Cosmopolitan Ideas: Grieg, MacDowell, and a Tale of Weary Men

Weber, Ryan R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_5

Ryan R. Weber⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

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Abstract

Though seldom acknowledged in existing literature, Grieg and MacDowell shared a similar goal of dismantling the label of “national artist” in favor of constructing a broader cosmopolitan identity. As their correspondence candidly acknowledges, this struggle did not occur in isolation. Each composer fostered a multilayered worldview based upon the values concurrently advanced by their literary colleagues, including Hamlin Garland and Arne Garborg. An intertextual analysis of the cosmopolitan conditions that simultaneously emerged across disciplinary boundaries will illustrate their similar methods for manufacturing new modes of heterogeneity amidst the shifting of cultural borders. This approach will permit one to better understand the process of marking and unmarking identities in an environment inundated by overlapping (and frequently competing) affiliations. Taken together, this chapter argues for the significance of negotiation over nostalgia, stylistic mixture over division, and disciplinary fusion over separation—all of which flourished within the transatlantic circles of cosmopolitanism.

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Notes

1.
Grieg, Letters to Colleagues and Friends, ed. Finn Benestad and trans. William H. Halverson (Columbus: Peer Gynt Press, 2000), 137.
2.
Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols: Twelve Essays on Art Dealing Chiefly with Literature, Painting and the Drama (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894), 66.
3.
Ibid., 15.
4.
Ibid., 6–7. Emphasis added.
5.
Reprinted and analyzed in Bomberger, MacDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 117–18.
6.
Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 374.
7.
Richard Taruskin, Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 816.
8.
Ibid., 376.
9.
Ibid., 377–78.
10.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 51–52.
11.
See also Richard Crawford, “Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone Poet,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49/3 (Autumn, 1996): 528–60 as well as Crawford’s analysis in America’s Musical Life, 382–86.
12.
Bomberger, MacDowell, 195.
13.
Ibid., 195–96.
14.
Ibid., 196.
15.
Ibid., 194–95. Emphasis added.
16.
Ibid., 118.
17.
For a selection of Garland’s essays that were written during the 1890s (the primary focus of this present volume), see Donald Pizer, ed. Hamlin Garland: Prairie Radical (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010). Pizer’s introduction is especially valuable for his insights into the motivations behind Garland’s works, including his fascination with Nordic culture that I emphasize throughout this volume.
18.
Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
19.
Benjamin Spencer, “The New Realism and a National Literature,” PMLA 56/4 (1941): 1116–32.
20.
Ibid., 1122–23.
21.
Quoted and expanded in Bomberger, MacDowell, 229.
22.
Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols, 184–85.
23.
Ibid., 191.
24.
Burnet C. Tuthill, “Daniel Gregory Mason,” The Musical Quarterly 34/1 (1948): 47–48.
25.
His interest in literature was also stimulated by an early childhood injury to his arm, which prevented him from performing.
26.
Compare also with Grainger’s view of these same elements in the preceding chapter.
27.
Daniel Gregory Mason, “Artistic Ideals V. Universality,” The Musical Quarterly 13/3 (1927): 355.
28.
Ibid., 358.
29.
Daniel Gregory Mason, “Democracy and Music,” The Musical Quarterly 3/4 (October 1917): 641.
30.
Ibid., 643. This complaint parallels those of Garland and Grieg I cited at the beginning of the chapter.
31.
Ibid., 653. See also Alain Frogley’s chapter, “‘The old sweet Anglo-Saxon spell’: Racial Discourses and the American Reception of British Music, 1895–1933,” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 244–57.
32.
Daniel Gregory Mason, “Artistic Ideals I: Independence,” The Musical Quarterly 12/1 (January 1926), 1.
33.
“Democracy and Music,” 657.
34.
Daniel Gregory Mason, “Folk-song and American Music: A Plea for the Unpopular Point of View,” The Musical Quarterly 4/3 (1918): 323. Later in his entry, Mason acknowledges that MacDowell’s embrace of Native-American folk tunes and his “idiomatic peculiarities” were instrumental in leading critics astray from the root of his discourse.
35.
Ibid., 325–26.
36.
Daniel S. Malachuk, “Nationalist Cosmopolitics in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future, eds. Diane Morgan and Gary Banham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 142.
37.
“Folk-Song and American Music,” 332.
38.
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 3.
39.
Ibid., 31. See also Gerard Delanty, “The rise and decline of classical cosmopolitanism,” in The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18–50, for a discussion of the historical trajectory of cosmopolitanism as well as its relationship to nationalism in the nineteenth century.
40.
Ibid., 3.
41.
Ibid., 7. For another historicist approach, see Chap. 2, “Apprenticeship of the Novel: Goethe and the Invention of History,” in Tobias Boes, Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 43–72.
42.
Ibid., 181.
43.
Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6.
44.
Ibid., 179.
45.
Joseph B. McCullough, “Introduction to the Bison Books Edition,” in Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads, eds. William Dean Howells and Joseph B. McCullough (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), xvi.
46.
Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 174.
47.
Ibid., 175.
48.
Ibid., 189.
49.
“Folk-Song and American Music,” 329.
50.
Nels Pearson, Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, and Samuel Beckett (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015), 30.
51.
Ibid., 31.
52.
Ibid., 122. The article cited is Alejandro A. Vallega, “Decoloniality and Philosophy, from a Latin American Perspective,” Center of Study and Investigation for Global Dialogues, accessed 27 May 2012, http://www.dialogoglobal.com/barcelona/texts/vallege/decoloniality-of-philosophy.pdf.
53.
Ibid., 323–24.
54.
Crumbling Idols, 21–22.
55.
“Introduction” in Hamlin Garland: Prairie Radical, xxi.
56.
“Garland on Veritism,” accessed 11 August 2015, http://people.uncw.edu/newlink/garland/veritism.htm.
57.
See pages 82–89.
58.
Ibid., 88–89.
59.
Edward MacDowell, Critical and Historical Lectures, ed. by W. J. Baltzell (Boston: F. H. Gilson Company, 1912), 84.
60.
Kara Anne Gardner, “Edward MacDowell, Antimodernism, and ‘Playing Indian’ in the Indian Suite,” The Musical Quarterly 87/3 (Autumn 2004): 370.
61.
Ibid.
62.
Ibid., 376.
63.
Ibid., 370–71.
64.
Ibid., 371.
65.
See also Crawford, “Edward MacDowell: Musical Nationalism and an American Tone Poet,” 540.
66.
Boes makes an important connection to Weber’s opera Der Freischütz in this context.
67.
Quoted and expanded in Formative Fictions, 89–90.
68.
Ibid., 90.
69.
Ibid., 91.
70.
417–18.
71.
The Cosmopolitan Imagination, 19.
72.
Crumbling Idols, 99.
73.
Pizer, “Introduction,” xx.
74.
Ibid., 58.
75.
Crumbling Idols, 34.
76.
Lawrence Gilman, Edward MacDowell: A Study (New York: John Lane, 1909), 100–1.
77.
Ibid., 40.
78.
I discuss Grainger’s interest in the same literature in the following chapters.
79.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 484.
80.
Ibid. I include the extended passage in the Introduction.
81.
Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 50. See also his chapter “Cosmopolitan Realism,” 17–47, for important connections between the forms of aesthetic realism I describe and their relationship to cosmopolitan identities.
82.
Ibid., 51.
83.
Ibid., 52.
84.
Monica Žagar, Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 33.
85.
Ibid., 125.
86.
Ibid., 83.
87.
Ibid., 67–82.
88.
See my extended discussion of Eugenics in Chap. 7.
89.
Ibid., 229.
90.
Ibid.
91.
Diaries, Articles, Speeches, 220.
92.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 562.
93.
Michael Spitzer, Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven’s Late Style (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 225.
94.
Ibid., 213.
95.
Arne Garborg, Weary Men, translated by Sverre Lyngstad (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 202.
96.
Ibid., 203.

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Ryan R. Weber

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Weber, R.R. (2018). Cosmopolitan Ideas: Grieg, MacDowell, and a Tale of Weary Men. In: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_5

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_5
Published: 27 October 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01860-3
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