Composing a Nation in Crisis: Musical Americanism and US National Identity in Elie Siegmeister's Vietnam War Works
2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5406/19452349.41.1.09
ISSN1945-2349
Autores Tópico(s)Communism, Protests, Social Movements
ResumoIn a 1976 interview, Elie Siegmeister proclaimed the importance of nationalism as the basis of great art. According to the US composer, great art is a response to the artist's situation and stands upon both temporal and locational foundations. This assertion is by no means surprising coming from Siegmeister, whose belief in the importance of developing a national music for the United States is a recurring theme in his published writings. This belief is equally evident in the composer's longstanding interest in promoting US folk and jazz music, through performances with the American Ballad Singers and through his own compositions and arrangements. Siegmeister frequently used his compositions as a way of responding to his own environment and time, setting poetry on political or social topics.2The Face of War and “Evil,” two political solo-vocal works composed in 1967, both protest the Vietnam War. In responding to this particular situation, however, these works encapsulate not only protest against the conflict, but also a complicated relationship with US national identity and musical Americanism. The story these works tell is not simply one of protest, but one of a particular time and place. I argue that these works present an American perspective that is both tied to and eschews an earlier, idealized conception of US national identity, now shattered by the nation's role in Vietnam. After establishing the context of Siegmeister's leftist political views and his commitment to musical Americanism, I analyze the composer's two Vietnam War works, demonstrating that the dissonant musical language he employs—through the style he terms “American Expressionism” in The Face of War, and through juxtaposition and contrast in “Evil”—is the product of his impulse to represent America musically at a time when he perceived his country's international role to be destructive. Ultimately, The Face of War and “Evil” carry the distinct footprint of the turbulent circumstances in which they were created: a period of disillusionment and conflict for this Americanist composer, prompted by US involvement in the Vietnam War.The 1960s and early 1970s were a fraught period in US history, during which strongly held and antithetical opinions about the Vietnam War prompted widespread social unrest and protest. Technological developments in the twentieth century allowed the conflict to be broadcast through media outlets all over the world, and for the first time US citizens at home were able to see for themselves the brutal realities of wartime carnage. This exposure, in combination with suspicions about the motivations behind US involvement, led many citizens to question traditional conceptions of American exceptionalism and their country's assumed position occupying the moral high ground. The effects of the Vietnam War were widespread and long-lasting, as indicated in Henry Kissinger's 1982 assertion, “Vietnam is still with us. It has created doubts about American judgment, about American credibility, about American power—not only at home, but throughout the world.”3 This statement is particularly notable coming from Kissinger, who was Secretary of State during the conflict and was at least partly responsible for many decisions about US involvement.It was amid these circumstances, in 1967, that Siegmeister composed his two Vietnam War works.4 In September, Siegmeister set some of Langston Hughes's poetry in a song cycle entitled The Face of War. The cycle's strong antiwar stance is described by the composer in his 1979 liner notes included in the Music of Elie Siegmeister album, in which he states that “like Langston Hughes and many other artists, I hated the Vietnam War. . . . I simply had to voice my anger.”5 Siegmeister expressed his opposition to the war not only through this composition, but also through participation in protest events. On October 21 of the same year, he joined over 100,000 other protesters in marching on Washington, an event he described to his student Leonard Lehrman as “marvelous!”: While it was not quite the storming of the Bastille or the fall of the Winter Palace, it had the feeling. The Hippies tried to levitate the Pentagon, and damn near succeeded (it's full of hot air as it is). . . . One student carried a sign reading “Johnson, pull out like your father should have.” . . . Excellent advice, I think.6In November, Siegmeister attended an antiwar poetry reading, “Poets for Peace,” which prompted him to set one of the poems featured at the event, “Evil,” by Richard Eberhart, to music. The resulting song of the same title represented, according to Siegmeister, a condemnation of the “Vietnam War and the State Department and their shenanigans in trying to make that a noble enterprise.”7 This November 13 event also inspired him to organize a similar event for musicians in the following year. A “Composers and Musicians for Peace” concert was held at Carnegie Hall on May 24, 1968.8The Face of War was performed at this concert, along with works by eleven other US composers, and Siegmeister added orchestral accompaniment to the song cycle specially for this event.9 The concert was dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., after his assassination on April 4, 1968. Just a year earlier, King's famous denunciation of the Vietnam War affected the premiere of Siegmeister's I Have a Dream cantata, when pro-war picketing prevented King and other prominent figures from attending.10 In May of 1970, as a professor at Hofstra University, Siegmeister participated in peaceful protests organized in the wake of the Kent State shooting. Special events organized by Hofstra's Ad Hoc Academic Freedom Committee included a lecture by Siegmeister on “Music and the War: The Democratic Tradition in Music,” as well as performances of two of his works.11The Face of War and “Evil” are just two among a number of works written in reaction to the war in Vietnam, both in the United States and worldwide. While the art music community produced more than 115 anti-Vietnam War compositions between 1965 and 1975, this repertoire is rarely heard in performance today and is similarly underrepresented in scholarship, excepting studies by Ben Arnold and Timothy P. Kinsella.12 Both Arnold and Kinsella describe trends within this group of works, most notably an overwhelming attitude of opposition and protest. Arnold emphasizes this as a significant change in the nature of war-related compositions, asserting that “composers no longer wrote compositions to support the war as [many did] during World War II; they openly protested the war and expressed antigovernment sentiments directly and to a degree unprecedented in history.”13 Kinsella likewise considers the repertoire of Vietnam War works to “[represent] a radical break from past tradition,” but acknowledges its position within a trajectory “that transformed war music from formulaic depictions of glorious battle to horrifying indictments of man's inhumanity to man, and literally frightening depictions of gruesome carnage” over the course of the twentieth century.14 Many of the other trends these scholars identify can be viewed as part of this trajectory. In their subject-matter, Vietnam War works depart from most earlier war compositions by calling for peace rather than rallying to victory.15 The composers overwhelmingly demonstrate empathy toward all victims of the war, regardless of the side on which they fought.16 Foreign soldiers’ lives are consistently considered as valuable as those of Americans; moreover, Arnold notes that “numerous popular and art composers satirized their own troops.”17 Attempts to glorify the deaths of Americans and their allies as heroic or their sacrifices as noble, common in previous war compositions, are absent.18 Lastly, Kinsella notes a conspicuous lack of both nationalism and patriotism, along with a trend toward placing direct or implied blame on the government.19These changes to the nature of war compositions are similarly reflected in the compositional techniques used in Vietnam works. Arnold and Kinsella agree that most of these works reject traditional forms and structures, embracing experimental and avant-garde techniques.20 Some composers use realistic sounds of gunfire, explosions, or screaming to emphasize the horror of the war.21 Kinsella asserts the “nightmarish” nature of this particular war necessitated a change in modes of composition: Composers of art music found traditional concepts of form, narrative, and technique . . . inadequate to convey their vision of the war. The war in Vietnam was a nightmarish war quite unlike any previous American war (which is not to suggest that all war is not nightmarish), and its complexity and surrealism inspired a new and different type of art music. Composers marshaled a wealth of innovative and extreme musical techniques in order to express the particular anguish, brutality, and absurdity of the Vietnam War, a postmodern war which . . . strongly resists traditional narrative techniques.22While Siegmeister was adamant in his opposition to the war and was involved in public events protesting it, his Vietnam War compositions are scarcely represented in the scholarly literature on art music responding to the conflict.23The Face of War and “Evil” exhibit many of the characteristics listed above that both Kinsella and Arnold identify as common in Vietnam War works; however, the implications of these characteristics become more significant when considered in the context of Siegmeister's attitudes toward nationalism and politics in the United States.While he never joined the Communist Party, Siegmeister was outspoken in his socialist political views throughout his lifetime.24 In September and November of 1933, the then-24-year-old composer published two articles in Modern Monthly, “Social Influences in Modern Music” and “The Class Spirit in Modern Music.”25 These two articles, described by Carol Oja as “an intense Marxist-flavored polemic,” advocated for a fusion of proletarian spirit with art music that would become a feature of Siegmeister's own works.26 He expanded on these ideas in his 1938 pamphlet Music and Society, the Marxist basis of which was criticized as “dangerous” by Kurt List.27 Siegmeister was a dedicated participant in cultural and musical activities related to the Popular Front. One of the many young composers who formed the Composers Collective in the 1930s, Siegmeister also conducted a workers’ chorus and served as music editor of Direction, a cultural journal associated with the Popular Front.28 The politics and artistic expressions of this movement reached far beyond Communist Party members. As Michael Denning has demonstrated, the Popular Front can be viewed as a “historical bloc” united through common goals of antifascism, antilynching, and unionism.29 The alignment between the Popular Front and antilynching, antisegregation politics is worth noting, as similar connections between the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements will be relevant to my discussion of Siegmeister's setting of The Face of War, by Black poet and social activist Langston Hughes—himself a notable figure in the cultural activities of the Popular Front.The leftist views that the young Siegmeister espouses in his early writings carried continued importance throughout his career. His proclivity for texts that emphasize the plight of the proletariat can be seen as early as his first published work, “The Strange Funeral in Braddock” (1936), which, through an evocative setting of poetry by Michael Gold, reinforces the workers’ struggle by relating the story of a Bohemian factory worker who meets his untimely demise swallowed in a block of steel. While composing music for the masses was common for many composers during the 1930s and early 1940s, Siegmeister's situation is significant—and unusual among American composers—because he continued this focus through the 1950s and beyond. Siegmeister's belief that, as he put it, “music is one of the elements of a normal American existence, not apart from it” inspired him not only to write music on proletarian themes throughout his career, but also to publish a number of books aimed at promoting music appreciation among the general public.30Alongside his passion for accessible, socially useful music, Siegmeister was a dedicated musical nationalist. He published a number of annotated collections of US folk music and spirituals, including A Treasury of American Song (1940), Work and Sing: A Collection of the Songs that Built America (1944), Folkways U.S.A. (1953–58), and The Joan Baez Songbook (1964). The American Ballad Singers, a vocal group Siegmeister founded in 1939, toured around the United States performing folk songs and ballads rooted in the country's history, including many of his own compositions and arrangements.31Furthermore, a number of his published articles focus on defining and promoting a particularly “American” music.32 Through his writings and interviews he emphasizes the importance of US national identity to his music, identifying himself along with composers such as Charles Ives and George Gershwin as part of an “underground indigenous musical line, always rejected by the Establishment.”33 Siegmeister's understanding of “indigenous” elements encompasses a broad range of musical traditions he considered native to the United States, including jazz, spirituals, and folk songs, in addition to Native American music. The national identity he identifies within his own and other US composers’ music is linked to two things: the integration of these “indigenous” musical elements and a consonant, lyrical style. First, Siegmeister considers the integration of folk and jazz elements into art music to be a central element of the “American” style of music. In his Music Lover's Handbook, for example, he asserts that “the ripening of our native musical consciousness” is essential to the future of US music, “for there can never be any true music in a country until the great international traditions of culture are wedded to the local popular style—until one indivisible national language, indigenous to the soil and the people, emerges.”34 Second, Siegmeister considers American music to be associated with a particular musical style: the lyrical and harmonically consonant style in which he is known for composing. Described by Oja as one who “favor[ed] traditional musical attitudes and materials,” Siegmeister continually indicated these preferences not only through his own compositions, but also through his writings on music.35 In a 1977 article in the New York Times, “A New Day is Dawning for American Composers,” Siegmeister links his preferred style of composition to US national identity by referring to Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and others as the “First American School,” responsible for creating “a distinctly native style.”36Siegmeister's writings and compositions encapsulate the two types of musical Americanism described by Barbara A. Zuck in A History of Musical Americanism: “conceptual Americanism,” which expresses a “pro-American-music stance,” and “compositional Americanism.” Zuck describes the latter as “the musical use of native elements,” but Emily Abrams Ansari's description of Americanist composers as “[seeking] to create a specifically American sound in their music” more accurately encompasses the many ways these composers worked towards this goal.37 Zuck describes both conceptual and compositional Americanism as grounded in the same impulse, a reaction to the class divisions in the United States that prioritized European musical traditions.38 This certainly rings true in the case of Siegmeister, who condemned the “haughty cultural snobbism” that “considers the European way as the noble high road and the American one the vulgar, low (and cheap) road” in his 1977 article, emphasizing the difference between American music and “European-style music written by Americans.”39 Indeed, Siegmeister's Americanism, both conceptual and compositional, reflects his socialist values. In using and promoting folk themes, he was consciously tying his output to the music of the common people; he considered folk art to be “the deepest, most democratic layer of our musical culture,” because it “stem[s] directly out of common life.”40 Similarly, by employing a consonant, approachable style, Siegmeister argues against musical elitism. In 1943, Siegmeister described his motivations in the early 1930s: “I found myself quite dissatisfied with performing for the narrow and oversophisticated audiences of the ‘elite’ organizations, and turned to making music for the wider audience of people who never came to modern music concerts—never even heard of them in fact.”41As musical trends in the United States changed over the course of the twentieth century, Siegmeister maintained his emphasis on an approachable musical aesthetic, disparaging the “abstruse calculation, cerebral patterns, machine-made sounds or, on the other hand, mystical throws of the dice” that dominated during the Cold War.42 In a 1977 interview he emphasized the importance of composing for an audience: “I care very much how the audience receives my work . . . if nobody wants to listen to your music, what's the use of writing it?”43 As Lehrman and Boulton note, this statement references and directly challenges the elitist views espoused by Milton Babbitt in his well-known essay, “Who Cares If You Listen?”44Overall, Siegmeister understands American music as a combination of both the proletarian spirit and an approachable musical style that serves that spirit. In his 1977 New York Times article, Siegmeister associates American masterpieces not only with the style of the “First American School,” but also with “a humanist concern for the common and the low,” indicating their interwoven nature.45 While Siegmeister was a devoted cultural nationalist, during the Cold War period he struggled to reconcile political nationalism with his leftist views.46 This conflict between his cultural and political beliefs comes to the fore in his two Vietnam War works. It is Siegmeister's political values, his conception of national identity, and the role of these elements in shaping his music that will reveal the intricacies of this Americanist composer's experience of the Vietnam War.For both of his Vietnam War works, Siegmeister selected pre-existing poetry that addressed the developing conflict. While the texts for The Face of War and “Evil” were written by Langston Hughes and Richard Eberhart, respectively, Siegmeister's choice to set these poems makes the poetry an important element of his own reaction to the Vietnam War. The source texts for each work were set without any alterations by Siegmeister, other than reversing the order of two poems from The Face of War and changing the title of one of these poems.47 The “Poets for Peace” event where Siegmeister first heard “Evil” featured readings of a number of antiwar poems, but Siegmeister chose this particular one from among them. His choice of The Face of War was similarly purposeful; when his plans to work on a Vietnam War piece with his friend and frequent collaborator Langston Hughes were abruptly cut short by the poet's death in May of 1967, Siegmeister selected this cycle of five poems from Hughes's forthcoming book, The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times.Through Hughes's poetry, Siegmeister's song cycle subtly highlights not only the devastation and inhumanity of war, but also the complexities of racial tensions surrounding the Vietnam War. In his liner notes for the cycle, Siegmeister asserts that the poetry speaks out against the violence suffered by racial minorities, describing it as “among the most powerful indictments of man's brutality to man—especially to the black and brown man—I have ever seen.”48 During the Vietnam War era, many connections formed between the antiwar and civil rights movements. Both movements drew upon similar political demographics, and many considered them to be motivated by common goals of human decency and equality.49 In addition to these commonalities, the inequitable number of Black Americans who were drafted and the questionable morality of requiring Black soldiers to fight for their country overseas when they struggled for equal rights at home were precipitating factors for many who joined the antiwar movement.50 Martin Luther King, Jr., was partially responsible for the two movements becoming so intertwined, making it all the more significant that Siegmeister's The Face of War premiered at a concert dedicated to his memory.51 On April 4, 1967, one year before his assassination, King delivered the well-known “Beyond Vietnam” speech, his most controversial public denunciation of the war in Vietnam.52 In the year that followed, King attended and spoke at numerous antiwar rallies and marches, solidifying himself as a symbol of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the connections between the two.Hughes's The Face of War presents five vignettes that directly confront the reality of wartime through powerful images of the violence and senselessness of war. The poems emphasize the perspectives of those who are directly affected by the fighting; namely, the soldiers, victims, and their families. The poems in The Face of War are less explicit than many of Hughes's other works in highlighting the struggles of Black Americans and condemning the injustices of racial inequality. The only explicit mention of race occurs in the final poem “War,” which references different skin colors as a way to illustrate equality of blame—all parties are responsible for allowing this violence: “What color is the face of war? Brown, black, white—your face and my face.” Nevertheless, these poems reflect Hughes's continued commitment to building a literary tradition upon Black American vernacular forms and dialect.53 In particular, the language of the poem “Without Benefit of Declaration” (renamed “Listen Here, Joe” in Siegmeister's song cycle) features folk speech and street-talk, elements that Richard K. Barksdale describes as both characteristic of Hughes's folk poetry and instrumental in advancing revolutionary Black street poetry.54 In contrast to the direct experiences of war described in The Face of War, Eberhart's “Evil” takes on the perspective of an American citizen living at home in the United States. References to fighting or the military are notably absent, and the only mention of the war is in mediated form, as “pictures of the lacerated Vietnamese.” Instead, the focus of the poem is a dinner party at which the guest of honor is a personification of evil.These source texts for Siegmeister's works, included here as appendices, engage with many of the common characteristics of Vietnam War-related musical works that Kinsella and Arnold have identified. For example, “Peace,” the third song in The Face of War, equalizes and shows empathy for victims on all sides of the conflict—once they are dead, neither winners nor losers care about the outcome. In “Listen Here, Joe,” the second song in the cycle, Hughes confronts the idea of heroism in battle by pointing to the emptiness of receiving a medal in payment for a human life: “a medal to your family in exchange for a guy.”Particularly notable in these poems is a strong antigovernment stance and placement of blame on those in positions of power. “Evil” challenges the government's position on the conflict and the validity of US involvement, ascribing blame to the politicians supporting the war in Vietnam. The poem describes Evil as the “ruler of the world” and points to discussions of “the affairs of state” in which the shame of “[losing] face” and “being weak” is considered worse than killing—a potent image at a time when it was already clear that the war in Vietnam was not going to end tidily. Siegmeister's musical setting emphasizes these aspects of the text. In example 1, the music is marked with a crescendo and the instruction to “get faster,” leading to the accented, fortissimo first beat of m. 38. The phrase reaches its highest pitch at this point, and the dotted rhythm in the vocal line adds insistence to the word “shame.” This lends emphasis to the diners’ justification for their actions—“that to lose face was a shame in being weak”—while pointing to the double meaning of the word “shame” in this context: the actions perpetrated in fear of being seen as weak are in fact what the diners should be ashamed of.These texts do not only place blame on the US government, however. Both “Evil” and The Face of War point to the culpability of human society in general, and that of the United States in particular, for the horrors of the war. Both poetic works call for the outrage and protest of the public by equating inaction with complicity. “Evil” repeatedly draws attention to ways in which the character of Evil is similar to that of the narrator and his friends. At first Evil's “mannered disguise” hides his true identity, seemingly excusing the other partygoers for considering him one of them. As the poem develops, however, none of those present at the dinner party voice any disagreement regarding the atrocities of the war. Thus, Eberhart makes all those who do not voice their objections complicit, extending the blame for the Vietnam War to all. Even the narrator, whose true feelings are revealed in the final line as he describes his desire to shoot his “imaginary bullet through [Evil's] throat,” shares responsibility, as he does not speak up or take any action. The Face of War presents a similar view, particularly with its final poem, “War.” In this text, which supplies the cycle's title, Hughes stresses the culpability of all parties through lines such as “The face of war is my face. / The face of war is your face,” and “It's hard to blame me, / Because I am here / So I kill you. / And you kill me.”By assigning blame to the US society and government in “Evil,” and to those on both sides of the conflict in The Face of War, these poems challenge the proclamations of exceptionalism and moral unassailability that characterized the US government's official rhetoric regarding Vietnam. This challenge to government rhetoric is also evident in “Evil” during the toasts. The party guests drink “to the nation” and “to the glory of the state,” expressing their patriotism, while also reinforcing their belief in the ideals of freedom and individuality through toasts “to freedom” and “to individual aims.” These toasts are tinged with irony and falsehood, both through the presence and participation of Evil and through the implied connections to the atrocities of war mentioned earlier in the poem. The phrase “We drank to the glory of our state, / None thinking this uncouth,” for example, parallels the earlier statement that “None thought to kill was bad.” In example 2, Siegmeister's expressive direction to sing his setting of this passage in a “noble” way lends a sense of caricature to the already ironic lyrics.In selecting these poems, Siegmeister evinces not only his opposition to the war but also his political views more broadly.Through their commentary on the Vietnam War, the two musical works draw attention to the plight of the war's proletarian victims, while simultaneously placing bourgeois society and the American government at fault. The Face of War and “Evil” present two very different perspectives on the war, one of which is directly impacted by the destruction while the other maintains an artificial distance. The vignettes in The Face of War draw attention to the lives lost, depicting soldiers as everyday people with parents and families at home. Its first song, “Official Notice,” is sung from the perspective of a grieving parent. The second song, “Listen Here, Joe,” directly addresses a young “kid” soldier who will die the next day on the battlefield. Contrastingly, in “Evil,” the dinner party setting that is so welcoming to the titular guest holds not only the United States, but more specifically its upper-class, culpable for the war. The polite conversation and ceremony of the banquet hall highlight the perceived distance between bourgeois American society and the atrocities of war that are “somehow not to be mentioned.” These two perspectives come together to create a larger picture of US society, one in which the government and the upper classes are considered responsible for a war that is destroying the lives of working-class soldiers.Siegmeister's choice of source texts is not the only element of these works that illustrates his conception of US society during the Vietnam War. His musical settings for these texts emphasize the stark contrast between their perspectives on the war, which he illuminates through a stylistic juxtaposition of the harshness of truth with the empty veneer of falsity.The musical language of The Face of War departs from the lyrical, consonant style for which Siegmeister is known, embracing an aesthetic that is dissonant and jarring. The composer's liner notes describe The Face of War as “an outcry, sometimes in harsh, almost atonal musical terms, against needless, horrible death on the battlefield.”55 David Lee Maze considers the music of the song cycle to be in some ways consistent with the composer's later-period style, particularly through its textural lightness and exposed inner structures.56Example 3 shows the sparse texture of the opening, a moment similar to what can be heard in some of the composer's contemporary songs, such as the Five Cummings Songs composed in 1970.Particular to The Face of War, however, is the insistent and often aggressive use of dissonance. Diminished-octave intervals—such as the C-sharp and C-natural that articulate the first beats of the opening three measures—and their augmented-octave inversions can be found throughout the piano part. The strident dissonance of these inte
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