Collective Difference: The Pan-American Association of Composers

great revolutionary banner of the day—began to notice that in Regla, on the other side of
the bay, there were rhythms just as complex and interesting as those created by
Stravinsky to evoke the primitive rituals of pagan Russia.” 11 Stravinsky composed the
Rite in a Europe on the brink of war. The final, explosive danse sacrale was widely heard
by contemporaries as an anti-nationalist commentary on human sacrifice in the name of
one’s tribe. 12
Simultaneously, however, in spite of the work’s aural association with a specific
time and place, elements of its musical style could be easily extrapolated and its
instrumentation adapted to express other times and places—other tribes or nations.
Stravinsky was widely hailed as the father of modernism as a generation of composers
attempted to transpose his innovations in harmony, texture, form, and instrumentation to
their own locales. In other words, the location of the Rite in an ancient time and place
(pagan Russia) reinforced the work’s universality rather than precluding it. The Rite gave
composers everywhere the impetus to mine the cultural materials of their ancient pasts to
create their own versions of international modernism. If they did not have an ancient past,
as in the relatively young United States, they simply borrowed or imagined musical
elements of Native Americans, descendents of imported Africans, or their Latin
American neighbors.
Amerindian Themes in American Music
Native American culture had been an object of study for European and American
artists, writers, and composers since the first encounters between explorers of the
American continent and Native Americans. One of the first Americans to treat
suggestions of Amerindian melodies in concert music was Anthony Philip Heinrich
(1781-1861). The orchestral works of this German-Bohemian born composer were highly
programmatic. His works that utilized Native American lore were often loosely based on
historical meetings between Indians and whites or portraits of Indian leaders. Heinrich’s
first such work was Pushmataha, a Venerable Chief of a Western Tribe of Indians (1831).
11 Alejo Carpentier, Music in Cuba (268-9).
12 In 1915, Jean Cocteau wrote that the work seemed to him a “prelude to war.” Quoted in Glenn Watkins,
Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 122.
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