America, the Cultural: How American Culture Changed European Music
The cultural influence of Europe on America is well-known. But Jack Sullivan, a professor of American Studies at Rider University in New Jersey, has published a new book that finally should put America's cultural inferiority complex to rest.
"New World Symphonies: How American Culture Changed European Music" (Yale University Press, 1999) proves that it was the New World that changed the Old.
Antonin Dvorak kept Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's epics of native Americans on his table as he composed.
Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel were both obsessed with the brooding melancholy of Edgar Alan Poe.
Walt Whitman inspired the both Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams, with a "lusty yes! to life," unlike Poe's "resounding no!.".
Most telling perhaps, the African-Americans energized twentieth-century art music in Europe-- with jazz, spirituals, and blues.
Sullivan has woven together the music of spirituals, jazz, Broadway, and Hollywood; and the poetry of Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman into a compelling argument that America created modern European culture.
"When Europeans fall for American culture, they do so with a special obsessiveness, a sense of discovery, spontaneity, and the exotic," Sullivan writes. "And in several cases, notably the works of Poe and the spirituals of black America, Europeans made the discovery first."
"Europeans have been extraordinarily articulate about their American discoveries," Sullivan writes, and that articulation makes "New World Symphonies" especially attractive to American readers who can truly see themselves in this European mirror.
For more information contact Jack Sullivan at Rider University at 609-895-5573, or at home at 212-724-5573, or try Earle Rommel in the university news office at 609-896-5192.
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