American Music’s Roots Probed by Southwest Chamber Music

Where does American music begin? A good bet has always been with an unkempt Boston tanner who had one eye, a withered arm, one leg shorter than the other and a serious snuff habit. William Billings’ spirit of adventure, invention and jolly irreverence bent Europe’s rules of harmony and created, in his hymns and fuging-tunes, a fresh music for a new world.

But maybe, just maybe, our real musical forefather was born in Boston in 1706, exactly 40 years earlier than Billings, and was a lot more distinguished. Benjamin Franklin, it is well known, invented the glass harmonica, a device of tuned glass bowls that charmed Mozart and Beethoven, both of whom composed for it. But there is also a short string quartet attributed to him. It is a fascinating curiosity, and it opened last weekend’s Southwest Chamber Music program at the Huntington Library.

Franklin’s String Quartet for three violins and cello is music, like so much American music would come to be, as invention. Writing it to be suitable for amateurs, the composer devised a system of tuning each instrument that would allow the five very short, suite-like movements to be played on open strings, without any fingering. That also meant that there was no opportunity for fingers to vibrate the strings. As a result, this quartet resonates with the same flat, vibrato-less sonorities that were so dear to many American Modernists in the early 1950s.

Southwest Chamber performs on the Loggia of the Huntington’s Main Art Gallery. The audience sits under a portico held up by classical columns. The gallery behind houses the renowned collection of portraits of bewigged 18th century Europeans. Convention, order, conformity of that age surround the audience. And it all helps to point out just what a plucky American Franklin was.

And yet Franklin’s quartet may not be by Franklin at all but a product of one of those very bewigged 18th century Europeans. European libraries house manuscripts of the piece with different authors, Pleyel and Haydn among them. Southwest Chamber did not consider this question in the program notes, but the whole unresolvable issue of trying to identify just what is American in music was the overriding theme of the program anyway.

The two works that followed Franklin’s were “Four Indigenous Portraits” by William Grant Still and Theme and Variations, Opus 80, by Amy Beach. Both pieces were written for flute and string quartet, and both are by important American pioneers who broke down race and gender barriers in classical music earlier this century. Neither Still, an African American composer, nor Beach, a woman composer who confronted the white male musical establishment in Boston, have yet been fully appreciated.

Indeed, so little of either composer is heard that we are far from able to make a proper assessment of them. They were composers of their time. Beach’s Theme and Variations is substantial, 20 minutes in length and leans in the direction of early-century French music, impressionist in harmonies, subtle in its use of sonorities. Still’s portraits applied spirituals, as well as Brazilian and native American musics, to the classical chamber music environment with a certain restraint and considerable warmth.

Dvorak’s “American” String Quintet concluded the program. The Czech composer, during his 10-year residence in America in the late 19th century, had clouded American waters. He urged Americans to write like Europeans but with indigenous material. But he overlooked the more authentic early American impulse to actually compose like Americans, breaking rules. His quintet is the gorgeous European music of a tourist.

The performances on Saturday by the Southwest strings and flutist Dorothy Stone were communicative, if more forthright then polished. Individuality was an important component of this program, and the playing contributed to an appreciation of it.