The Concert of Europe and the Sounds of America
Background and context to this year's Festival theme by Timothy Summers
When we used to study classical music, we devoted considerable time to Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the Eroica. Our attention was given in part to structural investigations (since ‘close reading’ and ‘structuralism’ were high ideals back in the 20th century); we looked at the false entrance of the horn at the recapitulation of the first movement, and at the clear, clever, and forceful system of variations in the last. But just as important as all these interior matters was the title page of the manuscript, from which a dedication to Napoleon Bonaparte had been scratched out with violence sufficient to leave a hole in the page. By 1804, when Napoleon declared himself ‘Emperor’ and Beethoven was mid-Eroica, it was clear that the ‘republican’ ideals of the French Revolution were curdling.
Ten long years later, Napoleon had been defeated, and a new order was being constructed to repair the gaping holes in the politics (and population) of the European continent. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815, led by Klemens von Metternich) established a system for international powers which, in its attempts to handle concord and discord amongst the European states, became known as the ‘Concert of Europe’. This name stuck, for many years and in many languages: Concert européen; Europäisches Konzert; Concierto europeo. On the one hand, the phrase ‘Concert of Europe’ might be seen as strictly metaphorical, or etymological, as we use ‘discord’ to name the apple which brought about the Trojan War. But ‘concert of Europe’ was more particular and concrete. It seemed to indicate that the matters of European concord and discord might indeed be handled through methods akin to those of the European polyphonic and symphonic traditions.
It seems more than coincidental that this same period, lasting from the Congress of Vienna to World War I, is also the golden age of European classical music. The period of the ‘Concert of Europe’ (also known more coolly as the ‘Vienna system’) is framed in music history by the ‘First Viennese School’ of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and the ‘Second Viennese School’ of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In between them, in a more or less Germanic way, are Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler. We studied the works of these men in a sequence that showed the idea of tonality straining and breaking in parallel with European politics. No one attributed any sort of causation, but the comparison was inevitable. We heard it a thousand times.
In this political/musical context, ‘listening’ became not only a matter of paying attention, but also a matter of surveillance, control, and correction—a matter not only of listening to others, but of making sure that the others were playing correctly, in the same rhythm, harmony, and perhaps humor. Musically, this has had some very good results, though the ‘corrective’ spirit still lives rather too heavily in the classical music world. Politically, there were some good results, too, but the negative consequences of ‘listening’ were dark: the order imposed by Metternich grew into an unprecedented apparatus for surveillance. In particular, the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees, which were brought forth in response to the murder of the conservative writer August von Kotzebue, sought to control the flow of thought by banning student societies and removing liberal professors from universities, putting tight controls on the press, and creating official investigative bodies tasked with controlling revolutionary tendencies.
So, the idea of ‘freedom’ in Europe turned inward, toward individuality, interiority, and (for our modest purposes) ‘chamber music’. This kind of music was, and remains, a genre which allowed that 1) large thoughts could be expressed, often wordlessly, in small spaces and 2) someone might make enough noise in the room that thoughts could be exchanged without being overheard and reported. The consequences, both bright and dark, reached powerfully into the twentieth century and beyond.
Meanwhile, in colonial America, George Washington had long since decided not to become any sort of monarch or emperor. His absolute resolution not to pursue permanent power had serious resonance in Europe. On hearing that Washington might leave the Army after the Revolutionary War, George III said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” Some thirty years later, in 1814 (parallel to the Congress of Vienna), Lord Byron still saw both the uniqueness and the historical consequence of Washington’s decisions, and wrote in his ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’:
Where may the wearied eye repose
When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes—One—the first—the last—the best--
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom Envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!
Washington was acutely aware of the importance of ceding power, and of its relative rarity in history. He was not only the first president of the United States of America, but also of the Society of the Cincinnati, named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who retired from the position of dictator to return to his farm in 458 BC.
What made the rising fact of America still more important on the world stage, even in its volatile infancy, is that European-derived ideas of freedom—liberty, equality, fraternity, property, pursuit of happiness— had largely failed in Europe but were in fact taking root in America. America’s immodest spaces promised much space for experimentation—but something more than the expansion of ideas happened. Europe’s big theories and its more orderly arts paled in comparison to the vast, unruly doings of the newly United States. No rules of polyphony could regulate so many voices, motions, actions, and peoples. It must have become clear that there might be new rules for almost everything.
For a more local perspective on both political and cultural matters, we might look to (violinist) Thomas Jefferson. A quick remark in an 1813 letter to Adrienne Catherine de Noailles, comtesse de Tessé, shows his awareness of 1) what sort of shadow the United States would cast in Europe and 2) how tight the surveillance regime in anti-revolutionary Europe would become.
Politics is a subject on which I find it safer to be silent, especially with my friends in France, lest my letters should look like a school of republicanism, and bring on them the surveillance of a police which considers that principle as the worst of heresies.
Jefferson also wrote in a strangely ambiguous way about ‘the arts’, mixing enthusiasm with the idea of ‘embarrassment’, of ‘betterment’, and of the uncertain status of the newly United States in the eyes of the world:
... you see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as [the aim is] to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world & procure them its praise. (Letter to James Madison, 1785)
That the young republic and its striving populace were somehow both lowly and powerful is an idea which has remained central to American identity. We seek to improve, but not to ‘be improved’.
With this in mind, we present three of Beethoven’s symphonies, made small for performance, study, and privacy in the manner of European chamber music. Extending from these epic European-revolutionary sources, we also present a wide array of American music in just a few of its many, many forms: from the strictly conceived dissonance of Ruth Crawford Seeger to the folk songs... also of Ruth Crawford Seeger. We offer as wide a landscape as time will allow, including Chilean protest songs as explored by the Harvard-trained Frederic Rzewski; the late-late Romanticism of New Englander Amy Beach, the still-later Neo-Romanticism of Samuel Barber; and the time-bending patterns of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
What unifies all of this (insofar as ‘unity’ is even a desirable outcome) is the wish to find spaces and voices we can all call our own—to create a bit of undeniable presence in sound and space, beyond the doubt-filled simulations, representations, and surveillance of the present. It is a fairly universal impulse. To make music is to create moments of absolute but indefinable order, to show the legible wake of our activity and contact. It seems to survive, describe, or circumscribe any political order or disorder.
In Europe, we often see order coming from the top down, driven by tradition, harmonic balance, role-playing, and a still-powerful style of ‘correct’ reading; in America, order rises from below, full of raw energy, impulse, and experimentation, with a risk of atavism—the exploration of sound itself in an ever-changing population and landscape. It has been so for at least 250 years. With luck and attention, it will remain so for times to come, forever in dialogue and forever unresolved.
Ten long years later, Napoleon had been defeated, and a new order was being constructed to repair the gaping holes in the politics (and population) of the European continent. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815, led by Klemens von Metternich) established a system for international powers which, in its attempts to handle concord and discord amongst the European states, became known as the ‘Concert of Europe’. This name stuck, for many years and in many languages: Concert européen; Europäisches Konzert; Concierto europeo. On the one hand, the phrase ‘Concert of Europe’ might be seen as strictly metaphorical, or etymological, as we use ‘discord’ to name the apple which brought about the Trojan War. But ‘concert of Europe’ was more particular and concrete. It seemed to indicate that the matters of European concord and discord might indeed be handled through methods akin to those of the European polyphonic and symphonic traditions.
It seems more than coincidental that this same period, lasting from the Congress of Vienna to World War I, is also the golden age of European classical music. The period of the ‘Concert of Europe’ (also known more coolly as the ‘Vienna system’) is framed in music history by the ‘First Viennese School’ of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and the ‘Second Viennese School’ of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. In between them, in a more or less Germanic way, are Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Richard Wagner, Robert Schumann, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, Johannes Brahms, and Gustav Mahler. We studied the works of these men in a sequence that showed the idea of tonality straining and breaking in parallel with European politics. No one attributed any sort of causation, but the comparison was inevitable. We heard it a thousand times.
In this political/musical context, ‘listening’ became not only a matter of paying attention, but also a matter of surveillance, control, and correction—a matter not only of listening to others, but of making sure that the others were playing correctly, in the same rhythm, harmony, and perhaps humor. Musically, this has had some very good results, though the ‘corrective’ spirit still lives rather too heavily in the classical music world. Politically, there were some good results, too, but the negative consequences of ‘listening’ were dark: the order imposed by Metternich grew into an unprecedented apparatus for surveillance. In particular, the 1819 Carlsbad Decrees, which were brought forth in response to the murder of the conservative writer August von Kotzebue, sought to control the flow of thought by banning student societies and removing liberal professors from universities, putting tight controls on the press, and creating official investigative bodies tasked with controlling revolutionary tendencies.
So, the idea of ‘freedom’ in Europe turned inward, toward individuality, interiority, and (for our modest purposes) ‘chamber music’. This kind of music was, and remains, a genre which allowed that 1) large thoughts could be expressed, often wordlessly, in small spaces and 2) someone might make enough noise in the room that thoughts could be exchanged without being overheard and reported. The consequences, both bright and dark, reached powerfully into the twentieth century and beyond.
Meanwhile, in colonial America, George Washington had long since decided not to become any sort of monarch or emperor. His absolute resolution not to pursue permanent power had serious resonance in Europe. On hearing that Washington might leave the Army after the Revolutionary War, George III said, “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.” Some thirty years later, in 1814 (parallel to the Congress of Vienna), Lord Byron still saw both the uniqueness and the historical consequence of Washington’s decisions, and wrote in his ‘Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte’:
Where may the wearied eye repose
When gazing on the Great;
Where neither guilty glory glows,
Nor despicable state?
Yes—One—the first—the last—the best--
The Cincinnatus of the West,
Whom Envy dared not hate,
Bequeath’d the name of Washington,
To make man blush there was but one!
Washington was acutely aware of the importance of ceding power, and of its relative rarity in history. He was not only the first president of the United States of America, but also of the Society of the Cincinnati, named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, who retired from the position of dictator to return to his farm in 458 BC.
What made the rising fact of America still more important on the world stage, even in its volatile infancy, is that European-derived ideas of freedom—liberty, equality, fraternity, property, pursuit of happiness— had largely failed in Europe but were in fact taking root in America. America’s immodest spaces promised much space for experimentation—but something more than the expansion of ideas happened. Europe’s big theories and its more orderly arts paled in comparison to the vast, unruly doings of the newly United States. No rules of polyphony could regulate so many voices, motions, actions, and peoples. It must have become clear that there might be new rules for almost everything.
For a more local perspective on both political and cultural matters, we might look to (violinist) Thomas Jefferson. A quick remark in an 1813 letter to Adrienne Catherine de Noailles, comtesse de Tessé, shows his awareness of 1) what sort of shadow the United States would cast in Europe and 2) how tight the surveillance regime in anti-revolutionary Europe would become.
Politics is a subject on which I find it safer to be silent, especially with my friends in France, lest my letters should look like a school of republicanism, and bring on them the surveillance of a police which considers that principle as the worst of heresies.
Jefferson also wrote in a strangely ambiguous way about ‘the arts’, mixing enthusiasm with the idea of ‘embarrassment’, of ‘betterment’, and of the uncertain status of the newly United States in the eyes of the world:
... you see I am an enthusiast on the subject of the arts. But it is an enthusiasm of which I am not ashamed, as [the aim is] to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, to reconcile to them the respect of the world & procure them its praise. (Letter to James Madison, 1785)
That the young republic and its striving populace were somehow both lowly and powerful is an idea which has remained central to American identity. We seek to improve, but not to ‘be improved’.
With this in mind, we present three of Beethoven’s symphonies, made small for performance, study, and privacy in the manner of European chamber music. Extending from these epic European-revolutionary sources, we also present a wide array of American music in just a few of its many, many forms: from the strictly conceived dissonance of Ruth Crawford Seeger to the folk songs... also of Ruth Crawford Seeger. We offer as wide a landscape as time will allow, including Chilean protest songs as explored by the Harvard-trained Frederic Rzewski; the late-late Romanticism of New Englander Amy Beach, the still-later Neo-Romanticism of Samuel Barber; and the time-bending patterns of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.
What unifies all of this (insofar as ‘unity’ is even a desirable outcome) is the wish to find spaces and voices we can all call our own—to create a bit of undeniable presence in sound and space, beyond the doubt-filled simulations, representations, and surveillance of the present. It is a fairly universal impulse. To make music is to create moments of absolute but indefinable order, to show the legible wake of our activity and contact. It seems to survive, describe, or circumscribe any political order or disorder.
In Europe, we often see order coming from the top down, driven by tradition, harmonic balance, role-playing, and a still-powerful style of ‘correct’ reading; in America, order rises from below, full of raw energy, impulse, and experimentation, with a risk of atavism—the exploration of sound itself in an ever-changing population and landscape. It has been so for at least 250 years. With luck and attention, it will remain so for times to come, forever in dialogue and forever unresolved.