Volume 4, Number 9 · June 3, 1965
On Being Discovered
By Virgil Thomson
Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music
by Wilfrid Mellers
Knopf, 543 pp., $5.95
America's art music has not heretofore aroused much enthusiasm among Europeans. Our ragtime was parodied lovingly, if not enviously, by Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. And jazz, though harder to make grow, did flower in the fugal finale of Milhaud's La Création du monde, of 1924. It also stimulated, beginning in the 1920s, serious historical studies by Robert Goffin and Hugues Panassié, more recently by André Hodeir. The examination of our Appalachian folklore had been started around 1915 by Cecil Sharp, an Englishman. And our commercial popular music had already, after World War I, replaced the Viennese for worldwide export. George Gershwin had even been successful in both kinds of production, since his Rhapsody in Blue for piano and orchestra and his opera Porgy and Bess had become, by the mid-1950s, as familiar to everybody everywhere as his songs.
Review, 2694 words
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