New York City’s Composers’ Collective: “Left-Wing Fool’s Paradise”or “American Musical Genesis”?
Julia Schmidt-Pirro
Abstract: In response to the growing unemployment and social misery of the early Depression years, the Composers’ Collective, founded in 1932–1933 in New York City, sought to make a social and political impact. Laying out the collective’s theoretical and ideological ambitions, this article highlights the organization’s initial agenda of political education and mass mobilization through avant-garde classical music. These efforts shifted as the collective’s members realized that their outreach efforts were failing, and they changed their focus from classical avantgarde music to folk music. This article argues that despite its short existence (1932–1936), the collective fostered a theoretical discourse about the political significance of music that influenced the later works of former members (e.g., Marc Blitzstein, Earl Robinson) a new generation of political musicians (e.g., Pete Seeger), and exemplifyied the important role music could play in America’s political stage.
The composer of the people’s movement and of the collective society will utilize all the skills and techniques he has inherited from the past to write not luxury music for the few, but music which shall be of, for and about the many. His is the task of breaking down the age-old division between learned or art music on the one hand, and folk or popular music on the other. In doing this he will be helping to break down the class division which these musical divisions have symbolized and helped perpetuate. It will also be his task to unite learning and popularity into an art which must become a broad instrument of social enlightenment and change.
Elie Siegmeister[3]
If one were asked to identify instances in U.S. history when music was used to effect political change, chances are that one would think immediately of the folk music tradition and its influence on the labor and peace struggles of the 1960s or of the role of African American spirituals and gospel music in the Civil Rights Movement. In those eras of heightened political consciousness, artists used their music to promote significant changes in American politics and society. Such songs as “We Shall Overcome,” “This Little Light of Mine,” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” come easily to mind as songs with lyrics and melodies familiar to millions of Americans and that remain in the memory of those who participated in or witnessed the anti-war and Civil Rights movements and of those with special interest in those movements and their music. The performers of that generation, including Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez enjoy wide name recognition to this day. This is not the case for musicians Earl Robinson or Marc Blitzstein, who were intensely involved in trying to employ music as a vehicle of political change in the 1930s and 1940s. Neither do the political compositions of their colleagues written amid the Depression resonate today: “Into the Streets May First” (Aaron Copland) “Chinaman, Laundryman” (Ruth Crawford Seeger), “Lenin, Who’s That Guy” (Charles Seeger). Politically engaged composers such as Aaron Copland and Ruth Crawford Seeger remain familiar in the context of American classical music but are no longer associated with the progressive ideology that once infused their work.
This article argues that the efforts of these classical artists should not only be remembered for the aesthetic and political contributions they made to mid-twentieth-century American music and politics but also for the legacy and mechanisms they made available for use by politically engaged musicians of the 1960s. In several important respects, such classical music composers as Robinson, Blitzstein, and Copland laid the groundwork for later uses of the folk and classical music traditions in the service of political and social change. This article focuses on the contributions of the Composers’ Collective (CC), a loosely organized group of classical music composers based in New York City in the 1930s—among them Robinson, Blitzstein and Copland—which carried on vigorous discussions about how music could be enlisted in the cause of progressive politics and supported the composition and performance of music for the people. The efforts of the collective, it will be argued, helped form the groundwork for the fruitful and effective deployment of music in the cultural and political movements of later years, especially the 1960s.
The Beginnings
In the mid-1920s and early 1930s, the professional musical landscape of the United States began to undergo a significant change. Many American classical avant-garde composers, who had previously left the United States, returned from Europe. They had spent the early 1920s in Paris or Berlin, to get exposure to cutting-edge music and to escape from a stifling artistic atmosphere in the United States. One of these exiles, Virgil Thomson, explains:
“I was …leaving an America that was beginning to enclose us all, at least those among us who needed to ripen unpushed. America was impatient with us, trying always to take us in hand and make u a success, or else squeezing us dry for exhibiting in an institution.”[4]
Driven back home by the falling value of the American dollar and, later by the rising tide of fascism, many of these composers, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Roger Sessions, George Antheil, and Marc Blitzstein, settled in New York City, where they hoped to make careers as composers. It was not easy. In a December 16, 1933, letter to the Mexican composer Carlos Chávez, Copland noted the sense of disconnection not only between returning composers but also between them and American audiences:
Everyone is in New York—Varèse, Antheil, Roy Harris, Sessions, Cowell etc.—but the feeling of camaraderie is not strong…Here in the US we composers have no possibility of directing the musical affairs of the nation – on the contrary, since my return, I have the impression that we are working in a vacuum. There seems to me less than ever a real rapport between the public and the composers and of course that is a very important way of creating an audience, and being in contact with an audience.[5]
Copland’s desire for composers to have more influence on musical affairs and to establish a rapport with audiences was made all the more urgent by the effects of the Great Depression. It had struck New York City’s immigrant and native working-class populations particularly hard. The difficult social and economic conditions of the time, combined with the city’s rich tradition (both native and imported) of socialist debate and agitation, served to raise the prestige of the Communist Party, especially in intellectual and artistic circles. Composer Conlon Nancarrow (born 1912), who joined the Communist Party in Boston, points to the prominent position the party held in New York City, where it was fashionable for intellectuals to become party members: “in New York, everyone at one time or another was in [the party].”[6] A 1936 letter from George Antheil, the “bad boy” of music in the 1920s who provoked controversy with his unconventional Ballet Mécanique, to his longtime patron Marie Louise Curtis Bok reveals the circumstances composers faced during this time and why they were drawn to an institution such as the CC. While stipulating that he did not approve of communism, he expressed appreciation for the support composers were getting from the “communistic movement” in the form of concerts, financial support and subsidies. As a result of this support, “practically all of our important young composers have gone over to this movement, and are some part of it, or at least belong to the Composers’ Collective.” He goes on to describe the rolls of the CC as including Varèse, Copland, Cowell, Siegmeister, Blitzstein, and “at least two dozen more.” He concludes by highlighting the lack of support for musical compositions in the United States: “I mention this only to show the great significance of the fact that creative music remains unsupported in America and the bitterness that is manifested in its youngest and finest creative talents.”[7]
Out of the context of economic depression and left-wing ferment emerged the Composers’ Collective, a short-lived and unique organization dedicated to the tasks of finding, and connecting with, a working-class audience, of creating a supportive circle of peers for the exchange of ideas, and of actively responding to the hardships of the times by promoting a leftist political agenda of social justice. Founded in the early 1930s by a group of highly educated, classically trained composers, the collective was an offshoot of a Communist Party–affiliated political organization, the Pierre Degeyter Club.[8] The Pierre Degeyter Club formed a wing of the Workers’ Music League, founded in 1931, as the U.S. section of the International Music Bureau. The league exercised its influence through its twenty branch organizations in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City. In this last city, league activities were particularly vigorous, supporting between eighteen and twenty workers’ musical organizations, including choruses, bands and orchestras. Testifying to the diversity of New York City’s immigrant culture, these musical organizations were organized by immigrant nationality and performed in their native language.[9] The principle under which all these organizations were formed was “Music for the Masses.”[10]
While “frictions and disagreements increased during the years of the CC,” members of the collective never completely broke with the party.[11] Connected indirectly to the party through the Pierre Degeyter Club and the Workers’ Music League, collective members could be more independent and cultivate a more politically diverse membership than was possible in either the club or the league.
Basic facts about the CC are hard to establish definitively because historians disagree about important dates and facts relating to the group, including the identities of its members.[12] Carol Oja lists Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Janet Barnes, Norman Cazden, Henry Leland Clarke, Aaron Copland, Earl Robinson, Jacob Schaefer, Elie Siegmeister, Lan Adomián, Irwin Heilner, Herbert Haufrecht, Wallingford Riegger, and Marc Blitzstein as members.[13] Another musicologist, Ann Pescatello, includes the expatriate avant-garde composer George Antheil, Ruth Crawford-Seeger (the wife of Charles Seeger), and the German composer Hanns Eisler, a former student of avant-garde composer Arnold Schoenberg, whose Communist Party affiliation was the strongest.[14] David Dunaway points out that George Antheil and Aaron Copland were only occasional visitors of the CC while Eisler addressed the group on several occasions. He also includes the composers George Maynard, Robert Gross, Alec North, and Herman Chauloff as members of the CC.[15]
While Hans Eisler’s status as a permanent member of the group is unclear, he was an important role model for the CC and their mission. A close collaborator of the German writer Bertolt Brecht and a former student of Arnold Schoenberg, he composed political songs such as the “Solidaritätslied” (Solidarity Song) and “Einheitsfront” (Unity Front) which were published and performed all over the world. On his first trip to the United States from February to May of 1935, Eisler visited New York City and attended meetings of the CC, taking active part in their discussions.[16] He continued his tour to Boston and other cities across the country and ended up in Los Angeles. During his stay in the United States, he conducted choral performances, lectured on culture and fascism, and performed his political songs together with the young baritone, Mordecai Bauman (himself playing the piano).[17]
Eisler’s speech “Music in Crisis” delivered on December 7, 1935, at New York’s Town Hall, is believed to have had a major impact on the CC.[18] Other speakers that evening included Aaron Copland and Henry Cowell. The importance of Eisler’s work can be traced in the CC’s publication New Workers’ Song Book (1934), which offered twenty-two songs modeled on Eisler’s work.[19] In a review of the Workers Song Book 2 which appeared in the Daily Worker, Blitzstein praised Eisler’s songs for providing “freshness of harmony” and “emotional drive” and for being “unconventional in a manner to attract workers, not repel them.”[20] Another admirer was the CC member Earl Robinson: “I learned much from the best mass songs of those days; in minor keys, they came from the German antifascists Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht.” He met Eilser in New York and later took lessons from him in California.[21]
Aaron Copland was another figure closely associated with the CC but whose membership status remains unclear. According to Elizabeth B. Crist, the composer might not have attended many meetings, but he still moved in the same circles of other, more permanent members of the CC. In November 1934, for example, Copland, together with Roy Harris, Elie Siegmeister, and Charles Seeger, presented a panel, “The Problems of the Composer in Modern Society,” at the Degeyter Club.[22]
An authoritative list of the collective may not exist partly because of shifts in membership over the years but nevertheless it becomes clear that if one includes long-term members, collaborators, and supporters, the tally of composers is relatively high. Another relevant factor making it difficult to put together a member list was that some composers were writing under pseudonyms. Ellie Siegmeister, for example, went by the pseudonym, L. E. Swift, Charles Seeger went by Carl Sand, and Henry Leland Clarke took the assumed name Jonathan Fairbanks.[23] This impulse toward disguise sometimes led to confusion. Siegmeister records that, “I took the name L. E. Swift, but sometimes I’d forget which name I was using. One time I was listed on a program as Swift conducting the Daily Workers Chorus in an arrangement by Siegmeister!”[24]
The use of pseudonyms along with the ambiguities in the historical record suggest that the members intended to hide, to an extent, the trail of their politically motivated involvement in the collective. Memories of the post–World War I Red Scare had not altogether faded. Eventually the concern of many members of being too identified with the Left was borne out by the resurgence of anti-Communist sentiment in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Clarke testified to this concern when he pointed out that, “It was dangerous to belong to the collective, and even more dangerous later on to have been connected with it.”[25] Another alumnus of the CC, Charles Seeger, bluntly refused to answer when a music historian asked him to identify other members. His only comment was, “That is what I never say!”[26]
According to one account, the CC was started by Jacob Schaefer, Leon Charles, and Henry Cowell after the three had given a seminar on writing songs for the masses.[27] Charles Seeger later claimed that Schaefer and Cowell (as well as Copland) were only “friends” of the collective but not members.[28] In an interview, Seeger suggested that his decision to join was undertaken very informally:
One night in December or January [1931], Henry Cowell came in and said, “You know, Charlie, (you were worried about the connection of music and society back there in Berkeley;) there’s a little group of good musicians who are moved by the Depression and are trying to make music that can go right into the streets and be used in protests and at union meetings. I think you might be interested in it.” And I was.[29]
Henry Leland Clarke another member of the Collective suggested that the organization “grew out of a seminar in the writing of mass songs organized in 1933.”[30] As Seeger’s recollection of Henry Cowell’s remarks suggest, the devastating social and economic impacts of the Depression motivated many of the CC’s members, who gathered weekly in lower Manhattan amid the proliferating bread lines. Hoping that their musical activities might have some effect against social injustice and mass immiseration, composers usually met on Friday at 5:30[31] and/or Saturday afternoons at 5430 Sixth Avenue in an old loft where there was an upright piano.[32] At these gatherings, each member would present a composition and then receive criticism, both in terms of the music’s possible social and political impact and in terms of its musical techniques.[33] In animated discussions, members tried to discover a worker-friendly classical music composed in a style both appealing and accessible to non-musicians. Yet, at the same time, the composers sought to incorporate the latest avant-garde compositional and performance techniques. For inspiration, the CC members looked to Russian and German workers songs.
In a newsletter published by the American Music League, Marc Blitzstein, secretary of the collective, listed the group’s aims as:
(...) the writing of (1) Mass Songs, dealing with immediate social issues... to be sung at meetings, on parades, and on picket lines; (2) Choral music for professional as well as non-professional choruses, dealing in a broader way with the social scene... (3) Solo songs, on social themes to be sung at meetings and concentrate the attention on the subjective, private emotions to the exclusion of the realistic social questions. (4) Instrumental music, to carry on the best musical traditions of the past, now threatened by the collapse of bourgeois culture...[34]
Especially interesting in this declaration are the third and fourth points. Both kinds of music mentioned here—solo (art) songs and instrumental music—are supposed to fulfill purposes—concentrating attention on “subjective, private emotions to the exclusion of the realistic social questions” and placing emphasis on pure (instrumental) music and musical values—that seem to conflict with the collective’s leftist aims by undercutting the propagandistic value of music. According to Robinson, these last two points of the collective’s agenda were a cause for ongoing discussions in the group: “We spent an awful lot of time talking about whether pure music, that is, instrumental music, could be useful for our purposes. I said no, and Seeger agreed with me.”[35]
Disagreements over the extent to which composers would have to compromise their classical music standards came to a head during and after a musical competition sponsored by the left-wing magazine, New Masses. Asked for submissions, members of the collective submitted songs composed to Alfred Hayes’ poem “Into the Streets May First.” Composers who submitted contributions included Lahn Adohmyan, Aaron Copland, Isadore Freed, Wallingford Riegger, Carl Sands (Charles Seeger), Mitya Stillman, L. E. Swift (Ellie Siegmeister) and one composer who signed with the name “XYZ.” Aaron Copland’s composition was unanimously chosen for the first prize and “sung by hundreds of men and women rallying at Union Square that day.”[36] New Masses writer Ashley Pettis approvingly described how the composition fused the “unfamiliar, ‘experimental’ nature of harmonies” with a more traditional musical style. Largely agreeing with the spirit of the collective’s statement of aims, Pettis emphasized the value of tradition and the importance of composing music that was both demanding and elevated:
(...) it is absolutely necessary at the stage in the creation of the mass songs, to preserve the best of the old traditions, harmonic and melodic, at the same time injecting new life into these old forms so that the most unsophisticated singer may be drawn into the singing—in order that “he who runs” may sing![37]
Charles Seeger, however, was less than sympathetic toward Copland’s song. For him, it was inadequate because it did not include enough musical material that might be both familiar and accessible to its target audience. It had some “freak modulations, and some big skips of sevenths in it, had some dissonances, key changes all over the place.” He challenged the jury’s decision and was reported to have asked Copland:
(..) do you think it will ever be sung on the picket line? And anyway, who would carry a piano into the streets May First or any time? (...) take mine, for instance. I haven’t tried to make a piece of music I admire. I tried to write a piece of music that I think might be sung on the picket line. Do you think there is anybody in New York who couldn’t join in with this the second time they hear it?[38]
The composer Jacob Schaefer, who was the director of the Jewish chorus “Freiheit Gesang Ferein” ([Freedom Singing Group] the precursor to the United Jewish Peoples’ Order Folk Singers) and the director of a mandolin orchestra, voiced similar concerns. Like Seeger, he was very critical of music too difficult to be sung or played by the working-class members of his chorus and orchestra.[39] And he subscribed to Seeger’s doubts about the appeal and effectiveness of Copland’s version of “Into the Streets May First.”[40]
Initially, members of the collective seemed to have shared both a belief in music that was demanding and of high musical quality and a prejudice against folk music. This initial embrace of a high-culture view of music probably had much to do with their educational backgrounds. Most of the composers of the collective were thoroughly trained classical musicians with degrees from prestigious European and American schools, who had refined their skills, studying with famous composers overseas (Blitzstein with Schoenberg in Berlin, Copland with Nadja Boulanger in Paris). Only after becoming involved with the musical activities of working-class communities and growing dissatisfied with the ineffectiveness of their outreach did members shift their approach. Earl Robinson gives an account of the theoretical struggles and developments the group underwent: “We spent an awful lot of time talking about whether pure music, that is instrumental music, could be useful to our purposes. I said no, and Seeger agreed with me. None of us used folk music at all until he and I started pushing it in 1934 and ‘35.”[41]
It was not only for cultural reasons that the members of the CC initially felt that folk music was an inappropriate musical source for protest songs. They actively rejected it for its perceived political deficiencies as becomes clear in the foreword to the Workers’ Songbook no. 1 (1934), which indirectly criticizes folk music for possessing such qualities as “defeatist melancholy, morbidity, hysteria and triviality.”[42] In their vigorous reaction against folk music, the collective also manifested the influence of Eisler, who, in line with Communist Party beliefs of the early 1930s, did not consider folk music an appropriate source to be used for revolutionary art forms.[43] Finally, as young American composers, many of whom belonged to the Lost Generation, they associated folk music with American provincialism and philistinism. Taking this viewpoint, the composers tended to emphasize the boundaries between classical and folk genres.
By the mid-1930s, the group began to reassess its evaluation of folk music and traditions. In 1934, Lahn Adohmyan published an article in the Daily Worker in which he proposed to enrich the workers’ choruses repertoire by including “Negro songs of protest, work songs, railroad songs [and] cowboy and hill songs.”[44] Seeger reports that his change of mind toward folk music was helped along when he and Cowell were asked to evaluate John Lomax’s book manuscript, “American Ballads and Folk Songs,” for possible publication by the Macmillan Press. Fascinated by the unique way music and words were woven together in this collected volume, he enthusiastically recommended its publication. According to Seeger his evolving attitude toward folk music was further stimulated by the Kentucky folksinger and militant organizer for the National Miner’s Union, Aunt Molly Jackson, who visited the CC three times between 1933 and 1934.[45] There are conflicting reports about whether she performed at those meetings. According to Dunaway, who interviewed Seeger as well as other members of the collective, Jackson was never asked to perform for the collective. The collective’s members “found her musically illiterate.”[46] Filene, on the other hand, reports that Jackson actually sang some of her strike songs based on traditional melodies at a CC meeting and, in return, the members of the CC performed some of their compositions (but he does not list a source for this report). According to Filene, the exchange did not result in greater mutual understanding or sympathy.[47]
Seeger could have heard her songs outside the collective. Unlike other members of the CC, Seeger was regularly exposed to authentic folk music as a faculty member at the New School for Social Research. He recalls first hearing folk music at the university in 1931. By the mid-1930s, he was incorporating folksongs in his lectures at the New School.[48] Whatever the specific circumstances might have been, Seeger remembers Jackson’s music as influencing him to change his attitude towards folk music:
I learned her songs and discovered that they were folk songs simply dolled up, with new words and perhaps a few touches of her own, and that the people could sing their songs and they couldn’t sing our songs. So I went up to her and I said, Mollie [sic], you’re on the right track and we’re on the wrong track and I gave up the Collective.[49]
Seeger and others’ reassessment of folk music was further encouraged by a growing movement to document the folk music tradition in the United States. By the 1930s, Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag (1927) had become popular. In 1933, other folk song collections had become available including George Pullen Jackson’s White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands, a study of shape-note singing and in 1934 Alan Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs. An additional factor in the CC’s shifting taste was Communist Party criticism. In 1934, Mike Gold, a regular columnist for the American Communist Party’s propaganda organ, The Daily Worker, reproached the music of the CC for being “full of geometric bitterness and the angles and glass splinters of pure technic (sic)…written for an assortment of mechanical canaries.” Attacking their elitism, he argued that members of the CC could learn from songwriters who “make revolution as intimate and simple as ‘Old Black Joe.’”[50]
The growing openness of the collective members towards folk sources was also reflected in the group’s musical publications. While the first two volumes of the Worker’s Songbook include only three compositions based on American folk and popular songs, the third volume, “Songs of the People,” relies heavily on folk music, with nearly half of the songs of folk or popular origin. The Collective’s engagement with folk music traditions became so substantial that more than one musicologist has sought to link the organization to the birth of the folk song movement of the late 1930s and 1940s.[51] As we will see, the fusion of classical and folk genres undertaken by members of the CC on theoretical and practical levels proved to be fruitful for future developments of American protest music.
According to Dunaway, the collective disbanded by the end of 1936.[52] (H. L. Clarke pushes the CC’s demise to the end of 1938.) [53] The Seegers left New York for Washington in 1935.[54] Henry Cowell left the group that same year. Aaron Copland, winner of the “Into the Streets May First” song competition, also decided to move on and dedicate himself to developing his own musical style.[55] His original wish to combine serious musical achievement with a political mission of promoting social progress remaining unfulfilled, Copland articulated his rising frustration in an article published by the American Mercury in 1935: “It is not even now appreciated that a serious and important composer functions among us; nor, as a man, is he properly understood...It cannot be doubted that he occupies little or no place even today in the mind of the public at large.”[56]
Several factors led to the demise of this short-lived organization. There was the group’s initial failure to understand the tension inherent in employing bourgeois art music for proletarian causes. Haufrecht, another member of the CC, characterized the ambition of trying to compose progressive music in the idiom of avant-garde music as “schizophrenic.”[57] Dunaway explains the CC’s lack of attentiveness as stemming from the CC’s ignorance of folk and popular music which left it without a “musical and cultural base for the popular revolutionary songs it desired to compose.”[58] Yet another reason for the dissolution of the collective was that some of the composers who valued creative independence eventually lost enthusiasm for party-line political work, which became more and more propaganda-oriented. Intimidation by government agents, who according to Seeger, were watching the collective also cannot be discounted as a factor in the group’s demise.[59]
Forging Different Paths from the CC: Earl Robinson, Marc Blitzstein, Charles Seeger and Pete Seeger
Several prominent members of the CC went on to make major contributions as politically engaged musicians, each of them focusing his energy and dedication in a different area of music. This article examines the popular compositions of Earl Robinson as well as the musical theatre compositions of Marc Blitzstein. In addition to influencing deeply the musical landscape of their time, the works of these CC members and affiliates shaped the approaches and views of a later generation of musicians. So, for example, Charles Seeger’s pioneering “field” work and his extensive reflections on the interrelationship between music and politics permanently marked the artistic aspirations of his son, Pete Seeger.
Over three decades, Earl Robinson became a key figure in the field of politically conscious music. Having studied composition at the University of Washington, where he received a Bachelor of Music and teaching certificate, he went on to New York City in 1934 in the hopes of landing a job. In the city, he continued his studies with Copland and Eisler, who strongly shaped his musical style and aspirations. Many of the works Robinson composed after his membership with the CC won popular acclaim and reached a wide audience. One of them, the ballad, “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” written in 1936—also referred to as “Joe Hill”—used lyrics by Alfred Hayes to focus on the historic figure of Joe Hill, an IWW organizer, who, despite a lack of evidence, was convicted of murder. An activist, songwriter and poet, Hill was condemned to death and executed in 1915. The story of a man dedicated to the arts and to social justice, who was wrongly convicted and executed sparked renewed interest during the Sixties. Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger each performed “Joe Hill” on many occasions. However, it was Joan Baez’s performance of the song at Woodstock in 1969 which brought it to wide popular attention.
In 1939, Robinson composed a cantata, “Ballad for Americans,” which celebrated diversity and criticized the inequality and lack of democracy in American life reached levels of popularity similar to those reached by Joe Hill.[60] Performed by Paul Robeson, during a CBS radio broadcast in 1939, the composition won immediate acclaim. Its wide appeal became manifest when it was used as a theme song at both the Republican and Communist Party national conventions in 1940.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Robinson started working in film music, always choosing films with progressive political messages. In 1937, for example he and CC member Alex North collaborated on the music for the 1937 film People of the Cumberland, a documentary produced with the cooperation of the Highlander Folk School and the people of Cumberland. Featuring music partly performed by the American People’s Chorus,[61] the film featured the landscape and social customs of the area as well as the residents’ extreme poverty and sought to demonstrate how labor unions could improve life for mill and coal workers.[62] Two years later, in 1939, Robinson provided the music for the documentary United Action, which depicted the 1936 strike at General Motors in Detroit. For one particularly brutal scene of police strike-breaking, he chose “a soprano solo singing a sweet, ironic “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”[63]
In 1943, Robinson turned to film and in 1945, he had a breakthrough when his 1942 song “The House I Live In,” with lyrics by Lewis Allan, gained national attention when Frank Sinatra performed it for the Oscar-winning eponymously titled Hollywood short movie.[64] Robinson recognized Sinatra’s special talent for combing a unique musicality with an ability to successfully bring across the meaning of the lyrics: Sinatra’s “style and phrasing, his putting across the sense of a lyric, are unequaled.”[65]. The song became extremely popular, earning Robinson a “Certificate of Special Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science” during the eighteenth Academy Awards in 1946.[66]
While the plot of the film is explicitly focused on the subject of religious prejudice, the song expresses a wider utopian vision of an America truly free and just. Focused on religious and racial prejudice, the song also expresses a utopian vision of American solidarity and freedom.[67] The film was shown in various settings, including churches and high schools all over the country. A contemporary report offers insight into the film’s impact. According to Hans Kafka’s 1946 column “Hollywood Calling…” which appeared in the German-Jewish émigré journal Aufbau, the film’s message bore some fruit:
Frank Sinatra’s crusade against racial intolerance was again regarded with skepticism when he failed to bring to reason the pupils of Froebel Highschool in Gary, Indiana, who striked [sic] in protest against their colored schoolmates, but his picture The House I Live In, now being shown in churches, civic centers, highschools [sic], etc., begins to bear fruit. Communities in New Hampshire, Illinois, Connecticut, and Massachusetts decided to invite negro children from Harlem for summer vacations and the tide of this wonderful idea, directly suggested by the picture, is still mounting. The House I Live In, incidentally, is shown either free, or for an admission charge which goes to agencies promoting good will between people of different race and religion. […][68]
During the Red Scare of the 1950s, Robinson’s song came under ideological attack but was revived more than thirty years later by Sinatra, who sang it during the national televised centenary celebration of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, attended by President Ronald Reagan. The checkered performance history of the “House I Live In” exemplifies the thesis of a 2002 article in the Nation, “Patriotism’s Secret History,” in which authors Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks make the point that most Americans are unaware of the left-wing origins of many of the icons and symbols that have shaped American patriotic culture. Referring to Sinatra’s performance of Robinson’s song “The House I Live In,” they remark: “Only a handful of Americans could have grasped the political irony of that moment: Sinatra performing a patriotic anthem written by blacklisted writers to a President, who as head of Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s, helped create Hollywood’s purge of radicals. Sinatra’s own left-wing (and nearly blacklisted past), and the history of the song itself, have been obliterated from public memory.”[69] With the rise of McCarthyism, Robinson became a target because of his ties to the Communist Party. He was blacklisted in 1950 and put on the Red Channels list (issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack), together with other former members and associates of the CC, Copland, and Blitzstein, and asked to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The blacklisting would make it impossible for him to find film work for twenty years.
Unable to find work in the movie industry, he turned to the stage. Together with three other blacklisted artists from the film industry, he composed the music for “Sandhog” (1952), a folk opera which adapted the short story “St. Columbia and the River” by Theodore Dreiser. The texts were provided by the blacklisted screenwriter Waldo Salt, and the show was directed by the blacklisted actor Howard Da Silva, who had played the role of “Larry Forman” in Bliztstein’s infamous first premier of “The Cradle Will Rock” in 1937. This politically engaged opera focused on the class struggle of the “sandhogs” (a slang term for urban miners or construction workers who worked on subways, sewers, water tunnels, and other projects underground). Premiering on November 23, 1954, it had a successful run of forty-eight shows. Some of the opera’s titles, including “Johnny’s Cursing Song,” “Work Song,” “Sweat Song,” and “Fugue on a Hot Afternoon in a Small Flat,” manifest the fusion of “lowbrow and highbrow” elements that characterized Robinson’s approach. Critics focused on the artistic achievement of the opera, to the exclusion of the piece’s political content.[70]
By the late 1950s, Robinson was searching for work in school systems. From 1957 to 1966, he chaired the music department at Elisabeth Irwin High School. His educational worked followed a 1954 composition in which he focused on the politically controversial subject of racial segregation in schools. Created in 1954 in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, “Black and White” was composed to lyrics by David Arkin. The piece became a huge hit in 1972 when it was recorded and performed in a pop version by the group “Three Dog Night,” selling more than a million copies.
The ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
A child is black, a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight, a beautiful sight.
*
Marc Blitzstein, who pursued a path of politically engaged music in musical theatre, started out as a child piano prodigy in Philadelphia. In the early 1920s, he studied composition with Nadja Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg, in Paris and Berlin, respectively. During his years in the collective, Blitzstein altered his style substantially. Initially, Blitzstein was a convinced believer in the strict segregation of musical genres. In an article written in 1933, he strongly criticized composers such as Copland and Weill for incorporating popular music like jazz in their serious music compositions.[71] By the mid-1930s, he had altered his view substantially. His transformation is explained by Carol Oja as originating in his sensitivity to the social realities of the Depression as well as by his marriage to Eva Goldbeck, who was a translator and disciple of Bertolt Brecht.[72] Another factor in Blitzstein’s change of opinion could have been his engagement in the intense debates carried out by the CC. By 1936, a new appreciation of the creative promise of fusing musical styles led him to reevaluate Weill’s music and to adopt a new musical language in his own work.[73] His highly effective musical theater piece, “The Cradle Will Rock” (1936), was a medley of different popular music styles and classical forms such as opera and ballet. Among those impressed by Blitzstein’s newfound approach was Charles Seeger, who claimed that Blitzstein came the closest to embodying the CC’s vision of a politically engaged composer.[74]
One of Blitzstein’s most influential works, “The Cradle Will Rock” has enjoyed an active performance history over the decades. The original performance of the piece, which was scheduled for July 1937 at the Maxine Elliott Theatre with full orchestra, was shut down at the last minute supposedly because of budget cuts at the Federal Theatre Project. The claim of financial problems seemed to some a cover for political opposition to its out-spoken, pro-communist ideas. Orson Welles, the director of the piece, Houseman, and Blitzstein immediately thought of a “counter-attack”. They rented a much larger venue (the Venice Theatre) and decided to go ahead with the production. The word came from the Actor’s Equity Association (AEA), an American labor union representing the actors, forbidding the actors to perform on stage. The plan shifted to a solo performance by Blitzstein singing and speaking the parts from the piano. However, Orson Welles, came up with an inspiring plan to evade the union prohibition. He organized it so that the actors spoke their lines from the audience. The piece was performed to a sold-out audience. A year later, on January 3, 1938, the piece received a new production at the Windsor Theatre under the direction of the new Mercury Theatre Company. A rousing success, it went on to a total of 108 performances.
A 1939 Harvard production staged by the student Leonard Bernstein was also a success both in terms of ticket sales and critical notice.[75] A revival of the “Cradle Will Rock” on Broadway on December 26, 1947, at the Mansfield Theater ran for 34 performances. During the 1950s Red Scare, fellow CC member Earl Robinson “music-directed” the first production in Los Angeles.[76] In 1969, Leonard Lehrman, a former student of Elie Siegmeister, revived a production again at Harvard, drawing explicit parallels between Blitzstein’s themes and the university’s complicity in the Vietnam War.[77]
After the death of German émigré composer Kurt Weill in 1950, Blitzstein began working on the translation of Brecht’s libretto for Weill’s “Threepenny Opera.” In 1952, the premiere concert performance was directed by Leonard Bernstein with Lotte Lenya in the lead role. A theater performance followed in 1954, for which Lenya won a Tony Award. The piece, which opened at the Theater de Lys on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village on March 10, 1954, successfully ran for 96 performances. The popularity and critical success of this work in the United States is widely credited to Blitzstein’s translation, which helped secure the piece a lasting place in American musical theatre repertoire.
Through his role as transmitter of Weill’s signature score to a new generation of American audiences, Blitzstein may have had a substantial, if indirect, influence on 1960s music. To be sure, direct traces of his influence are few, if any. Blitzstein biographer Eric Gordon claims that Blitzstein’s name and works were no longer of any interest to the 1960s generation of left-wing musical activists.
The new protest music was another stripe entirely – folk and folk-inspired music, such as the songs of Joan Baez and Phil Ochs, or rock in all its varieties, such as the Beatles, Country Joe and the Fish, and the Mothers of Invention. Blitzstein’s sophistication, urbanity, culture, and the times that gave him a singing voice were things of a generation past.[78]
However, several folk and rock musicians of the Sixties have attested to the influence of Weill’s music – which was known to them, in many cases, via Blitzstein’s translation. Melanie, a singer from the Woodstock generation, claimed that the music of Billie Holiday and Kurt Weill influenced her early singing style. Judy Collins included the famous “Pirate Jenny Song” from the “Threepenny Opera” on her 1966 recording, “In My Life.”[79] Most significantly, Bob Dylan, in his autobiography, relates how striking It was to experience the “raw intensity of (Weill’s) songs,” their “erratic, unrhythmical and herky-jerky—weird visions.” He singles out the “show-stopping ballad, ‘A Ship the Black Freighter,’ [whose] real title was ‘Pirate Jenny,’” as “a new stimulant for [his] senses…like a folk song but a folk song from a different gallon jug in a different backyard.” He notes how the song’s structure was built on “free verse association…and [a] disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns.” For Dylan, this was music at the “cutting edge,” and it motivated him to try and “figure out how to manipulate and control this particular structure and form which [he] knew was the key that gave `Pirate Jenny’ its resilience and outrageous power.”
I’d think about this later in my dumpy apartment…I could see that the type of songs I was leaning towards singing didn’t exist and I began playing with the form, trying to grasp it—trying to make a song that transcended the information in it, the character and plot.[80]
In all likelihood, the version he heard utilized Blitzstein’s English-translated libretto. If Dylan can be taken at his word, one of the most influential political singers and musical innovators of the Sixties found major inspiration and guidance for his own work through serendipitous exposure to a classical music piece originally written in a popular idiom for German audiences by Brecht but later for American audiences by Blitzstein. Even if Blitzstein did not influence the 1960s protest music directly, the many-faceted connections between influential 1960s artists and musical activists that grew out of the CC traditions suggest that other of his colleagues in the CC did.
The works of Hanns Eisler, which were important points of reference for CC members, also left a lasting impact on political-musical movements of later generations, including that of the 1960s. In 1949, after his hearing before HUAC, Eisler was forced to leave the United States. This decision sparked protest in progressive circles and led to a large-scale fund-raising party on the composer’s behalf in New York City. It was around this time that Woody Guthrie wrote the song, “Eisler on the Go,” which preserved the memory of this campaign of solidarity in music. The song’s refrai—-”I don’t know what I’ll do, I don’t know what I’ll do”—expressed the deep sense of frustration felt by Eisler’s supporters. The song was never published and went unrecorded for decades. Discovered among the hundreds of lyrics stored over the years in the Woody Guthrie Archives in New York City, it was found by British political folk-punk artist Billy Bragg. Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s daughter, had asked Bragg to comb through the archives for recording material. She was particularly struck by the Eisler song: “I mean for Billy to find Hanns Eisler was miraculous, “Eisler on the Go,” which was my favorite personal song on the first one.”[81] With the American band, Wilco, Bragg set to music and recorded this song and other unknown lyrics of Woody Guthrie songs, which had never been recorded and for which no musical notation existed. For his part, Eisler ended up in East Germany and worked artistically with Brecht. He never returned to the US. The legacy of Eisler stands as a token of the plausibility of the CC’s ambition to use the resources of classical music to promote left-wing solidarity and agency.[82]
Team Seeger: Father and Son
Looking back on his intense involvement with the CC, Charles Seeger commented: “We were all on the wrong track—it was professionals trying to write music for the people and not in the people’s idiom. Well, those four things all came together with [the] invitation to go to Washington.”[83] In the unconditional tone of his remark, Seeger seems to express a view of the CC as a failed experiment. Still, in the following sentence, he implicitly concedes the importance of the ongoing discussions of the CC years, which informed Seeger’s later, more nuanced approach to drawing out the political significance of music as an administrator of a New Deal program.
Inspired and provoked by CC’s discussions of the value of folk music, Seeger would go on many years after the CC ceased to exist to dedicate himself to the preservation of folk songs.[84] In November 1935, he found work in the Resettlement Administration (RA) and from 1937–1941 was appointed deputy director of the Federal Music Project (FMP). As a program director in the Special Skills Division of the RA—a division that was meant to help build new communities and overcome disruptions caused by the resettlement of poor families from rural and urban areas to new suburban communities—he relied on the fund of experience he had built up in the CC. According to Sidney Robertson, one of his assistants during the RA years and Cowell’s future wife, Seeger’s ability to energize others and to stir “up all sorts of other people with ideas for uses to which the archives might be put” helped foster a new attitude toward folk music in the 1930s.[85] Between 1935 and 1941, approximately 1,000 recordings were added to the collection of American Folk Music in the Library of Congress under his guidance.[86] As Charles Seeger’s wife and close collaborator, Ruth Crawford Seeger, describes in her collection American Folk Songs for Children, the effort to collect and preserve folk art was, to a significant extent, political in both its motivation and effect:
[The folksong collection] gives early experience of democratic attitudes and values.… This kind of music has crossed and recrossed many sorts of boundaries and is still crossing and recrossing them. [87]
Seeger and Crawford knew that by making folk songs available to a wider audience through publications, they would reach people of different backgrounds and cultures. They hoped that exposure to this diverse musical heritage would foster sympathetic understanding of difference and help to unite people across the lines of class and race.
The most direct line from the intense experiments of the CC to the musical political culture of the Sixties is probably the connection between Charles Seeger and his son Pete Seeger. In 1932, just at the beginning of the formation of the CC, Pete, as a young man, was taken by his father and stepmother Ruth Crawford Seeger to an “unheated loft in Greenwich Village” to hear a speech given by Aaron Copland. It was Pete Seeger’s introduction to the avant-garde atmosphere of CC gatherings:
As Peter watched from the back of the room, two dozen prominent New York composers arrived, dressed in corduroys and leather jackets, carrying scores and instruments. Trained in the best music schools in the country, they were the renegades of the Philharmonic, passionately political.[88]
Peter was apparently unimpressed. Asked about his father’s involvement with the CC years later, Pete Seeger dismissed the ambitions of these musicians and of his father to enlist classical music avant-gardism in the service of left-populist politics: “Well their attempts were laughable.”[89] In one concession, which may have been made with tongue in cheek, Seeger did acknowledge one successful creative episode at the CC:
The closest they all got to writing real songs was when they wrote rounds…My father wanted to publish a book called ‘Rounds About the Very Rich.’ He was fond of one that was sung in three parts, like ‘Row, Row Your Boat.’ It went like this… “Oh joy upon this earth/to live and see the day/when Rockefeller senior/shall up to me and say/Comrade, can you spare a dime?”[90]
Needless to say, Pete Seeger did not hold up the CC as a significant influence upon his own development as a politically committed musician. It remains true, however, that his father exposed him to lines of thinking and debate pursued at CC meetings. One event that Pete does acknowledge as having had an immense impact on his musical development was a square dance festival in the Southern Mountains to which his father brought him. “I suddenly realized there was a wealth of music in my country that you never heard on the radio: old-time music, my brother called it –I think a better name than folk music—all over the place.”[91] His enthusiasm for the rich but neglected sources of folk music echoes his father’s. Charles Seeger was also the one who introduced Pete to Aunt Molly Jackson, who left a lasting impression on Pete: “She sang, ‘I am a union woman/just as brave as I can be/I do not like the bosses/and the bosses don’t like me’… And that was how I began to hear folk music.”[92]
In the mid-1930s, his father introduced Pete to Alan Lomax, the collector and documenter of American folk music. Through Lomax, Pete came to a deeper understanding of folk music and its distinctive sources in oral culture. “But this was brand-new to me, the idea that you could, you did not have to have a book in front of you, and you could decide which notes and verses you were going to sing.”[93] In 1940, twenty-one-year old Pete Seeger started working for Alan Lomax—at the time 25 years old. For 15 dollars a week, Seeger listened through the collected piles of recordings at the archive and made decisions about which songs stood out musically.
One could say that Pete Seeger’s burgeoning interest in folk music picked up where his father’s preservationist efforts left off. To the extent that Charles Seeger’s efforts in the field of folk music had been fostered by the theoretical discussions and aspirations of the CC, Pete’s foray into folk music performance with a political edge could be seen as the next step in a logical progression that began with the CC. In his visits to elementary schools and in his efforts to empower audiences at his shows to sing for themselves—”Hey,…I can sing this song myself. I don’t need Seeger anymore.”—as Filene puts it - Pete effectively carried forward the democratizing mission that had been so often articulated by CC members.[94] To take one notable example of Pete’s approach from his album “American Favorite Ballads,” he teaches the audience members the different voice parts for “Wimoweh”:
Now this is kind of an experiment. I usually sing this song with a whole bunch of people…[I]t needs basses, altos, and tenors all joining in. It’s not a very difficult part. But here I am all by myself, and frankly I can’t sing it very well by myself. So I’m going to give you the parts…[T]hey sing like this. Now that’s too low for some of you, […] you can take the high part that goes (Seeger demonstrates).[95]
Seeger’s dedication to educate and involve his audiences during his performances can be seen as a continuation of one of the core ideas of the CC. An early example of Seeger’s educational approach can also be found in his book “How to Play the Five-String Banjo.” Besides containing information on the instrument’s history and its role in the southern mountain culture, it gives detailed instructions on how to play the instrument properly and most effectively. The book was a project he worked on while touring with Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948. The first edition was self-mimeographed.
Immediately after the war Pete Seeger tried to get involved in the political musical activities of the Communist Party, envisioning the creation of a “singing labor movement” that would involve “hundreds, thousands, ten thousands of union choruses. Just as every church has a choir, why not every union?”[96] The image of ten-thousand labor choruses interestingly brings to mind the vigorous choral culture that was present in New York City during his father’s years at the CC. A meeting in January 1946 with a Communist Party official, in which Seeger laid out his musical ideas of “progressive song books for every union, workers making their own culture and spreading it through People’s Song,” did not result in any concrete Party plans or initiatives. However, Pete was able to put his musical abilities to Party use at his live performances. During one event, he performed Kentucky banjo tunes to a New York City working class audience. After the concert, a party official came up to him and noted that, “here in New York hardly anybody knows that kind of music… If you are going to work with the workers of New York City, you should be in the jazz field.”[97] It was an ironic if unintended echo of the CC’s earlier educational efforts to expand musical tastes by exposing audiences to unfamiliar music idioms. All in all, Charles Seeger’s evolving sense of musical-political mission strongly influenced his son’s choice of musical-political vocation.
One example of an offshoot organization was the People’s Song Newsletter, a folk song newsletter founded by Pete Seeger in the postwar period. It preceded and influenced the publication, Sing Out! which was eventually to support the work of the 1960s artists in both music and politics.
Conclusion
If Herbert Haufrecht, former member of the CC, dismisses the ambition of the CC to combine a progressive political content with “highbrow” avant-garde music as “schizophrenic,”[98] then R. G. Davis offers a different point of view. He argues for the validity of CC’s original goal of an artistic-political marriage that could appeal to working-class audiences.[99] According to Davis, this initially promising revolutionary artistic impulse was too quickly discarded for a politically problematic, “easy-listening” approach, away from any contact with “dreaded ‘high art.’” He laments that Seeger instead of shifting completely towards folk music could have easily ‘given’ “[the American Left] a more complex vehicle for understanding… Had he chosen to do so, however, it would have been his (and his comrades’) responsibility to make it clear, to explain it to the ‘masses’ so it could be used.” He goes on:
The protest music that has come down from the 1930s to the 1980s via Charles Seeger and his followers is almost always “feel good” music (despite whatever the lyrics might have to say). Musically, it presents no atmosphere of debate because it provides only one side of complex set of questions. Composed, intellectual music also allows for debate with form; folk has room for only one theme (“Unite!” or “Strike!” or “Victory!”) and little for oppositional dialogue. Pleasing, nostalgic, and above all, entertaining, it is useful at rallies and on picket lines.
This line of argument is interesting. Despite his contempt for “feel good” folk music, Davis does implicitly allow that, in urgent or pressing situations, a “simple” and upbeat music may be necessary to encourage unity or promote action (“Strike!”). One only has to bring to mind the emotionally explosive atmosphere of the Civil Rights struggle, where music became an important means of encouragement for participants to stick together and not flinch in the prospect of mental and physical abuse. By indirectly describing folk as a genre of “feel good” and “easy-listening” music, Davis ignores many of the complex aspects of folk music that have been pointed out by classical avant-garde composers such as Ruth Crawford Seeger.[100] Charles Seeger, for example, noted that folk music exhibited a unique potential for weaving together music and text: “…the stuff put together with the music and the words were absolutely marvelous….”[101] One could argue that this unique interweaving of music and words revealed a complexity of form which stimulated the sort of reflection and debate for which Davis seems to call. (As an analogy, one need only think of rap’s kinetic fusion of words and music and the sort of intellectual and political challenges this fusion raises for listeners.) It is noteworthy, however, that at the end of the day, Davis does not advocate “a dismissal of the folk/jazz/pop tradition, only an expansion of the musical palette that is comparable to a postmodern, historically materialist discourse.”
Davis’s position although controversial is thought-provoking and worth investigating further. The CC’s original mission of bringing across their political avant-garde music to the ‘masses’ is certainly a valid one. Earlier experiments with similar goals, like the settlement house of the late 1800s and early 1900s, show that it was possible to build this kind of “advanced” musical-political membership. To successfully follow through with such a mission, however, it was necessary to establish an infrastructure, which continuously worked to involve and create musical communities by the means of education and concerts. Settlement houses, such as Hull House in Chicago and Henry Street in New York City, both used contemporary classical music education as an important tool to inspire social and political change.
The CC was more focused on discussions within the collective than on outreach. Members’ turn towards folk music, more ‘pleasant’ and easily communicated musical aesthetics, and their decision to abandon the CC was stimulated, as noted earlier, by many different factors. In hindsight, it might seem that the members of the CC were too impatient and gave up too easily. From a historical distance, however this judgment is a difficult judgment to make. Shaped and influenced by the “Zeitgeist” of the Depression era the members were swept up in the push by the American Communist Party for a Popular Front, in which a search for uniquely Americanism artistic expressions began. Also, as creative artists, members wanted to advance and develop their own music, and found the group-oriented constellation of the CC too constricting. But even if they did not fulfill their original goal, ex-members and associates of the CC can be seen as having been engaged in activities consistent with the CC’s central mission: educating a broader public musically and fostering political awareness at the same time.
However plausible Davis’s position, it is important to point out that works like “Ballad for Americans” and “Cradle Will Rock,” so obviously shaped by the CC’s discussions, cannot be dismissed as “easy-listening” or “feel good music.” Both works offer a unique fusion of popular, folk (lowbrow) and classical avant-garde musical idioms (highbrow). The new pathways presented by works like these opened doors for future generations of composers. One of them was Leonard Bernstein, whom Blitzstein first got to know at the 1939 Harvard production of The Cradle Will Rock, and who felt deeply inspired by the older composer. More than once—to the annoyance of Blitzstein—his admiration went as far as borrowing musical tunes, without attribution, and even whole songs from Blitzstein for his own works.[102] Bernstein’s work, West Side Story, extends the musical pathway first laid out by Blitzstein’s political musical theater. According to Gordon, Bernstein also “transparently” transformed a musical theme from Blitzstein’s “Regina” and used it for one of West Side Story’s signature songs, “Maria.”[103] Oja argues that the impact of Blitzstein’s work on the music world can be seen in the musical theatre and Broadway pieces of the Fifties and Sixties, including the compositions of Sondheim and Bernstein.[104]
In a somewhat parallel line of argument, Eric A. Gordon, Blitzstein’s biographer sees the genre of musical theatre and operatic stage as the one in which American composers have had the strongest impact as politically informed creative artists.[105] According to him, popular music on Broadway, benefited from the difficulty American composers had in finding opera houses which financially would take a chance on new American pieces. This difficulty left the composers with little choice but to compose more and more for the popular stage. Although Gordon does not specifically mention the CC in his argument, he does mention several composers affiliated with the group who “carved out” places on the popular stage, among them: Blitzstein, Copland and Robinson. Continuing on to the present, Gordon names Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, Philip Glass, and John Adams.[106]
Despite regretting Charles Seeger’s turn toward folk and “‘feel good’ music,” Davis nevertheless acknowledges the importance of Charles Seeger “and his followers” in launching a tradition of American protest music. In the light of the enormous impact of the works of many former members or associates of the CC in shaping a tradition of American political protest music, the CC clearly deserves recognition as a unique institution in American cultural life. Even if its ambitious goal to foster a progressive-revolutionary political consciousness in working class audiences by exposing them to the aesthetically revolutionary idioms of avant-garde music was not achieved during its existence, the CC’s members’ eventual decision to trespass across musical genre borders was itself a radical “move,” that helped open doors for future experiments in political-engaged music making. In this regard, Dunaway’s point that, “the era of the Composers Collective may be seen by future historians as an American musical genesis,” [107] seems well taken.
What was new in the CC’s approach was the coordination of a group of prominent American composers all pushing toward the same goal. This push arose out of the continuing theoretical discussions held at the CC which provided a theoretical base for later efforts. Besides fostering broad discussions about political music, the CC also created an important network of personal contacts and collaborations. As Composers’ Collective member Henry Leland Clarke saw it, the theoretical discussions as well as the contacts and collaborations prepared the ground for later significant developments:
The Composers’ Collective of 1935 was a rare institution…rarely have creative artists worked for a common cause with sufficient dedication to make them WANT criticism from each other. Without the CC there would have been no Abe Lincoln Song by Earl Robinson, and without his Lincoln Song there would have been no Lincoln Portrait by Aaron Copland. Without the Composers’ Collective there would have been no Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein, and without his Cradle Will Rock there would have been no West Side Story by Leonard Bernstein.[108]
The shared aims and mutual influences of these composers, musicians, and intellectuals of the 1930s and their systematic efforts to use music as a medium of social struggle, provided a template from which folk singers of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of the Sixties could operate. The still powerful echo of the protest music of the 1960s and their performers is strongly linked to CC efforts to popularize folk songs as a political vehicle and the classical techniques they made available. Through its intensive working over of musical material, its generation of networks, its focus on education (exemplified in Ruth Crawford Seeger’s publications of folk song for children and Pete Seeger’s insistence on audience participation), the CC created resources for future generations of musical protestors. One could even argue that these efforts were crucial to the birth of a specific American protest music which has been deeply shaped by a fusion of different musical traditions.
[1] Letter from Lahn Adomian to Charles Seeger, ca. 1975, in Ruth Crawford Seeger. A Composer’s Search for American Music, by Judith Tick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 404.
[2] David K. Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers’ Collective of New York,” New York Folklore 5 (Summer 1979): 9.
[3] Elie Siegmeister, Music and Society (New York: Critics Group Press, 1938), 26, accessed Feb. 10, 2021,
[4] Virgil Thomson, An Autobiography by Virgil Thomson (New York: Dutton Paperback, 1985), 74.
[5] Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland. 1900 through 1942 (New York: St. Martin’s/ Marek, 1984), 222.
[6] William Duckworth, Talking Music. Conversations with John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers (New York: Schirmer Books, 1995), 38.
[7] Antheil letter to Ms. Bok, March 12, 1936, George Antheil correspondence with Mary Louise Curtis Bok, 1921 -1940 (Music Division, Library of Congress) ML 31.A59.. Box-Folder 2/1-13 (1931-1940) https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/eadmus.mu010018
Thanks to Mauro Piccinini for calling my attention to this quote.
[8] Copland and Perlis, Copland, 223.
[9] Ann M. Pecatello, Charles Seeger. A Life in American Music (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), 113.
[10] Serge R. Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 42.
[11] Copland and Perlis, Copland, 223.
[12] The founding date of the collective remains unclear, with some accounts (e.g., Dunaway, Copland/Perlis) listing 1931 and others (Zuck 1980, Reuss 1971, and Cohen) giving 1932 [David K. Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers’ Collective of New York,” New York Folklore 5 (Summer 1979): 1–19; Copland and Perlis, Copland, 223; Richard Reuss, “The Roots of American Left-wing Interest in Folksong” Labor History 12 (1971): 259–79; Barbara Zuck A History of Musical Americanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980); Ronald D. Cohen Rainbow Quest. The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 21].
[13]Carol Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” Musical Quarterly 73 (1989): 447.
[14] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 111.
[15] Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 2.
[16] Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 452.
[17] In May 1935, Bauman became the first singer to make a recording of Eisler songs in the United States. Eisler’s tour ended with an invitation to return in the fall as a guest lecturer for the New School for Social Research
[18] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 112. The lecture was later published by the left-wing Downtown Music School in the spring of 1936. See Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 452).
[19] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 115.
[20] Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 453.
[21] Earl Robinson, Ballad of an American. The Autobiography of Earl Robinson (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 68.
[22] Elizabeth Bergman Crist, Music for the Common Man. Aaron Copland during the Depression and War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23.
[23]Pescatello also mentions Stefan Wolpe (Volpe) and Jeannette Barnett (Janet Barnes), S. C. Riegger (S. C. Richards) (See Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 224).
[24]Copland and Perlis, Copland, 224.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Ibid., 223.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 116.
[29]David K. Dunaway, “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands: The Composers’ Collective Years,” Ethnomusicology 24 (May 1980): 161.
[30] H. L. Clark “Composers’ Collective of New York” Grove Music Dictionary Online (2001), ed. Laura Macy, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic, accessed on Feb. 10, 2021. Musicologist and composer Norman Cazden, also a member of the group, recalled the same date as Seeger, 1931. See Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 1.
[31] Crist, Music for the Common Man, 23.
[32] Copland and Perlis, Copland, 223. The headquarters of the collective was 47 East 12th Street. The Degeyter Club was on East 19th Street. Ibid.
[33] Interview with Norman Cazden, June 17, 1976, in Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers’ Collective of New York,” 1979, p. 4.
[34]Copland and Perlis, Copland, 383.
[35]Ibid.
[36] Eric A. Gordon, Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1989), 91.
[37]Ashley Pettis, “Marching with a Song,” New Masses, May 1, 1934, pp. 16–17.
[38]Copland and Perlis, Copland, 225.
[39] Ibid., 224.
[40] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 117.
[41]Copland and Perlis, Copland, 224.
[42] Workers Song Book no. 1 (New York: Workers Music League, USA Section of International Music Bureau, 1934).
[43] Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 7.
[44] Lahn Adohmyan, “What Songs Should Workers’ Choruses Sing?,” Daily Worker, Feb. 7, 1934, p. 5.
[45] Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 6.
[46] Ibid.
[47] Benjamin Filene, Romancing the Folk. Public Memory and American Roots Music (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 69.
[48] Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 6, 9.
[49] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 135n45 (Charles Seeger
dictated to Peggy Seeger Cohen, April 22, 1977).
[50] Mike Gold “Change the World Column (“The Steam Hammer”), Daily Worker, June 11, 1934, p. 5. Cited in Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 12.
[51] Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 459.
[52] Dunaway “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 13.
[53] H. L. Clarke, “Composers’ Collective of New York,” Grove Music Dictionary Online.
[54] Judith Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger. A Composer’s Search for American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 233.
[55]Copland and Perlis, Copland, 224.
[56]Aaron Copland, “The American Composer Gets a Break,” American Mercury 35 (April 1935): 488–92.
[57] Dunaway “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 7.
[58] Ibid., 11–12.
[59] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 115.
[60] It was first performed by Paul Robeson was immediately recorded and sold more than 30,000 copies within one year.
[61] Robinson Ballad of an American, 74–75.
[62] People of the Cumberland, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/huffman/frontier/people.html, accessed Feb. 10, 2021.
[63] Robinson, Ballad of an American, 75.
[64] The House I Live In, prod. Frank Ross and Mervyn LeRoy; dir. Mervyn LeRoy; screenplay by Albert Maltz (RKO Radio). “The House I Live In,” music by Earl Robinson, lyrics by Lewis Allan (RKO Radio).
[65] Robinson, Ballad of an American, 157.
[66] Ibid., 155. See lyrics in Appendix.
[67] The lyricist of the song, Lewis Allan (alias Abel Meeropol), is also the author of the lyrics of the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday.
[68] Hans Kafka, “What’s New?,” Aufbau 5 (Feb. 1946): 17, cited in Hans Kafka, Hollywood Calling. Die Aufbau-Kolumne zum Film Exil (Hamburg: ConferencePoint Verlag, 2002), 113.
[69] Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks, “Patriotism’s Secret History,” Nation, June 3, 2002, p. 2, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/patriotisms-secret-history/, accessed Feb. 10, 2021.
[70] Keith Newlin, ed., A Theodore Dreiser Encyclopedia (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 5.
[71]Marc Blitzstein, “Popular Music—An Invasion: 1923–1933,” Modern Music (1933): 101.
[72] Carol Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 445–75.
[73] Ibid., 449.
[74] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 114.
[75] Gordon, Mark the Music, 178; Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,”459–60.
[76] Robinson and Gordon, Ballad of an American, 214.
[77] Gordon, Mark the Music, 536. In 1999, Blitzstein’s “Cradle Will Rock” became the subject of a film by Tim Robbins.
[78] Gordon, Mark the Music, 536.
[79] Richie Unterberger, Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock’s Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 2003), 82, 112.
[80] Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 272–73, 275–76.
[81] Man in The Sand. A Talk with Nora Guthrie. DVDTalk, http://www.dvdtalk.com/noraguthrieinterview.html, accessed Feb. 20, 2021.
[82] Another interesting connection between the CC and the folk music revival of the 1960s is Elie Siegmeister’s arrangement work for Joan Baez’s songbook. See The Joan Baez Songbook, ed. Maynard Solomon (Ryerson Music Publishers, 1964).
[83] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 135.
[84] Dunaway, “Charles Seeger and Carl Sands,” 168.
[85] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 139, 147.
[86] Ibid., 155.
[87] Ruth Crawford Seeger, American Folk Songs for Children (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1948), 22.
[88] David Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing: Pete Seeger (New York: Da Capo, 1990), 39.
[89] “Pete Seeger radio interview with Democracy Now!,” https://www.democracynow.org/2006/7/3/we_shall_overcome_an_hour_with, accessed Feb. 11, 2021.
[90] Alec Wilkinson, “The Protest Singer. Pete Seeger and American Folk Music,” New Yorker, April 17, 2006, p. 44.
[91] Pete Seeger radio interview with “Democracy Now!”
[92] Wilkinson, “Protest Singer,” 44.
[93] “Rik Palieri’s Interview with Pete Seeger,” The Folk Life, ed. John McLaughlin and Jamie Downs, http://www.thedigitalfolklife.org/seeger.html, accessed Feb. 10, 2021.
[94] Filene, Romancing the Folk, 197
[95] Ibid. .
[96] Dunaway, How Can I Keep from Singing, 117.
[97] Ibid., 118.
[98] Dunaway “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 7.
[99] R. G. Davis, “Music from the Left,” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 1 (Winter 1988): 7–25.
[100] Tick, Ruth Crawford Seeger, 242.
[101] Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 135.
[102] Gordon, Mark the Music, 364.
[103] Ibid., 431.
[104] Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s ‘The Cradle Will Rock’ and Mass-Song Style of the 1930’s,” 459.
[105] Eric A. Gordon, “Political Consciousness and the American Composer,” International Center for American Music, p. 3,
http://icamus.org/media/filer_public/17/a9/17a949ca-8f0e-4982-8809-4931d3c58c89/eric_a_gordon_-_icamus_seminar_-_october_2006.pdf, accessed Feb. 11, 2021.
[106] “Menotti cannot be considered America’s most socially conscious composer, however. That landscape was carved out by others, such as Marc Blitzstein, a Marxist humanist who made it his lifelong project to illuminate American problems of class, gender and race, and intermittently by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Kurt Weill, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Richard Rogers, Frederick Loewe, Carlisle Floyd, Stephen Sondheim, William Finn, Philip Glass, John Adams, and others. […] Earl Robinson, composer of “Ballad for Americans,” “Joe Hill,” and “The House I Live In,” wrote a full-length stage work, “Sandhog” (1954), whose principal characters are the Irish-American workers who built the subway tunnels under New York harbor.” See Gordon, “Political Consciousness and the American Composer.”
[107] Dunaway, “Unsung Songs of Protest,” 9.
[108] Henry Leland Clarke cited in Pescatello, Charles Seeger, 117. For Clark’s response to Steven E. Gilbert, see “‘In Seventy-Six the Sky Was Red’: A Profile of Earl Robinson,” presented to the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society, Nov. 7, 1976.
Dr. Julia Schmidt-Pirro received her PhD in Musicology from the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1999 under the guidance of Prof. Helga de la Motte-Haber. She has taught courses at Georgia Southern University & Armstrong Atlantic State University, including the Honors Class, “Music and Politics.” She has published a book and several articles on European and American Avant-garde composers, including George Antheil, John Cage, and Mayako Kubo. Her co-authored article, “Employing Music in the Cause of Social Justice: Ruth Crawford and Zilphia Horton,” was selected by the editors of Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore for republication in the edited volume, New York State Folklife Reader: Diverse Voices (2013). Her most recent publication “Bringing Spirituals onto the Classical Music Stage in the Service of African American Civil Rights” appeared in Political Messaging in Music and Entertainment Spaces Across the Globe (Vol. 1), Vernon Press, 2022.