The Arts in America

The development of the arts in America music, dance, architecture, the visual arts, and literature — has been marked by a tension between two strong sources of inspiration: European sophistication and domestic originality. Frequently, the best American artists have managed to harness both sources.

Music Until the 20th century, “serious” music in America was shaped by European standards and idioms. A notable exception was the music of composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), son of a British father and a Creole mother. Gottschalk enlivened his music with plantation melodies and Caribbean rhythms that he had beard in his native New Orleans.

More representative of early American music were the compositions of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908), who not only patterned his works after European models but stoutly resisted the label of “American composer.” A distinctively American classical music came to fruition when such composers as George Gershwin (1898-1937) and Aaron Copland (1900-1990) incorporated homegrown melodies and rhythms into forms borrowed from Europe. Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and his opera Porgy and Bess were influenced by jazz and African- American folk songs.

In the last decades of the 20th century, there has been a trend back toward music that pleases both composer and listener, a development that may be related to the uneasy status of the symphony orchestra in America. Unlike Europe, where it is common for governments to underwrite their orchestras and opera companies, the arts in America get relatively little public support. To survive, symphony orchestras depend largely on philanthropy and paid admissions. Meanwhile, opera, old and new, has been flourishing. Because it is so expensive to stage, however, opera depends heavily on the generosity of corporate and private donors.

DanceClosely related to the development of American music in the early 20th century was the emergence of a new, and distinctively American, art form — modern dance. Among the early innovators was Isadora Duncan (1878-1927), who stressed pure, unstructured movement in lieu of the positions of classical ballet.

The main line of development, however, runs from the dance company of Ruth St.Denis (1878-1968) and her husband- partner, Ted Shawn (1891-1972).

In the early 20th century U.S. audiences also were introduced to classical ballet by touring companies of European dancers. The first American ballet troupes were founded in the 1930s, when dancers and choreographers teamed up with visionary lovers of ballet such as Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1996). Kirstein invited Russian choreographer George Balanchine (1904- 1983) to the United States in 1933, and the two established the School of American Ballet, which became the New York City Ballet in 1948. Ballet manager and publicity agent Richard Pleasant (1909-1961) founded America’s second leading ballet organization, American Ballet Theatre, with dancer and patron Lucia Chase (1907- 1986) in 1940. Paradoxically, native-born directors like Pleasant included Russian classics in their repertoires, while Balanchine announced that his new American company was predicated on distinguished music and new works in the classical idiom, not the standard repertory of the past. Since then, the American ballet scene has been a mix of classic revivals and original works.

ArchitectureAmerica’s unmistakable contribution to architecture has been the skyscraper, whose bold, thrusting lines have made it the symbol of capitalist energy. Made possible by new construction techniques and the invention of the elevator, the first skyscraper went up in Chicago in 1884. Many of the most graceful early towers were designed by Louis Sullivan (1856-1924), America’s first great modern architect.

The visual arts America’s first well-known school of painting — the Hudson River school — appeared in 1820. The Hudson River painters’ directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists as Winslow Homer (1836- 1910), who depicted rural America — the sea, the mountains, and the people who lived near them. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins (1844- 1916), an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism.

Controversy soon became a way of life for American artists. In fact, much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. “To hell with the artistic values,” announced Robert Henri (1865-1929). He was the leader of what critics called the “ash-can” school of painting, after the group’s portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life. Soon the ash-can artists gave way to modernists arriving from Europe — the cubists and abstract painters promoted by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1 864- 1946) at his Gallery 291 in New York City. In the years after World War II, a group of young New York artists formed the first Native American movement to exert major influence on foreign artists: abstract expressionism. Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media.

Today artists in America tend not to restrict themselves to schools, styles, or a single medium. A work of art might be a performance on stage or a hand-written manifesto it might be a massive design cut into a Western desert or a severe arrangement of marble panels inscribed with the names of American soldiers who died in Vietnam. Perhaps the most influential 20th-century American contribution to world art has been a mocking playfulness, a sense that a central purpose of a new work is to join the ongoing debate over the definition of art itself.

Exercise1. For questions 1-10, read the text below. Use the word given in capitals at the end of each line to form a word that fits in the space in the same line. There is an example at the beginning.

Busking

Street (0)… performers…, or “Buskers”, help make any city center PERFORM

a place of (1)…. In any major city, you can find young, ENTERTAIN

(2)….. people juggling, playing the guitar or even doing EMPLOY

magic tricks for money. All they need is a (3)….place to SUIT

perform and a good crowd. Some people might (4)….. APPROVE

of busking, but most people agree that it’s an (5)…. ENJOY

break to have an (6)…. Show when you’re out shopping. EXPECT

Some young people, (7)… to afford a luxury trip around ABLE

the world, busk in order to travel. It’s (8)…., but it’s cheap. COMFORT

Unless you are (9)…., a few hours playing will pay for a bed. LUCK

The (10)…is that you need to have some talent or you might ADVANTAGE

go hungry!