Stephen Longstreet We all went to Paris: Americans in the City of Light, 1776-1971 The Macmillan Co.: NY, 1972, 448 pp., 1920s
[p. 377] Chapter 48 Americans with Music-Harris, Thomson, etc.
Just how many Americans were living in Paris, how many hung out in cafes, no one will ever know for sure. The American Chamber of Commerce in Herbert Hoover's time in 1927, figured in some way not fully explained that there were 15,000 Americans living in Paris. Perhaps, it was pointed out, that they were only counting people doing business in Paris, not artists. The police said there were 35,000 Americans residing in Paris in 1927. The must have been counting the kind of people the U.S. Chamber of Commerce didn't think worth adding up: painters, writers, composers, plain loafers, who could say to be betrayed at least proves we still exist. All those who sat on the terrasses of the Cafe Du Dome, Le Select La Rotuonde drinking marc-cassis. These cafes and the American Express, where one could pick up checks from home, were best liked by the Montpartnasse Americans. Some were poets like Stephen Vincent Benet, who remembered his roots and the American genocide of the Indians.
I shall not rest in Montparnasse . . .
I shall not be there, I shall rise and pass
Bury my heart in Wounded Knee . . .
While a great deal has been printed and gossiped about the writers who found their style or their souls in Paris, the musicians have been only [p. 378] vaguely known, or made into living figures by the writers of memoirs. American musicians hungered for news of Satie, Nadia Boulanger, the Ballet Russe of Sergei Diaghilev, the new sounds of Debussy and Ravel. The amenities of musical controversy drew younger Americans to Paris. From the first notes of Petrouchka in 1911, Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913 (the latter caused a riot in its first playing) to the final cheers and bravos for Daphnis and Chloe, L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune. It seem Paris was making all the right new sounds. The artist would cry "We are the taste-manipulators, open your ears!"
Virgil Thomson came out of Harvard to run away to Paris from his German music teachers. George Antheil came, Aaron Copland ("For me abroad inevitably meant Paris.") All found the air freer and living costing just a little less. Only the most pessimistic Americans gave up and went home if he could stay.
In 1918 there was talk of an American Conservatory of Music at Fontainebleau, for American students to spend summers with French teachers to acquire experience and the consciousness of new ideas. By 1921 the school was open in an old palace and first in line was Aaron Copland. Later he and Virgil Thomson and Melville Smith were the first Americans to study with the great Nadia Boulanger, sultana of musical sensitivity sensitiveness. Studying with Nadia-to the musical world-was the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval in Modern Music. Copland admitted: "I arrived fresh out of Brooklyn, twenty, and all agog . . . Her intellectual interest . . . [was] an important stimulus to her American students." She had an irreducible uniqueness, multiple qualities for searching out true talent.
In 1926 she gave a concert of chamber music by American composers, work of her pupils. Roy Harris gave a performance of his Concerto for Piano, Clarinet, and String Quartet. Harris was frontier-Oklahoma by birth, small-town California by growth, before he got to France and Nadia. "Going to Paris was the best thing I ever did. I was just a truck driver then, and had written my first works out of the fullness of my ignorance . . She said there were three kinds of music students: the ones who had money and no talent, and those she took; the kind who had talent and no money, and those she took, and the third kind had money and talent and those she never got."
. . . [p. 379]
Because the writers created most of the impressions of Americans in Paris in those days, they seem more interesting than the musicians. But the enfant terrible, George Antheil, was the equal of Hemingway or Gertrude Stein in attracting attention with an absurdity of nihilism. George was twenty-two when he came to Paris, short, thin, brash, and loud. He carried a pistol in a holster under his evening clothes and would often take it out and balance it on the piano when performing in public, the way a poker player in a big game of the old West would place his Colt .45 in plain view to show that he'd stand for no monkey business. George had played piano over most of Europe after coming from Trenton, New Jersey. He was admired by many experts as having great promise. Stravinsky set up a concordat for Geroge in Paris, but the young man delayed because a Hungarian girl named Boske with whom he was involved couldn't get a visa to join him and he needed her for her flattering unction to his art. He got to Paris in June, 1923, and cried out, "This is the city of Stravinsky's music!" Hardly news by then, even to the ordinary citizens aware of the city's obsessive cults of art.
George went to work on his Ballet Mecanique; his fame rests on that with the public, those who remember him at all. It was scored for eight pianos, a player piano, drums, xylophones, airplane propellers, and other mechanical noisemakers. It was art to some, ubiquitous vulgarity to to others. The concert "got catcalls and booing, shrieking and whistling, shouts of "thief" mixed with bravos." People began to call each other names and forgot there was any music going on." Like so much avant-garde work it was the true stuff only to a small group of social status seekers and to the deep thinkers of the day.
It looked as if Geroge Antheil were going to become the greatest thing [p. 380] in music since the invention of the violin. But George's fame and glory did not last. Platitudes burst like soap bubbles, fame dribbled away. In New York City the Ballet Mecanique failed to impress. The all-Antheil concert at Carnegie Hall, in 1927, was looked upon as more of a circus act than the arrival of a musical god . . . George admitted he was corrupted by his first successes. "I had become a mere imitator of the latest and most elegant Parisian (and most decadent), the most recent neoclassicism."
Paris, although more sympathetic to new art than any other city, was a difficult one in which to hold one's artistic integrity. One senses in George's yelps of pain and bowed head, the rejected artist, the bitter hemlock of one who had so much within his grasp, yet somehow it got away, an Abraham howling at Sodom, fingers in his ears. George used his own failure to damn all that Paris could do for the artist, and he pointed out how bad was that flavour of Paris that some took away with them. "How effete my taste had become in Paris! How effete still were the taste of my colleagues who had dragged too much of their Paris studies and taste home with them."
George Antheil ended up in Hollywood writing scores for films, his talent twitching like a damaged muscle, hack work that echoes little of the promise that had excited Paris and its musical critics. George had read William Blake on how one sells out to the Vegetation: "This World of Imagination is the World of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite & Eternal, whereas the World of Generation, or Vegetation is Finite & Temporal."
[p. 381] . . .
In 1926 came Thomson's meeting with Gertrude Stein, George Antheil brought him into the Stein circle . . . Gertrude didn't have much musical sense or appreciation. She still thought The Trail of the Loneseome Pine "as pleasing as the heart of a melon and pretty good music." . . .
[p. 383] . . .
. . . By July of 1929 the opera was finished, but it didn't get onto a stage until 1934. A museum director at Harvard, A. Everett Austin, president of The Friends and Enemies of Modern Music, "felt Four Saints was just the right project to open a new wing of the museum at Hartford, Connecticut." The decor and setting were done with intoxicated ardor by a society painter, Florine Stettheimer, a sort of primitive in mink, who liked fluffy, shiny, slinky material. The sets and costumes were mostly made of cellophane, lace, feathers, glass beads . . . .