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In Search of Hybridity: Grainger, MacDowell and their Cosmopolitan Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

Ryan Weber
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Abstract

While their names are not frequently juxtaposed in existing scholarship, Percy Grainger and Edward MacDowell both maintained that cosmopolitanism was not merely a return to eighteenth-century idealism, but also a practical solution to mediating the anxieties of their epoch. I argue that, as members of a transatlantic network of artists, their overlapping system of referents and mutual fascination with Nordic cultures was integral to the development of mutable definitions of cosmopolitanism. At the same time, the deliberate consciousness of difference that permitted for the simultaneous expansion and contraction of identities also contributed to the rise of conflicting imperatives. In the case of Grainger, certain tensions remain unresolved, including the propensity to circulate racial hierarchies under the moniker of ‘cosmopolitanism’. Therefore, in this article, I offer a methodology for appraising the common foundations of their affiliations, advance new analytical tools for evaluating the practice of ‘cosmopolitanizing’ local sources, and problematize the purported universality of their resultant discourse. By focusing upon the particular aspect of harmonic contextuality, I find that a distinct mode of hybridity emerged as they sought to distance themselves from European artistic models while in living America – one that ironically brought properties of time and space into closer proximity. This study thereby illustrates that the consequences of their cultural dialogue led to the end of anachronisms in the service of a ‘continual and restless spirit of change’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , April 2019 , pp. 63 - 88
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© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 Reprinted in Grainger on Music, ed. Malcolm Gillies and Bruce Clunies Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 131–40.

2 Grainger on Music, 139.

3 Grainger’s veneration of Grieg continued posthumously through a series of articles that he published over several decades. See ‘Grieg: Nationalist and Cosmopolitan’, in Grainger on Music, 318–37.

4 Grainger on Music, 134.

5 Grainger on Music, 135.

6 In this manner, I am adopting the approach adopted by Jakob Lothe in his essay, ‘Short Fiction as Estrangement: From Franz Kafka to Tarjei Vesaas and Kjell Askildsen’ in European and Nordic Modernisms, ed. Mats Jansson, Jakob Lothe and Hannu Riikonen (London: Norvik Press, 2004), 97–115. As Lothe points out, ‘influence is exceedingly difficult to measure and evaluate. Even though the concept of intertextuality can also appear to be impossibly imprecise, it invites the critic and reader to compare authors and texts by considering what kind of dialogue (if any) obtains between them (107)’. In musicological spheres, Robert S. Hatten has long argued for the utility of this approach since the release of his article, ‘The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies’, The American Journal of Semiotics 3/5 (1985): 69–82.

7 My use of the term is drawn from Gerald Delanty’s volume, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See especially the ‘Introduction’, 1–17, for a theoretical framework that illustrates how ‘a strong emphasis on hybridity and the mixed nature of cultural phenomena’ (5) led to a transnational movement of cosmopolitanism. Delanty emphasizes many key issues that are integral to this present study, including 1) the role of a critical attitude in shaping new perspectives on society; 2) ‘the condition of ambivalence in which boundaries are being transcended and new ones established’ (7); and 3) the ‘conception of modernity that emphasizes … [the] multiple and interactive nature’ (6) of social reality.

8 The type of analysis I am advocating here can be found in The Cosmopolitan Reader, ed. Garrett Wallace Brown and David Held (Malden: Polity Press, 2010). See especially Martha C. Nussbaum’s entry, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, 155–62, for an historical survey of cosmopolitanism; Kok-Chor Tan’s entry on ‘Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism’, 176–90, for a discussion of how national and cosmopolitan forces have been mediated in different societies; and Jacques Derrida’s ‘On Cosmopolitanism’, 414–22, for a discussion of how the experience of cosmopolitanism shapes contemporary identities.

9 Other pertinent examples can be found in Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, ed. Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). In Manning and Taylor’s entry, ‘The National and Cosmopolitanism: Introduction’, 17–22, they outline an important dimension that is applicable to the composers featured in this study: ‘By focusing on the Atlantic, with its emphasis on mobility and migration, Transatlantic Studies challenges the security of the static and bordered spaces of all kinds, none more so than the defining authority of the nation. Rethinking the geography in which literary study is undertaken, the critics selected here develop a scholarly practice that is relational rather than territorial, showing how the diverse networks of travel, exchange and contact entail new and diverse ways of imagining space, place, and identity’ (18).

10 Saavedra, Leonora, ‘Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style: Constructing the National, Seeking the Cosmopolitan’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 68/1 (2015): 100 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Saavedra, ‘Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style’, 104.

12 The critical methodology that I employ here is predicated upon the work of Amanda Anderson in The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6. See also Anderson’s article, ‘Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity’ in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 265–90. In addition, Pheng Cheah’s article in the same volume, ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism’, 290–328, explores the various ways in which hybridity serves as ‘cultural agency’.

13 See E. Douglas Bomberger’s discussion in MacDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 24–49. He also notes how MacDowell was primed to develop a cosmopolitan position through his exposure to a wide range of cultures while growing up in America.

14 Bomberger, MacDowell, 181.

15 See ‘Chronology’ in Grainger on Music, ix–xiv.

16 For a detailed discussion of Grainger’s activities in London at the turn of the twentieth century, see Bird, John, Percy Grainger (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 63–152 Google Scholar, and Banfield, Stephen, ‘Grainger the Edwardian’, Musicology Australia 37/2 (2015): 148–166 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Grainger on Music, 133.

18 Joseph E. Morgan offers a thorough analysis in his recent volume, Carl Maria von Weber: Oberon and Cosmopolitanism in the Early German Romantic (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

19 Saavedra, ‘Carlos Chávez’s Polysemic Style’, 104.

20 Homi K. Bhabha has described this process in Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10: ‘The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with “newness” that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.’

21 Collins, Sarah and Perry, Simon, ‘“The Beauty of Bravery”: Alternative Modernisms, De-Historicizing Grainger’, in Grainger the Modernist, ed. Suzanne Robinson and Kay Dreyfus (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 29 Google Scholar.

22 See Chapter 6, ‘Old Worlds for New’ in Mellers, Wilfrid, Percy Grainger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–120 Google Scholar.

23 For an important discussion of Grainger’s concept of race, which functioned to unite American and Nordic cultures, see Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Percy Grainger and American Nordicism’, in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–124 Google Scholar.

24 Gooley, Dana, ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism, 1848–1914’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 66/2 (2013), 523–524 Google Scholar.

25 Gregory Mason, Daniel, ‘Folk-Song and American Music: A Plea for the Unpopular Point of View’, The Musical Quarterly 4/3 (1918): 23 Google Scholar. Later in his entry, Mason acknowledges that MacDowell’s embrace of Native American folk tunes and ‘idiomatic peculiarities’ was ironically pivotal in leading critics astray from the nature of his cosmopolitan discourse – a point that will be revisited later in this article.

26 Gooley, ‘Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Nationalism’, 525–6.

27 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 28.

28 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 83.

29 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 11–12.

30 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 30.

31 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 30. Italics are added for emphasis.

32 Morgan suggests Beethoven and Meyerbeer in Carl Maria von Weber, 30–31.

33 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 51–76.

34 Note especially Morgan’s analysis of Euryanthe in Carl Maria von Weber, 96–112.

35 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 278.

36 Morgan, Carl Maria von Weber, 138.

37 Quoted and expanded in Bomberger, MacDowell, 195–6.

38 Grainger on Music, 250.

39 Bomberger, MacDowell, 183.

40 Grainger on Music, 77.

41 Grainger on Music, 344.

42 Grainger on Music, 343.

43 This critical view of cosmopolitanism is explored in Germann Molz, Jennie, ‘Cosmopolitanism and Consumption’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. by Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 33–52 Google Scholar.

44 Graham Barwell, ‘A “Treat Equal to Wagner”: Grainger’s Interactions with the Music and Culture of Polynesia’, in Grainger the Modernist, 71. For an important historic backdrop, see Burnett Tylor, Edward, Primitive Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 2016)Google Scholar.

45 For a wider analysis of cosmopolitanism used in this manner, see Agathocleous, Tanya, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. In this volume, the author traces internal contradictions in the works of nineteenth-century writers, the tensions between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ usages of cosmopolitanism, and even the process by which ‘modernists construct imaginative communities that emphatically reject the universalism for which cosmopolitanism is often indicated’ (172).

46 Peter Tregear also notes how ‘the idea that a piano accompaniment could be composed in such a way as to intervene and comment on the poetic meanings’ stems from the nineteenth-century tradition, but ‘the obvious difference between Romantic-era art song and Grainger’s folk song arrangements is … their respective relationship to the new’: Peter Tregear, ‘Grainger’s Folk Song Settings and Musical Irony’, in Grainger the Modernist, 100).

47 Grainger, ‘The World Music of To-morrow’, in Grainger on Music, 85. Grainger’s inclusion of Stravinsky in this roster is intriguing, for Stravinsky famously disavowed the use of folk music in high art. The political dimensions of this complicated stance have been discussed in Taruskin, Richard, Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Taruskin also discusses the antagonisms between Stravinsky and Bartók – two influential figures for Grainger – in ‘Why You Cannot Leave Bartók Out’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47/3–4 ( 2006): 265–77. Grainger may have been emulating Stravinsky’s stance more closely than he would have imagined in his own ability to publicly support one ideology while musically offering a very different stance. This is especially true when it came to acknowledging his own sources – something Grainger consciously obfuscated in order to emphasize the influence of Nordic elements in his art (see also note 49 below).

48 Crawford, Richard, ‘Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone Poet’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 49/3 (1996): 545 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Here Crawford cites MacDowell’s Critical and Historical Essays: Lectures Delivered at Columbia University, ed. W. J. Baltzell (Boston: Arthur P. Schmidt, 1912), reprinted with an introduction by Irving Lowens (New York: Da Capo Press, 1969). See also Francis Brancaleone’s analysis of MacDowell’s famous Indian Suite, op. 48 for orchestra in ‘Edward MacDowell and Indian Motives’, American Music 7/4 (1989): 359.

49 While I focus upon the connection to Grieg in this study, it is important to note that the web of aesthetic influences was wide for both composers. Even more, Grainger was always the master at encouraging his audiences to see only the specific influences that he wanted to acknowledge. This meant that other prominent figures like Ferruccio Busoni were purposely left out of his primary account of the period. Nonetheless, Andrew Hugill has noted the significance of Busoni’s effect on Grainger starting in 1903 and culminating in his later publication, Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music (1911): Andrew Hargill, ‘Percy Grainger: A Pioneer of Electronic Music’, in Grainger the Modernist, 241–4. In a similar fashion, Bomberger has noted MacDowell’s ‘jealousy’ over Busoni’s reception in MacDowell, 173. Busoni’s popularity in America clearly was a source of anxiety for both figures and perhaps this uneasiness encouraged a style of cosmopolitanism that outwardly fixated on the successes of Grieg.

50 Grainger on Music, 136.

51 Papastergiadis, Nikos, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 196 Google Scholar.

52 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 117.

53 See also Grieg’s letters to Grainger (1906–07) in Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, ed. Finn Benestad, trans. William H. Halverson (Columbus: Peer Gynt Press, 2000), 263–70.

54 Grainger on Music, 326.

55 See Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Great Expectations: Grieg and Grainger’, The Musical Times 148 (2007): 7–26 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 See John Whiteoak, ‘Minstrelsy, Ragtime, “Improvisatory Music” and Percy Grainger’s “Unwritten Music”’ in Grainger the Modernist, 139–61. As evidence of the wide-reaching influences that found their way into Grainger’s other works in the early twentieth century, the author asserts that he ‘engaged directly with popular modernity in 1901 and 1903 in basing ragtime experiments on Tin Pan Alley and Broadway successes and he even references mainstream popular music instrumental sounds of the day’ (160).

57 When Grieg was not functioning as the lone surrogate for Nordic identity, Grainger looked to other figures such as the Danish folk song collector Evald Tang Kristensen. See Graham Freeman’s discussion in ‘Grainger and the Performativity of Folk Song’, in Grainger the Modernist, 33–54.

58 Grainger on Music, 139.

59 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 177. See also Papastergiadis’ discussion of this volume in Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 144–6.

60 Hollinger, David A., ‘The New Cosmopolitanism’ in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227–239 Google Scholar.

61 Hollinger, ‘The New Cosmopolitanism’, 231.

62 I explore this process in more detail in ‘“New Efforts with Old Means”: Cross-Cultural Symbiosis in the Works of Grieg and Grainger’, Musicology Australia 38/1 (2016): 29–45.

63 Grainger on Music, 329.

64 Grainger on Music, 330.

65 Grainger on Music, 44. Finck was also the author of works on MacDowell.

66 A much different type of debate took place in Grainger’s life after the writing of this piece, in which he later proclaimed the superiority of the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon races above all others. This intensification of the racial component of his philosophy occured most notably after World War I. While the scope of this study does not explore this eventual shift in his thinking, a primary account can be found in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, ed. Malcolm Gillies, David Pear and Mark Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Gillies, Malcolm and Pear, David, ‘Percy Grainger and American Nordicism’, in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 115–124 Google Scholar.

67 See, for instance, Grainger’s comments on ‘A Flawlessly Nordic Way of Living (1933)’, in Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, 136–8.

68 Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 79.

69 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 132–3.

70 Grainger on Music, 78.

71 Quoted in Bomberger, MacDowell, 196.

72 Quoted and expanded in Bomberger, MacDowell, 193.

73 Bomberger traces MacDowell’s reception related to this issue in ‘International Tastes vs. American Opportunities’, MacDowell, 180–97.

74 Grainger on Music, 82.

75 Bomberger, MacDowell, 160–61.

76 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 131.

77 Bomberger, MacDowell, 194–5.

78 Hamlin Garland (born 1860, died 1940): an American writer known for his style of realism in works such as Crumbling Idols (1894) and A Daughter of the Middle Border, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922. His admiration for MacDowell was recorded in his memoirs, Roadside Meetings (1930).

79 Leonard, Neil, ‘Edward MacDowll and the Realists’, American Quarterly 18/2 (1966), 176 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The connection between Garland, Howells and the role of realism was noted even earlier by Spencer, Benjamin T. in ‘The New Realism and a National Literature’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 56/4 (1941), 1116–1132 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

80 Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture, 131.

81 Grainger on Music, 332.

82 See Benedict Anderson, ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the World-in-Motion: On the Logics of Seriality’, in Cosmopolitics, 117–33.

83 James Clifford, ‘Mixed Feelings’, in Cosmopolitics, 365. Here I also refer to Pheng Cheah’s commentary in his ‘Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical – Today’, in ibid., 20–22.

84 Clifford, ‘Mixed Feelings’, 365.

85 Kwame Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in Cosmopolitics, 107.

86 Boes, Tobias, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 167 Google Scholar. Here Boes refers to the concept of Ernst Bloch, which is explored in relation to the reciprocal relationship between music and literature in his chapter, ‘Apocalipsis Cum Figuris: Thomas Mann and the Bildungroman at the Ends of Time’, 155–81.

87 Grainger on Music, 78.

88 Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David, ‘Introduction: On Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music’, in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondalgh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 19 Google Scholar.