Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music

Abstract

The romantic notion of an artist permanently skulking at society's borders has “special resonance in America,” Michael Broyles contends in his new book, because “the historic lack of an infrastructure has pushed artists further to the societal margins” (p. 65). Yet, Broyles argues, since the colonial period the musician has ironically been both at the margins and at the center. To understand this phenomenon, Broyles turns his interpretative lens on William Billings, Anthony Heinrich, Charles Ives, Leo Ornstein, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Frank Zappa, and Meredith Monk. Through each case study, often supplemented by additional figures, Broyles shows how the often ambivalent relationship between composers and audience limned the outlines of a society's own conception of itself. Broyles starts with Billings's willingness to imagine himself a composer at a time and place when such a profession was unheard of. That act alone, coupled with his embrace of themes inspired by a natural world that still frightened his post-Puritan society, made him a maverick. His successor, Anthony Heinrich, cleverly appealed to the early republic's love affair with the frontier and sold himself as a humble backwoods composer. His clumsiness with accepted compositional rules became part of his charm, and with it came inflated hopes that the nation's musical mavericks would forge an American compositional style. That promise awaited another generation, heralded by Leo Ornstein and his contemporary Charles Ives, who both struggled to introduce musical modernism to skeptical American concert audiences. Their lonely crusade earned them significant helpings of scorn and grudging admiration, but they were so outside the mainstream that they barely budged a conservative public. It took the allied efforts of those such as Ruggles, Cowell, and others who in the 1920s formed a coterie of guilds, leagues, and societies that, though often bitter rivals, by “sheer audacity … attracted a public” (p. 144). Those who followed in their wake—Cage, Young, Reich, Zappa, and Monk—combined what were often radical musical insights with a “movement toward theater, an awareness of the potential of new media, and a breakdown of the classical-popular divide” (p. 317). In so doing, they cleverly tapped into the American obsession with celebrity, but ironically their iconoclasm became such an expected part of their work that they became almost banal. The maverick had gone mainstream.