Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music

The history of twelve-tone serial music in the United States extends from the late 1920s to the present day. Practitioners of a distinctively American brand of twelve-tone music have included many well-known composers in three distinct waves of activity: prewar experimentation by native-born “ultra-modern” composers amid an influx of European émigrés; a postwar boom; and a third wave of twelve-tone activity since 1980. This extensive repertoire shares certain structural features, including twelve-note aggregates and serial ordering, but even these very general compositional commitments are subject to individual modification, and American twelve-tone serial music has taken astonishingly varied forms. To give an accurate account of this music's history, we must first pry away the many myths that have accreted around it. In the process, we will need to abandon historiographical models that focus on one or two “great men” and that describe the history of style as a series of changing fashions. This article proposes that we regard American music since 1925 as a dynamic steady state within which modernist styles, including twelve-tone serialism, persist as vibrant strands within the postmodern musical fabric.

Section: Myth No 5: the Myth Of The Academic Serialistmentioning

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A Revisionist History of Twelve-Tone Serialism in American Music

Straus¹

2008

“… 1 Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 227–42.…”

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From Lumpy Gravy to Civilization Phaze III: The Story of Frank Zappa's Disenchantment

Bernard¹

2011

Among the vast recorded output of Frank Zappa's remarkable career, two albums—the very early Lumpy Gravy (1968) and the posthumously released Civilization Phaze III (1994)—have special significance, not only for their great originality but also for the conceptual link between them. A close examination of these works, together with recently issued audio-archival material that provides a basis for conjecture about the genesis of Lumpy Gravy, reveals much about Zappa's unique position in the realms of popular and art music as he negotiated the boundary between them. It also shows how and to what extent Zappa embraced an avant-garde aesthetic in Lumpy Gravy, his first solo album, and how this orientation was abandoned yet also, in a way, echoed in Civilization Phaze III.

“… 18 The only full-length biography of Heinrich is Upton's Anthony Philip Heinrich . More recently, Michael Broyles has devoted a chapter to the composer in his Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). Contemporaneous descriptions of Heinrich include both Gustav Schilling's Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften oder Universal-Lexicon der Tonkunst (1836) and François-Joseph Fétis' Biographie universelle des musiciens (1859).…”

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The Musical Audubon: Ornithology and Nationalism in the Symphonies of Anthony Philip Heinrich

Gibbons¹

2009

Anthony Philip Heinrich's two symphonies on avian themes— The Ornithological Combat of Kings, or The Condor of the Andes and the Eagle of the Cordilleras (original version ca. 1835; final form 1857) and The Columbiad, or Migration of American Wild Passenger Pigeons (ca. 1857)—have not been generally considered among his nationalistic works. Placing these works into historical context, however, makes the nationalism of their programmatic content clear. These symphonies reveal surprising connections in the U.S. consciousness between birds and national identity in the nineteenth-century United States. Through the examination of this music in the contexts of naturalist writers such as Alexander von Humboldt, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon, the last of whom was a close friend of Heinrich's, this article demonstrates the extent to which Heinrich's music tapped into the popularity of ornithology in the United States.