H. Wiley Hitchcock: Changing History

H. Wiley Hitchcock: Changing History

A visit with American music scholar and co-editor of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.



H. Wiley Hitchcock
Photo by John Bentham

Wednesday, November 13, 2002—11 a.m.

Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Videotaped by Amanda MacBlane

FRANK J. OTERI: I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the differences between history, journalism, criticism, and advocacy.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I find that they’re not all that different. I’ve been a good friend of composers and I’ve also been a good friend of critics. I judge them as I judge historians, testing the accuracy of the factual matter they give us. I welcome them because of their ideas and the creative aspect of their writing, just as I do historians. I recently had the occasion to write a review of Richard Crawford‘s new book called America’s Musical Life, almost 1000 pages of the history of American Music—and I realized that this is a new history. There’s an abbreviated version that will probably replace my own Music in the United States—a successful textbook, now in its fourth edition. Rich’s book is probably going to replace it because it’s a new history: it’s a history for the 21st century. Mine was for the last quarter or third of the 20th century.

FRANK J. OTERI: So what’s so different about it?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Instead of taking composers or pieces of music as the point of departure, Crawford’s book centers on the performance of American music. His concern is with America’s musical life, in terms of the performers of American music, the listeners to American music, the producers and buyers of scores, recordings, and tickets to performances, rather than just the music just itself.

FRANK J. OTERI: So it doesn’t really present a canonical list…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, it doesn’t pretend to do that.

FRANK J. OTERI: So in that sense it probably won’t replace your book, so much as be a nice parallel to it.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes, in a way it’s a complement to my book, which is full of music examples and analytic comments. That’s where I’m at, the music for itself, less than say the sociology of music or biographies of composers, or things like that. I guess I’m oversimplifying by claiming that these various things that you are talking about, even advocacy, are very similar: the critic, the historian, who of course makes a new history every time he or she sets a pen or fingers to paper or computer, and the advocate—who has to advocate, I suppose either in words or in performance, or in some way or other, and thereby makes a selection, and thus suggests a graduated roster of preferences, which the historian does, too, and so does the critic.

FRANK J. OTERI: So then talking about this and what you’re saying about the new history being about performers and consumers, not so much about works, what is the responsibility of the musicologist to music? What is the goal?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, if by musicologist you mean primarily the historian…

FRANK J. OTERI: The historian, right.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I think my goal as a music historian has been to attempt to reflect the music as it was experienced in its own time, primarily. Also to attempt to reflect what the composer thinks he or she is doing in such-and-such a work and to become, in a sense, a critic myself.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, in the preface to the 3rd edition of your American music history, you said that one of the goals in writing the book was to make people aware of our musical history in its totality as opposed to just being a footnote to European musical history.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right.

FRANK J. OTERI: We have this problem in this country when we think of “classical music”—to use that hobgoblin of an expression—as being European music, as not being our own. And the other thing that your book did in your 1st edition which dates back to the late ’60s, probably there weren’t very many precedents for it at that point, was to deal with not just so-called classical music, in that sense, but also to deal with jazz and, I haven’t seen the 1st edition of the book so I don’t know if rock already figures in the 1st edition, but it certainly figures in subsequent editions of the book.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: OK. But we have to go back historically in a way to 1969 when my book was first published—Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction. A Historical, American English. (laughs) Not An historical, no, no! At any rate, at that time, and you’re absolutely right, there were few precedents. But Gilbert Chase had written his book America’s Music in 1955, and I learned a great deal from that book and I credit Gilbert in the introduction of my own book. But, much more than now, American music, to musicologists at least, was sort of a country cousin in the Euro-American tradition. In fact, I don’t even think that term Euro-American music was common; it’s commonplace now because when we think of our music intellectually, let’s say, we think about it, particularly classical music, as part of a tradition that began in Europe and was fed and nurtured by that tradition—but by now has developed way out of it: it’s a world of difference today from what it was thirty-three years ago.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Now your book on American music came as a result of an entire series of books that was on the history of music which were designed basically, and I think largely still serve as textbooks. I know when I was an undergraduate they were the textbooks that we used in my music survey sequence. All of those books—the book on Baroque music, the Classical period, the Renaissance. What was interesting about the United States book was that it was the only book in the series that focused on the music of one particular country rather than a time period.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: That’s true, although officially there was also Gerard Béhague‘s book on Latin American music.

FRANK J. OTERI: But that dealt with a whole continent.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: More: the whole subcontinent of Latin America and the continent of South America!

FRANK J. OTERI: And that’s a book that had no precedent and no followers, there is no other book like that.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, exactly. And it’s out-of-print—regrettably, really regrettably…

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s really a shame. It’s a really good book. Now you were the general editor of that entire series. Did you initiate doing the book on the United States?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, it was put to me by the publisher, which was Prentice Hall. They said to me that they would like to get a series of books that could serve as textbooks on the history of music and how would I plan such a series? So the 11 books that were in the series were of my planning, as was the choice of the authors. Now, oddly enough, I had paid my dues to the American musicological establishment, so to speak, not by working in American music but by doing a doctoral dissertation on the French 17th-century composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier. But from the late 1940s I’d been teaching a course on American music, a one-semester course at the University of Michigan where I was teaching. And when I moved to New York in 1961, shortly thereafter, Prentice Hall approached me about this series. And I thought at first, of course, I will do the Baroque book, but I want a book on American music: who can I get for that? And I wasn’t sure whom I could get, and I finally decided, well, I’ll do it. So I did, and suddenly I was an Americanist!

 

FRANK J. OTERI: To take this history back even further to your first background in music, I was curious when I learned that your early work was on 17th century Baroque music. What led you to the interest in American music?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: My father. When I was a boy growing up near Detroit, Michigan, where my father worked, my father was crazy about music of all kinds—classical music, popular music, jazz (swing, of the time), musical comedies, you name it. The young Frank Sinatra I first heard at Eastwood Gardens, just outside Detroit, singing with Tommy Dorsey‘s band. My father took me into Detroit time and time again to hear music of all kinds, and to that is what I owe my first interest in American music. I grew up with it and it was my vernacular. I even helped organize and played in a little jazz band in school. We called it the Rhythm Wreckers [laughs]. I gave up playing jazz when I went to college, but kept up my work in piano.

FRANK J. OTERI: So you were a pianist in the jazz band?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, no, as a matter of fact I played sax and clarinet.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, wow! You don’t play anymore?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, I don’t.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you still play the piano?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. I don’t practice anymore, but I noodle and improvise for my own amusement.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now when you came to do this book on American music, to take it back to 1969 again, what was the general reception, because there weren’t a lot of courses devoted specifically to American music at universities at that point?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Absolutely not! The composer Ross Lee Finney came to the University of Michigan after I’d begun my graduate study there. He immediately galvanized the place. By that time I had given up the idea that I was a real composer—although I’d composed quite a bit—but I was crazy about composition, new compositions, composers, and I sat in on Ross Finney’s weekly seminar for his composition students, by his permission—never missed a one of those. Ross was very proud that he had taught a course on American music at Smith College, where he had been in the 1930s, preceding his tenure at Michigan in the 1940s. And he played guitar and he sang to the guitar, mostly folk music, and we did a lot of talking about American music and its history and so on. In fact, he published a review of that very book of mine that we’ve been talking about. So that was one precedent—Ross’s course. Also there was a professor named Raymond Kendall with whom I studied when I was an undergraduate in the early 1940s, just before I had to leave to serve in World War II, and again as a graduate student at Michigan after the war. And in a seminar of his, I remember doing a term paper on film music for The Best Years of Our Lives, a post-World War II movie. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of that film.

FRANK J. OTERI: Yeah, I’ve seen it; it’s almost 3 hours long…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. In any case, Kendall interested me again in American music as an academic. So I had this encouragement. But they were very unusual, not perhaps unique, but very unusual.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: Now in terms of America’s music history—I remember when Kyle Gann‘s book came out a few years back, and Gann was involved in the most recent edition of your book, he wrote the last chapter…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right—in the 4th edition, which came out in 2000.

FRANK J. OTERI: Everybody said that the thing they found so surprising and refreshing about his book was that minimali
sm
, rather than being the last chapter was smack in the middle, because so much has happened since then. I’m going to say something that is almost the opposite of that about the 4th edition of your book. We normally think of America’s musical history as beginning with Charles Ives. Very rarely there might be a small chapter about things that happened before but then it’s straight to Ives. What I found so refreshing about your book is that Ives occurs halfway through your book! There’s all this stuff before Ives that most of us don’t pay attention to at all. And I think it’s part of this idea of America not really acknowledging that we have a musical history. There were a lot of fascinating composer before Ives. There were a lot of really inventive music done before Ives and that stuff gets done even less than recent American music.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. I think especially in the field of popular music—I’m talking about pre-Ives popular music, which has now become a kind of folk music—it’s become a part of our vernacular upbringings. I was interested in Ives in the first place, in this connection, and I’ve maintained that interest in a big way.

FRANK J. OTERI: You’ve published a great deal about Ives.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Lots of publications, and I’ve just completed a critical edition of 129 songs by Ives, which is going to be published next year [as a volume of the American Musicological Society‘s series called MUSA—Music of the U.S.A.].

FRANK J. OTERI: So there are an additional 15 beyond the canonic 114.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: You are exactly right! At any rate, one thing that interested me in Ives and why I found him so interesting and worth a chapter all by himself in the history of American music is that he was really the first serious composer of non-pop music, let’s say, to find a usable past in American music, in earlier American music: the music of Civil War songs, band marches, dance tunes, and American hymnody. And he put them to excellent use, not only out of nostalgia for the early days but out of appreciation of the music. His father, of course, George Ives, encouraged him in this, as a musician himself if not a composer. So, yeah, there’s a lot of music back there.

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course, the other thing about Ives is that in some ways he was a pivotal figure on another level in that he was the first really major composer to be almost a complete outcast in a way. He was completely outside the musical establishment of the time and this whole tradition, I mean, we toss around this term maverick

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: You know, the whole notion of outsider composers, there are examples of it, I mean Gann likes to say that Billings was an outsider and that Heinrich was an outsider, but not really in the same way that Ives was an outsider.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No. Billings was by no means an outsider to the culture, to his own culture. He was an outsider, though, in terms of his independence of thought, claiming that he was a self-learned composer, and an outsider in his first publication, which was a book consisting of nobody else’s music but his own. He was a real outsider in that: that was a total first in American music.

FRANK J. OTERI: And that his music was not European. It didn’t follow the rules that the Europeans enshrined, you know, the proper way that voice-leading should go.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Right. Exactly.

FRANK J. OTERI: He did it his own way, but Ives took it one step further ’cause Ives was not only an outsider in terms of his music not having a relationship to European music, but it didn’t have a relationship to other American music, even though, ultimately, it did.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It did.

FRANK J. OTERI: It’s a wonderful paradox…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It had very little to do with the so-called classical music, or as I prefer to call it the cultivated tradition of American music, it had little to do with that—but lots to do with other kinds of traditional American music, what I call the vernacular traditions of American music. Well, you know, it’s interesting: Michael Tilson Thomas put on this “maverick” series of concerts out in San Francisco a couple of years ago and I was looking at the program book and at the composers in it, and, yeah, they’re all the figures that we think of as “The Mavericks”: Harrison, Cage, then going back: Cowell, Ives, Heinrich, and back to Billings and so on. I’m interested these days, for my own personal reasons, in Virgil Thomson. Increasingly I am thinking of him as a maverick. Nobody thinks of him as such, but he was. For example, long before Copland turned to what he imagined to be folk music, Thomson was doing it out of his own roots in Kansas City, Missouri—his roots in white gospel hymnody, Baptist hymnody, American hymnody. In the mid ’20s he was doing that and by 1934 we had his opera Four Saints in Three Acts which was rooted in that music—and in that sense he was a maverick, before Copland and others turned to such music, in that populist, Americanist era of the 1930s, the Depression era

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, I would say he was a maverick on some other levels. This whole idea of getting people to come to his apartment and sit for a portrait and create a piece of music based on that.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, yes. [laughs] You see that larger music score on the wall over there? That’s Virgil’s last complete composition; it’s a portrait of me.

FRANK J. OTERI: Oh, wow!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yeah! It’s called Two Birds. When Virgil finished the portrait, which he did in his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel, he gave a little grunt of pleasure and surprise, and said “Look! It’s the end of the page and it’s the end of the piece. Now I’ve got to go pee. Here’s the score, and you can look at it, but you can’t ask me anything about it. [FJO laughs] Now excuse me.”

FRANK J. OTERI: So that was his last piece.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It was his last completed piece, yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: Wow! How soon did he die after that?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, the portrait was in May of 1988, and he died about a year and a half after that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Has that piece ever been recorded?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I don’t think it’s been recorded, though it’s been played. Jacquelyn Helin has played it in concerts; perhaps others, too.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: You write history and then time passes on, so the things that you don’t write about, the things that happen after you write the book, get left out of the history…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Obviously!

FRANK J. OTERI: They’re not going to get written about, which is a tricky thing because it takes a while for a new edition of a book to be published and one of the things that I wanted to talk to you quite a bit about was the Grove Dictionary of American Music.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: OK.

FRANK J. OTERI: To this day, there’s nothing like it. But you know, a number of years have gone by and lo and behold, there’s a new edition of the official Grove

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: And of Jazz Grove.

FRANK J. OTERI: Right, but there is not a new edition of American Grove. But to take this story back to its beginnings, how did the American Grove come about?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Through the vision of Stanley Sadie, who was the editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the big 20-volume revision in 1980 of the old Grove’s Dictionary—an outstanding and unique and innovative version of the earlier editions of Grove. Stanley was the editor of that 1980 version, and to it he brought an ecumenical view of music, music all over the world, and all kinds and levels and emphases, including jazz and popular music, which had had no role to speak of in the previous Grove’s Dictionaries. Stanley considered American music important, and he turned to me to be the area editor for the Americas. I didn’t know much about Canadian music, so I got John Beckwith to assist me with Canada; and I got Gerard Béhague to assist me with music south of the border; my own editorial concentration was on United States music and I had a fairly free hand from Stanley on that. Some American composers had been in the New Grove of 1980, and he said, “Well, take a look at the articles on them and consider that this is now going to be an American music dictionary, perhaps of two volumes, and you can enlarge those articles and think about lots and lots and lots of other American composers and American musics of all kinds, and start planning your own dictionary.” And as you know, it ended up with 4 volumes [laughs], twice as long as planned. Fairly early on, it was clear that Stanley, who was British and lived in England, and Wiley, who was American and lived in New York, had a whole ocean between us, and we needed somebody in the middle, so we interviewed for someone to come in and be a sort of administrative interacter, and we happened upon Susan Feder, and she was marvelous. She was, as I’ve insisted ever since, the lynchpin of that dictionary. Within American music, we divided it up by letters for the various sub-areas. I was in charge of sub-area R (among others); that was for immigrant composers like Dvorak, Milhaud, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartók, Martinu, and so on.

FRANK J. OTERI: Miklós Rózsa.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, Rozsa was assigned to film music, a whole other area.

FRANK J. OTERI: Now the thing about that edition that’s so unusual is here you have essentially a British publication, devoting itself to being an exhaustive compendium of information about the music of one specific country outside of that country. Why didn’t we ever come up with the idea for an American Grove ourselves?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Probably because of that tendency on the part of Americans to think that they are not really quite as sophisticated or serious minded or they don’t have a history, they don’t have a historical background comparable to those of the European subcontinent. What Lou Harrison calls the northwest corner of Asia! [laughs] But I must point out that again Stanley Sadie was self-effacing and generous: he didn’t pretend to know anything about American music, so he came to me and effectively said, “Here…” He was working for MacMillan Company, Ltd. of course, which was in it for the money, and they thought they saw a market in America for an encyclopedia essentially of American music, thought it would be a big sales item … and this brings us back to the question, there’s this brand new 29- or 30-volume second edition of the big international dictionary. And there’s a new edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. Why not a new one of “AmeriGrove”? Well, apparently it wasn’t as financially successful as they had hoped or planned or imagined. And so there’s never been a mention of a 2nd edition.

FRANK J. OTERI: And it was never issued in paperback either.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, no, you’re right.

FRANK J. OTERI: Well, that…once again that leads to another interesting issue. Stanley Sadie, not knowing about American music, was very lucky to find you and to find Susan Feder and to find other people who were very knowledgeable about this. But when we let someone else write our own history rather than write it for ourselves, we face the problem of a lot of the information not being there and one of the things that I thought was so interesting about the 1980 Grove, which was obviously taken care of in American Grove and the revised new Grove that just came out—in the 1980 edition, John Adams wasn’t in there. You could say that his career was just starting, but he had already reached a level of recognition that a comparable British composer who was his age would have been in there just because they would’ve known about him, they would’ve known that this is somebody to include. Which raises the question—how do you get into Grove? Where do you need to be in your career?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, perhaps it was my fault if John Adams was not in the 1980 version. I can’t remember when I first became aware of John Adams as a composer. I think it must have been around that time. But remember: 1980 was the publication date of the New Grove, so essentially that dictionary was completed by 1978 or something like that. But I made very certain to get John Adams in AmeriGrove, in 1986!

FRANK J. OTERI: As well as John Luther Adams!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: John Luther Adams! Good, I’m glad. [laughs] Oh! Maybe that’s why John Luther was so pleasant to me when he became president of AMC and showed up in New York from his native Alaska!

FRANK J. OTERI: So, where do you need to be in your career to merit an entry?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: It’s so objective…objective?? That’s an interesting slip!! It’s so subjective: it depends on who’s doing the selection and who’s doing the recommendations. You must remember that the big Grove’s Dictionary of 1980 had hundreds of authors—hundreds! And Stanley Sadie turned to American musicologists for all kinds of topics, not just American but in fact, most of the musicological articles on major classical music composers were by Americans. And, for the American Grove, there were a similarly large number of American contributors, and once Susan and I had decided on the subdivision into areas, we had about 15 to 20 of them, and we got area sub-editors for each of those. John Rockwell, for example, was our principle adviser on rock, both in the entries to have on rock and the authors to write them; at the time John was the major rock critic. Similarly, Edward Berlin, who did a doctoral dissertation on ragtime (by the way, still the best book on ragtime, now in its 2nd edition) was named as the area sub-editor for ragtime, charged with proposing players and composers of ragtime, and authors on entries on them. So, that was one way in which the dictionary was not a hegemony or a dictatorship of content, so to speak, though obviously it called on decisions by individuals.

FRANK J. OTERI: In a way though, with newer music, you’re acting a little bit as a fortuneteller, you’re acting a bit as a…maybe in 1980 it wasn’t so clear, or I take it back, 1978, maybe by 1978, Shaker Loops hadn’t even been composed yet.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Is that true? I was trying to remember the first time I heard Shaker Loops and also the Greek…

FRANK J. OTERI:Phrygian Gates was 1979, I think.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: O.K.

FRANK J. OTERI: And Shaker Loops was ’80. One piece of his had already been recorded though called American Standard.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I don’t even know that piece!

FRANK J. OTERI: With that great middle movement “Christian Zeal and Activity”…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Oh, yeah!

FRANK J. OTERI: It was a fascinating piece and it was recorded by the Obscure label that Brian Eno ran for a while, but that was the only thing on record. So maybe in 1978 it would be hard to tell that he was going to be such a major player.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes, I think so, exactly.

FRANK J. OTERI: And this gets back to what we were saying before. You write a book of history and then life goes on. What do you do with all the stuff that happens afterwards? Well, now they have this very impressive idea that the whole Grove Dictionary is on the Internet.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: And theoretically they should be able to revise it regularly, add works lists so the works list doesn’t end with the publishing date, because a living composer is still composing theoretically. Yet, those changes haven’t happened because such an enterprise is so cumbersome…I thought it was really interesting, Melinda Wagner won the Pulitzer Prize a couple of years ago. She’s not in the new edition of Grove Dictionary. Well, she probably wasn’t visible by the time that went to press, but certainly now, having won the Pulitzer Prize, it could be added on the Internet, but it still hasn’t been after two years!

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yes. But who’s going to add it? And who’s going to be paid—who’s going to pay that person to add it? Once again we come down to money—as Virgil Thomson taught us, you know! [laughs] Macmillan would have to pay somebody to write the Melinda Wagner article.

FRANK J. OTERI: I still didn’t get the check for the one article I wrote for Grove.
[laughs]

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Was your article printed?

FRANK J. OTERI: Yes. It was only $100. It wasn’t a lot of money, so, it’s not that big a deal…

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: That’s the exception that proves my rule! [laughs]

FRANK J. OTERI: So maybe they need to assign the article first and then worry about paying the person [laughs] I don’t really mean that, of course, but we need to figure out a viable solution to this problem, though, because these articles really need to be written and the economic impetus is not always there. But let’s get back to who gets in and who doesn’t get in. I found there are people who were in the American Grove who were not in the 1980 Grove.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Oh, yeah, lots of ’em!

FRANK J. OTERI: Lots. But some also didn’t make it into the new New Grove.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, see there again you’re switching now from something regional (the American Grove), because it’s more than national, the American Grove I mean. Canada’s in it to a degree—but it’s not like the Music in Canada encyclopedia—but there’s also Mexico and Latin America and South America. But now, with the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, that’s the thing that’s expanded geographically to the whole world, so there had to be some reductions of national or regional representation; it wasn’t a case of automatically including everything that was in the American Grove. And by the way, perhaps I should make it clear that I have had nothing to do with all of the many spin-offs of the New Grove of 1980, only the American Grove.

FRANK J. OTERI: Were you at all involved with this latest edition?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No, I was not. A former student of mine and her late husband—Carol Oja and the greatly lamented Mark Tucker (who wrote the new general article on “Jazz” for the big “Newer Grove“)—were the area co-editors for United States music. I think they must be credited.

FRANK J. OTERI: So, then I guess from your vantage point, Americans do have as fair a chance as anybody of getting into the Grove Dictionary.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Yeah.

FRANK J. OTERI: Maybe even a fairer chance because there was this entire edition devoted to America.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I hadn’t thought about the “Newer Grove.” as call the big new 30-volume international dictionary, so I really can’t speak about this. I don’t have any really intelligent opinion about whether we, here in the USA, have a better chance than anybody else except for the influence of the country in general and the increased respect for American music of all kinds on the part of the British.

 

FRANK J. OTERI: In terms of the larger field of musicology, and you have served as president of the American Musicological Society, it was nice to hear that Grove chose a lot of American writers, not just to write about American music but also to write about major composers of “foreign” music as well. There’s a fear perhaps that as an American you get typecast as “that’s the person who can write about American music.” I’ve certainly heard conductors say, “I’m afraid of programming too much American music because then I’ll only get hired to do the concerts with American music.” So what is the responsibility, in your opinion, of American musicologists toward American music vis-à-vis the larger field of music history internationally?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: Well, there, Frank, you’re asking me to suggest an ethical mandate, and I’m unwilling to do that. I think that the increase in interest on the part of American musicologists in American music is remarkable. I’m talking about the last 25 years or so. The increase has been immense and now you’re finding it even in the pages of that august journal, The Journal of the American Musicological Society. Ta-da! You’re finding articles on American music of all kinds and by all kinds of authors. One thinks of not just the likes of Richard Crawford, who’s been a pure Americanist, musicologically speaking, forever and nothing else, but you find musicologists like Chris Reynolds, who’s a Beethovenian and also a Renaissance music scholar: he is now working on an edition of some American choral music for MUSA, the Music of the USA series of critical editions. Charles Hamm, first recognized as a leading scholar of Guillaume Dufay‘s 15th-century music, has turned to major research on American popular song. You’re finding other musicologists also who paid their musicological dues, as I spoke of myself having done, as scholars of European music, turning to American music—and not just as a relief, necessarily, but as something worth studying musicologically speaking. So I don’t think it’s a matter of responsibility, it’s a matter of receptivity, by the musicological establishment, which has been created by a whole bunch of things, such as the publication of the American Grove Dictionary, the Institute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, which I founded in 1971, and the Society for American Music begun in 1974 as the Sonneck Society (after Oscar Sonneck, the first important chief of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, and writer of a lot about American music). There have been all of these things to encourage the musicologists to say, “Hey, hey! Look!”

FRANK J. OTERI: You made an issue in the introduction to your book, that popular music very much needs to be taken as a part of our history. Jazz gets in there quite a bit, although jazz really isn’t really popular music anymore.

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: No.

FRANK J. OTERI: And rock is slowly morphing into its own separate sub-genre of music, now that we’re in a sort of a post-rock world. This is another ethical question I guess, is there any music not worth studying at all? Is there anything we can ignore as a part of our history?

H. WILEY HITCHC
OCK:
Any music, if one gets interested in it, is worth taking very seriously, not only emotionally but intellectually and significantly as a part of life. It’s a matter of being interested in sound and music, and in the experiencing of sound as something other than a signal for action (like a siren, for instance). For me, no music that I can imagine is unworthy of attention. Whether it mandates attention by everyone is another matter.

FRANK J. OTERI: Do you have to love it to write about it?

H. WILEY HITCHCOCK: I should hope so!