American music, the
music of the people, is built upon the Puritan hymn tunes and savors
of the persecution that made the Pilgrim Fathers fly to the new land.
Some think that the negro melodies should form the basis of our
American music; but why? The negro is an importation, not a native,
and if we want the real thing, it seems to me that we will have to
find it in the Indian melodies, but it will take artistic handling to
develop them from aboriginal simplicity to the intricacy necessary to
represent in any sense present-day, cosmopolitan America.
Universality is just now the philosophical ideal, and it seems to me
that America, the composite nation, is the proper center from which
such a spirit should emanate. Why try to foster the limited local idea
with regard to music, or any artistic or intellectual pursuit? Why
encourage the production of distinctive American music in a country in
which there is not even a distinctive type of face or mode of speech?
Here is a Virginian, descended from an American Indian and an English
colonist, living next door to a Plymouth Rock Yankee whose husband is
a French Canadian.
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