Music in America
On the level of ideas, confusion surrounds the attempt to find a truly American voice, mirroring in many ways the contradictions inherent to philosophies and modes of governance often violently opposed to Catholic truth. Culture reflects ideas. In the case of Christendom, definitive culture reflects absolute truth. In the case of modern America, a cultural void reflects an absence of truth. In an attempt to fill this void and restore truth, we must understand the ideas that American culture has traditionally reflected.
Protestantism, modernism, Americanism, and transcendental humanism form America’s philosophical and cultural bedrock. Success in understanding the development of America’s cultural voice lies in deciphering how these ideologies are connected as a way of explaining the divisions that define American cultural development in the 19th and 20th centuries: tradition and progress, substance and style, concrete and abstract thought, cultivated and vernacular idioms. In order to guard our Catholic inheritance from our non-Catholic cultural heritage, we must understand the ideological roots of the problem; the process starts with understanding how we came to be where we are.
American Transcendentalism
The American mind, modern in its essence, intuitively grasps the European humanist thinkers—Hobbes and Locke, Descartes and Rousseau, Kant and Hegel, Mill and Comte, Nietzsche and Freud—distilled and adapted for a new world by Emerson and Thoreau, Jefferson and Washington, and the American philosophers William James, C. S. Peirce, and John Dewey. It also understands paradox. George Washington—aware of the instability inherent in a centralized government established by a revolution fought against the concept of centralized government—wrote in his Farewell Address, “The very idea of the power and the right of the People to establish Government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established Government.” Washington knew the spirit of “non serviam—I will not serve” intimately, and understood the very real danger that lay in the void created by the separation of Church and State: without true moral balance in government, very little separates totalitarianism from anarchy.
Thinkers since the Enlightenment had argued that man’s position had shifted relative to God, or, more importantly, that the essence of God had somehow changed as the result of man’s evolving perception of Him. Though Ralph Waldo Emerson and other philosophers of the 19th century often invoked God, they supported or opposed a deity vaguely perceptible in nature, not an exclusive Godhead in an unchangeable system of His own devising. Emerson proposed that “God did not create nature to accomplish his work and to evidence himself. Nature was God as he appeared to parts of himself.”1 American transcendentalists, especially Emerson, sought to discover man’s proper place in this dynamic new conception of nature. With unmistakable and thoroughly misguided brilliance, they combined philosophy, religion, literature, individual rhetorical narrative, Aristotelian logic, Platonic discursive style, and elements of mysticism in creating something short of a cogent system. As Guy Stroh writes in American Philosophy,
For Emerson and other romanticists the term “transcendental” really referred to an infinite array of the mind’s own intuitions or direct insights. These intuitions were not only sources of knowledge, but sources of the deepest and most important truths. For Kant, however, there was no such thing as intuitive knowledge....In borrowing the term “transcendentalism” from Kant, Emerson breathed a new and essentially romantic meaning into the word...[using] “intuition” to signify the poetic faculty of seeing things creatively, seeing things with a freshness and a richness such as only the widest exercise of the imagination could contemplate.
Within this broader philosophical construct based loosely on Kantian idealism, divine truth resided both inside of man as he represented a part of the divine collective, and outside of man as a vaguely benevolent cosmic essence. For the American transcendentalists, the fact that perceptions and emotion differ from person to person merely proved the subjectivity of truth.2 In denying the absolute nature of truth as it existed in the Christian model, humanist thinkers attacked the notion that conflicting philosophical points or internal inconsistencies invalidated any conclusions relative to the nature and perception of truth. For knowledge to result primarily from processing sense-perception and natural phenomena within each individual, however, the system had to allow for opposing truths to exist without negating each other. The Hegelian dialectic approach set up opposing concepts as theses and antitheses that produce new and continuously evolving future “truths,” or syntheses, after engaging in the dialectic exchange.3
For the transcendentalists, the dialectic process proved foundational for their poetic new expression of reason and understanding. Having resigned his own pulpit in 1832, Emerson delivered a sensational address to graduating Harvard Divinity School students in 1838. In it he revealed the logical end of the dialectic exchange relative to the nature of truth and God’s association with man:
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world.
Emerson broke no new heretical ground in speaking of Christ as only a man; by stating plainly, however—to none others than the elite of American Protestant theology—that “God incarnates himself in man,” he put forth the transcendental doctrine of man’s divinity, the true end of humanist thought.
The Modern Edifice
The Columbian Exposition in Chicago—which ran from May through October, 1893—stood as a beacon of electric light at a turning point in American history, and illuminated a nation more urban than rural, more industrial than agrarian, and more commercial than homemade. Visitors to the exposition came expecting a carnival and found themselves in a grand mixed-metaphor, bursting with irony and stranger-than-fiction juxtapositions. The builders of the exposition, led by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham, designed a temporary campus to reflect the permanence of American modernity in neoclassical style, complete with columns and pediments. Irony hid in plain sight, lost to visitors dazzled by the whitewashed plaster facades designed to reflect whatever light shone on them. Many of the dynamos and gadgets of the future faded immediately into the past, and what remained—Cracker Jacks, Shredded Wheat, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and the Zipper—hardly changed the course of history. Susan B. Anthony and Buffalo Bill developed a mutual admiration; real American Indians rode carousel horses; Archduke Ferdinand (on whose head precariously sat the crown of Hapsburg and the last political vestiges of Christendom) rode the Ferris wheel. Scott Joplin played rags. Displays such as this one were grand, quasi-liturgical spectacles for the religion of Man, the triumph of science and technological advancement, and the fruits of centuries of “enlightened” thought. Scientific reasoning unraveled the mysteries of creation, and man claimed his divinity by building, discovery, and creation, spurred on by the belief that
the entire universe—including all human life—was governed by deterministic laws discoverable only through scientific inquiry. Science, in other words, was a kind of Easter-egg hunt; once the eggs were gathered the game would be over: the laws governing the universe would be fully known.4
Positivist philosopher Auguste Comte superimposed this sense of man-made wonder on his man-made religion, replacing God with the “Great Being,” humanity. Emerson’s “Supreme Spirit,” another product of his Harvard address, represented a similar grand collective consciousness with mystical overtones, the godhead within and among men. Comte died in 1857; Emerson, in 1882; the abandoned exposition burned to the ground in July 1894.
Attempts at Reflection
Having survived a formative century and endured a brutal Civil War (a “cousins’ war” fought, in the words of literary historian Louis Menand, “with modern weapons and premodern tactics”), American culture found itself at the ideological crossroads of tradition and progress as the turn of the 20th century approached. The country had long struggled to define itself by way of commercial productivity rather than social refinement. “Unlike commerce and industry, national taste and accomplishment in music were more aspiration than fact,” and this aspiration manifested itself in derivation.5 “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Emerson wrote in his essay “The American Scholar” to inspire the American mind to original greatness rather than hollow imitation, to build on the past with hope for the future. But since most serious American music depended upon European models, what would be left to inspire an American composer if he ignored the “courtly muses,” the only traditionally known sources of artistic inspiration? American composers of cultivated music lived and studied abroad out of ironic necessity, achieving artistic legitimacy as Americans only after having received training abroad. Composers sought to establish an original American style, believing one would emerge through diligent application of accepted techniques learned with the masters in Europe. No one, it seems, imagined that the pieces of an amalgamated style lay in the popular music of town squares, gazebos, saloons, and churches, and would coalesce—more passively than actively—as the result of the collective failure on the part of cultivated artists to establish a body of American-made masterworks with any predictable consistency.
In true democratic fashion, traditional and progressive forces filled the vacuum created in the confusion: a battle raged between the forces of cultivated and vernacular music for the ears of America. To the horror of the musical establishment, their ramparts of European fugues and counterpoint started to crumble under the attack of ragtime and minstrelsy. With neither composers nor audience particularly convinced of the importance or appropriateness of a national culture defined by appropriated styles and techniques, true home-grown products—Protestant hymnody, and the musical styles of African lineage such as Negro spirituals, blues, and jazz that form the foundation of Rock and Roll and have come to dominate global musical culture—began to take on a sort of legitimacy due not to any substantive merit, but rather simply because America could make uncontested claims to them. The radio and other “marvels” beckoned humankind to passivity, while industrialization incrementally emaciated the human spirit that cultivated musicians had historically been charged to elevate and nourish. With the advent of Modernism and its synthesis of all heresies came Abstractism, antithesis of all beauty; many guardians of culture—perhaps motivated by the need to distinguish themselves at any cost, perhaps driven by the allure of sophistication and pride—embraced the mirage. The Devil, as he often does, waited at the crossroads.
The editor of this magazine has correctly stated that the Russian error of communistic materialism has indeed spread globally; capitalism, fully as materialist a form of bondage as communism, simply promises higher profits for the slave. Without God as the source of truth and law, man has become “wolf to man”6 and a God to himself. The humanist man-god looks inward and downward for his own gratification, not outward and upward towards his edification; in reflecting humanist ideas, America has spread cultural errors—debased populism and vulgar vernacularism in nearly every cultural medium—around the globe continuously for over a century. Certainly not alone in turning away from substantive culture and historical masterworks—man’s greatest attempts to express truth through beauty—America seems to share the morbid global fascination with either exclusive specialization—snobbery—or the licentious embrace of vulgarity in her intellectual and cultural pursuits. Long having been told actively and enticed passively into a false sense of intellectual superiority, men and women of the modern age remain convinced that little of the collective artistic past represents anything of value in the present: choosing to recreate nearly exclusively with vernacular forms that differ not in substance but rather in sentiment, men and women of good will fall into the trap of intellectual democratic indifferentism. This is where we are. Each Catholic must choose to reverse the progress of degradation on an individual level, embracing the culture that reflects Catholic truth, and embodying the ideas that will restore Catholicity to culture.
1 Bruce Kuklick, A History of Philosophy in America, 1720-2000 (Clarendon Press, 2001).
2 This difference also logically implied that truth might not exist. The fact that two opposing circular arguments emerge from the same major premises has posed a foundational philosophical dilemma for centuries. The ancients knew that man could not deny the concept of truth, only ignore or oppose it; modern philosophers proposed multiple possible truths as theoretical and developmental in nature. Truth accepted as absolute precludes contradiction; truth accepted as changeable results in negation.
3 The perception of truth as changeable prompted the dialectic fabrication of a metaphysical impossibility, a non-binding absolute: truth exists without any real responsibility to know it, only a vague directive to interpret it on an individual basis…
4 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture (Pantheon Books, 1981), 20.
5 Stuart Feder, The Life of Charles Ives (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
6 Thomas Hobbes, ironically one of the humanist architects of the God-less political system.
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