Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers' Collective Years
1980; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/851110
ISSN2156-7417
Autores Tópico(s)Musicology and Musical Analysis
Resumon the winter of 1931, when Charles Seeger first joined a group of composers deliberating on music and social change, he was 45 years old and a respected instructor at New York's prestigious Institute for Musical Arts. How did this urbane professor, a founder of the august New York Musicological Society, come to write anthems of class struggle? This activity occurred amidst the massive human suffering of the Depression years; Charles Seeger found in the Collective not only social expression but a musical outlet. For the first time in a half-dozen years, he began to compose, inspired by the possibility of giving music a meaning for the audience beyond the seminar (Green 1979:398). When Seeger entered the Collective in 1931, he was, by his account, both disenchanted with the course of fine art music and scornful of folk and popular music. By his departure from the group in November 1935, Charles Seeger was determined to use traditional American folk music to unify diverse sectors of America, a quest he continued in his work in New Deal agencies and in the Pan American Union. (Later he passed this mission along to his musician children: Pete, Mike, and Peggy.) His evolution from an outspoken anti-folk song stance to a later exploration of folksong materials traces a larger journey of left-wing intellectuals toward folk culture in the 1930s. Among Seeger's colleagues at the Composers' Collective were his former student, Henry Cowell, and Marc Blitzstein, Elie Siegmeister, Herbert Haufrecht, Henry Leland Clarke, Earl Robinson, and Norman Cazden. Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland visited the group (Dunaway 1980; Reuss 1971). The Collective itself was an offshoot of the Communist Party's International Music Bureau and the Pierre Degeyter Club (named for the composer of the Internationale). In 1934 and '35, Seeger adopted the nom-de-plume Carl Sands to write what he later called affective music criticism for the Daily Worker. The overall goal of the Collective was to create a new music, simultaneously revolutionary in
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