic role in articulating what I have called impulse toward nativism-that is, conscious effort to produce art forms rooted in American sources of inspiration.4 On other side of debate were those who remained suspicious of efforts to achieve nationality through innovation in arts and impatient with