MUSIC / CHRIS PASLES : When Europe Was Happy to Buy American

Although the United States declared its political independence in 1776, this country didn’t begin to free itself until a lot later. American classical musicians looked to European teachers and models all the way up through the beginning of this century.

Then, right after World War I, a strange thing happened: suddenly, they found European musicians staring right back over here.

Not at their watery imitations of German symphonies and fugues and piano pieces, but at new, vital, distinctively American types of music: ragtime and jazz.

Composers regarded as formidably intellectual--Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Hindemith, among others--suddenly began incorporating elements of music heard in Parisian nightclubs and dance halls. Imported straight from America.

“We think of (the ‘20s) as the jazz era, the flapper era, Americans going to Paris, that sort of thing,” pianist Leonard Stein said in a recent interview. “But, on the other hand, the Europeans were very much influenced by American models.”

Schoenberg’s Suite, Opus 25, and Hindemith’s Suite “1922,” Opus 22, are two works that show these influences, if on a rather sophisticated level.

Stein will play both works in a 1920s program by the Southwest Chamber Music Society being performed today at Chapman University in Orange. He also will join Dorothy Stone in the Flute Sonata by Poulenc and the Flute Sonatina by Milhaud.

“Most of the works on the program are concerned with the spirit of the 1920s,” Stein said.

“You have a kind of mixture of what is called neoclassicism--the return to forms of an earlier period--and also the influence of popular American styles.

“Naturally that was a reaction to the period that came before (World War I)), as with Debussy and others, whose music was more literary or had some kind of other reference--imagistic, one might say--and it was a more subjective period, if you want to be general.

“The period after the war, with its disillusionments, was perhaps more objective in its attitude. We’d describe it as being more cool.

“This was the period of Dadaism and what the Germans called the new Sobriety , the new Objectivity.”

In both the Stravinsky and Hindemith pieces there is “an emphasis on rhythm and accenting--which you would find naturally in danced movements--sort of brought up to date, as Stravinsky did, too.

“The excitement is in the accentuation and the cross-rhythms, the syncopation, accents off the beat--the non-adherence to metrical values, which is more a modern idea.”

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Schoenberg was “aware of the aesthetic around him, although he wrote the Suite in Vienna and you might say it has a Viennese flavor to it.”

But he had a practical purpose, too.

“I think that in his own way he was using these more popular, accessible forms as a kind of hook to bring in new (12-tone compositional) methods--something that would be understood with its form.”

For this reason, he shaped each movement after dance forms of the early 18th Century--the gavotte, minuet and gigue.

But “despite the non-tonal method,” Stein insisted, “Schoenberg’s Suite is still very light music, although it is not usually played that way.

“One thinks only of the difficulties of making sense of a new kind of method of composition. But in essence it’s rather light music.”

In fact, for all his adventuresome modernism, Schoenberg, Stein insisted, is “still in the tradition of subjective interpretation” he allowed the performers.

“With this kind of music, which is rich, particularly polyphonically, you can derive many divergent ways of expression in it,” he said.

“The difficulty is in bringing out the various parts. But for anyone brought up on Bach, that problem is not insurmountable.”

Hindemith went a step further in identifying with popular culture, calling movements in his Suite “Shimmy,” “Boston” and “Ragtime.”

“He even writes a direction in the ‘Ragtime’ that one should play it like a machine,” Stein says. “So you can see a kind of modernism at work there, to imitate the machine.”

But the pop influence didn’t last, at least in Hindemith’s case.

He later avowed “a complete rejection of this period of his writing,” Stein said. “As he became more ‘serious,’ he rejected these earlier influences of jazz and so-called ‘vulgar’ vocabulary.”

Even so, the works he wrote during this period retain their vitality, as do the pieces by Schoenberg, Varese, Poulenc and Milhaud, which will complete the program at Chapman.

* The Southwest Chamber Music Society will play music composed in the ‘20s by Schoenberg, Poulenc and others on Thursday at 8 p.m. at Bertea Hall (Music Building), Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. $7 and $14. (800) 726-7147.