Contenu du sommaire : Les musiques savantes américaines : questions d'esthétique

This article explores the roots of the American art music tradition in the aesthetics of John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893), the most influential writer on music in 19th century America. As a Brook Farmer and a former Unitarian minister, Dwight articulated a conception of music simultaneously endowed with deep spiritual content and social import. Steeped in the literary and musical traditions of German Romanticism, especially the works of Schiller and Beethoven, Dwight's musical Transcendentalism echoed many of Emerson's themes and contributed to fashioning the key notions that nurtured the aesthetic tradition in which Charles Ives was raised. His utopian musical anthropology turned music into a form of spiritual experience reorienting our relation to the world and thus foreshadowing the refounding of society.

George Gershwin's music is not confined to one universe. Its background hints at European sources, while Gershwin's achievement is clearly rooted in the American aesthetic world. Thus, the “serious” music of the classical musician naturally enters into a dialogue with various folk cultures (especially Central European and African-American music, be it religious, orchestral, rural, etc.). Gershwin's professional commitment and his artistic openness testify to his unprejudiced approach to art, which accounts for his music becoming a staple of three very different repertoires — jazz, pop, and “classical” music. Gershwin is even responsible for a form of mutual contamination between jazz and classical music, since jazz has borrowed operatic forms from Gershwin (Porgy and Bess has been performed by artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis), while Gershwin borrowed colours and rhythms from jazz and imported them into classical music. The logical outcome of such a mixed heritage is obvious in contemporary jazz pianist Marcus Roberts' rendition of Gershwin's works, which involves a symphony orchestra and a jazz rhythm section, thus harking back to Gershwin's own double outlook. Gershwin was not an isolated case. The great composers of his time shared the same ambivalent attitude, caught between cultural ties that reflect European origins and the American universe that ultimately gave shape to their music. Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Howard Dietz, Sigmund Romberg, and Alan Jay Lerner come to mind. Social factors impact aesthetic substance : the rise of a new musical form stems directly from the coming together of composers of Jewish-European origin, African-American culture and the development of show business. George Gershwin showcases a specifically American incarnation of the dialectics of art seen both as a product of contemporary folk culture and as an individual elaboration of this material in the field of “legit” music.

This essay attempts to draw a parallel between the musician John Cage and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the former a composer – if indeed this is the right term – of « sound games » inseparable from everyday settings in which supposedly impure and nonmusical « noises » abound, and the latter an inventor of « language games » similarly apprehended in the context of everyday life. A detailed comparison between Cage's and Wittgenstein's « pragmatic » rather than « empirical » approaches sheds light on what Cage himself termed his « philosophy », which he equates with a form of « music action » whereby he rebels against the tyranny of the « great form » and the traditional European understanding of musical syntax. This essay reflects on the similar ways in which Cage and Wittgenstein attempt to distance themselves from established notions of harmony, the former by reexamining the nature of musical significance, and the latter by calling into question the notion that words somehow « fit » the world. Cage's questioning of intention and its role in musical composition is central to the argument.

This article presents and analyzes the piano music of four twentieth-century American composers — George Antheil, Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and Conlon Nancarrow — who all share an interest in mechanisms and mechanistic conceptions of art. Using as a theoretical framework the concept of the “technological sublime” first proposed by Leo Marx, we intend to show that the radical calling into question of the limit separating the human from the machine in the music of these composers is not the product of an eccentric avant-garde but, on the contrary, is at the center of an American artistic ethos characterized by the problematic relation between the organic and the mechanic. We suggest that what we call an “aesthetic tension” at the heart of such piano music raises issues of performance that are crucial to understanding how the aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions of art are interrelated.

In this interview, the French composer Betsy Jolas evokes her lifelong transatlantic experience with vivacity, humor and generosity. Born in Paris to a French father of German descent— the poet Eugene Jolas, founder of the important literary review transition — and an American mother—the translator Maria Jolas—, Betsy Jolas spent her formative years during World War Two at Bennington College, Vermont, before completing her studies at the Paris Conservatoire, where she was later to teach musical analysis and composition. She has returned regularly to the United States from 1971 onwards, teaching at such prestigious institutions as Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, and Mills College ; she has been invited several times at the world-renowned Tanglewood Festival. She has been awarded many prizes and distinctions both in France and the United States, where she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Betsy Jolas is undoubtedly one of the “great witnesses” of American and French twentieth-century artistic life. Her spirited commitment to teaching, her utter originality and independence from all schools and coteries, her often trenchant views on music, her creative vitality, all bear witness to an exceptional artistic personality. A ceaseless teller of anecdotes with a wonderful sense of detail, she always captures in her vignettes the essence of the people and situations she fondly remembers throughout this interview.

Zigzag Journeys in Europe (1879) by Hezekiah Butterworth, Three Vassar Girls in England (1884) and Witch Winnie in Paris (1897) by Elizabeth Williams Champney are travelogue storybooks, a genre which flourished at the end of the 19th century. As can be expected of works strongly influenced by a literary trend, they offer representations of France and England based on stereotypes, mostly of European origin. These stereotypes reflect a tendency to foster open-minded and peaceful exchanges between the United States, England, and France. As a result, these novels depict pacified countries and a unified territory in which national differences are no longer perceptible.