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Cultural hierarchy and the persistence of optimism in Meredith Willson's America

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Cultural Hierarchy and the Persistence of Optimism in Meredith Willson’s America

by

JAMES M. DELOREY

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 James M. Delorey
ii

In memory of Fred Buda (1935–2019)

For Nichole, Paul, and Willa

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Although I had been working on this dissertation already, I received a major boost when Nate
Sloan joined the faculty of the Thornton School. His confidence in me was transformational, and
his enthusiasm for my work, regular check-ins, and sound advice were crucial to bringing this
project to a close. I would like to thank him for all his efforts. Joanna Demers has been with me
from the very start, and I am grateful for her sustained support and advice. I am also grateful for
the expertise and insight that Lisa Cooper Vest has always been generous enough to offer me.
Thank you to Tok Thomson, Leah Morrison, and Scott Spencer who all encouraged and
supported me at different times. I would also like to thank Sean Nye for always being willing to
talk and offer his encouragement. None of this would have been possible without the immense
support of Nichole Fiore. I cannot thank her enough. Lastly, I would like to thank Paul and Willa
for their patience. Their smiles, laughs, and hugs have sustained me through the most difficult
times.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DEDICATION……………………………………………………………………...............

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………...............

LIST OF EXAMPLES……………………………………………………………...............

ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………...............

CHAPTERS

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………….

A Usable Past……………………………………………………………………….
Willson and The Music Man Scholarship…………………………………………..
Optimism…………………………………………………………………………...
Cultural Hierarchy………………………………………………………………….
The Jazz Age: Modernism and National Character………………………………...

1. INTELLECTUAL AND MUSICAL FOUNDATIONS………………………................

The Young Americans……………………………………………………...............
The Seven Arts……………………………………………………………...............
Gilbert Seldes.............................................................................................................
Paul Whiteman……………………………………………………………...............
O. O. McIntyre Suite………………………………………………………………..

2. WILLSON’S PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC………………………………………………

Robert Meredith Willson: Myth Versus Reality……………………………………
A Different Evaluation……………………………………………………………...
Willson’s Philosophy of Melody…………………………………………...............
“The Folk Songs of Tomorrow”: American Melodies……………………………..
Classical Music and Democratic Values……………………………………………

3. MEREDITH WILLSON AND POSTWAR CULTURAL HIERARCHY……………...

American Roots of Mass Culture Critique……………………………………….....
Mass Culture in the World War II Era……………………………………………...
Mass Culture, Complexity, and Modernism in the Cold War……………………...
Musical Modernism and Complexity in the Cold War……………………………..
Willson’s Encounter with Cultural Hierarchy……………………………………...
“Selling Long-Hair”………………………………………………………………...

Page
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103
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163
169
185
v

4. WILLSON’S MUSICALS……………………………………………………………….

The Music Man……………………………………………………………………..
Willson’s Other Musicals…………………………………………………………..

CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………..

BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..

188

191
220

228

235
vi

LIST OF EXAMPLES

Example 1. Suggested Program from “A Modest Proposal” .................................................. 46
Example 2. Program for Eva Gauthier's Recital in 1923 ........................................................ 59
Example 3. Photograph of Paul Whiteman with Fellow Bandleaders ................................... 73
Example 4. Photograph of Paul Whiteman (left) and Meredith Willson .............................. 80
Example 5. Cakewalk Rhythm .................................................................................................. 83
Example 6. Patter Rhythm ......................................................................................................... 84
Example 7. Patter Rhythm from “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil” ........................ 84
Example 8. Three-beat Jazz Pattern ......................................................................................... 85
Example 9. Sock Section with Blues Bass ................................................................................. 86
Example 10. Blues Bass in “Thots While Strolling” ................................................................ 87
Example 11. “Thots While Strolling” Flute Melody ................................................................ 90
Example 12. “Thots While Strolling” Cantabile Melody ......................................................... 90
Example 13. Five Stages of Deceleration in “Local Boy Makes Good” with Train Effect... 91
Example 14. “Thots While Strolling” Flute and Cantabile Melodies in Counterpoint from
“Local Boy Makes Good” ................................................................................................... 91
Example 15. Explication of Plurisignificance in Harmonie und Modulationslehre ............... 93
Example 16. Plurisignificance and Traditional Harmonic Motion in “Thingumbobs” ....... 95
Example 17. Plurisignificance with Enharmonic Reinterpretation in “Thingumbobs” ...... 95
Example 18. Generation of Scales Through Symmetrical Inversion ..................................... 96
Example 19. Chromatic Symmetrical Inversion in “Local Boy Makes Good” ..................... 96
Example 20. Allegro Moderato from Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D. 759 with
Damrosch Lyrics ................................................................................................................ 102
Example 21. “Old Joe Clark” from “Calico Square Dance” ................................................ 127
Example 22. "Old Joe Clark" with Willson's Fiddle Melody from "Calico Square Dance
............................................................................................................................................. 127
Example 23. Melodic Motives from “Forth and Back” ......................................................... 128
Example 24. American Parade Rhythm ................................................................................. 132
Example 25. Accompaniment Comparison of the First Eight Measures of Beethoven's
Minuet in G Major and “Goodnight, My Someone” ....................................................... 209
Example 26. Opening Measures of "Down by the O-Hi-O ................................................... 211
Example 27. Opening Measures of “In the Gloaming” ......................................................... 211
Example 28. Opening Measures of “Votre toast, je peaux vous le render” ........................ 211
Example 29. “My White Knight” and “The Sadder but Wiser Girl” in Counterpoint ..... 213
Example 30. Beginning of “Goodnight, My Someone” Reprise with Marian and Harold
Singing their Own Songs ................................................................................................... 219
Example 31. “Goodnight, My Someone” Reprise with Marian and Harold Singing Each
Other’s Songs ..................................................................................................................... 219
Example 32. “Happy Birthday, Mrs. J. J. Brown” Gavotte ................................................. 222
Example 33. “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” as Sung by Molly's Friends ................................ 223
vii

ABSTRACT

CULTURAL HIERARCHY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF OPTIMISM IN MEREDITH
WILLSON’S AMERICA

JAMES M. DELOREY

The career and music of Meredith Willson highlight important moments in the establishment of
cultural hierarchy in America and the ways in which ideas about that hierarchy came to affect
twentieth-century music and musicians. Working in the realms of both classical and popular
music in 1920s New York City, Willson captured the spirit of communitarianism and pluralism
present in the artistic community and brought it forward into later decades even as the cultural
environment around him changed. The spirit of pluralism is evident, for example, in his early
composition the O. O. McIntyre Suite (1934), which blends programmatic, modernist, and jazz
elements to create an original dance-band work in the vein of Paul Whiteman, celebrating the
popular syndicated columnist Oscar Odd McIntyre. After World War II, the difficulty Willson
faced in sustaining the pluralist cultural trend underscores the strength that cultural hierarchy
gained thanks to shifting world politics and critiques of mass and middlebrow culture. Highbrow
culture now favored avant-garde modernism, but this eventual outcome was not inevitable before
the war; modernism and communitarianism were often complementary through the 1930s.
Willson, discouraged by the greater exclusivity of classical music, instead turned to popular
music, which he felt offered greater creative freedom. His Broadway musicals The Music Man
(1957) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1962) explore the dynamics of cultural hierarchy both
dramatically and musically. More broadly, Willson’s post-war career illuminates the optimistic
perspective that a hierarchy-free American musical culture could still exist.

1

INTRODUCTION

I was introduced to the topics, themes, and ideas that follow through The Music Man (1957) and
the Unsinkable Molly Brown (1960), the best-known Broadway musicals by the composer,
lyricist, and writer Meredith Willson (1902–1984), but my interest was sustained when I learned
more about Willson’s past musical endeavors, especially those in the 1920s and 30s. Except for
his work in radio and television or his song “Chicken Fat,” written to support John F. Kennedy’s
Presidential Council on Physical Fitness and distributed to schools across the country with
accompany exercises, Willson’s career beyond the two musicals above is largely unknown to the
general public. Accordingly, Willson’s character and personality tend to be defined by this
limited knowledge and his own promotion of connections to his home state of Iowa and to John
Philip Sousa. But his work beyond the commonly known is impressively broad: as a flautist he
played with the Sousa Band, leading theater orchestras, the New York Philharmonic, the CBS
radio orchestra, and several modernist musical organizations of the 1920s; as a composer he
wrote film scores, symphonies, orchestral suites for the radio, popular songs, and two additional
musicals; and he also worked as a radio host, music director and frequent guest conductor.
1
The
wealth of research pathways and the clear need to reappraise his character and personality in
light of newly available archival documents presented enticing opportunities.
The underlying theme of both Willson’s career and this dissertation is cultural hierarchy,
the idea that culture is divided into two or three parts, high and low or high, middle, and low.
This theme is applicable in primarily three ways. First, it applies to the fact that he existed in two
musical realms, both classical (high) and popular (low) for most of his career. Second, he was

1
The organizations include the League of Composers, the International Composers’ Alliance, the
New York Chamber Music Society, and Pro-Musica.
2

directly engaged in debates about high and low culture, especially as they intensified in the late
1940s and 50s. Third, cultural hierarchy is an underlying theme because it still plays a role in the
reception of Willson and his music. Specifically, he is left out of the broader narratives about
twentieth century American music because he is largely thought of as strictly a Broadway
composer. His status as a Broadway composer in turn colors the reception of his work in
classical music and jazz. Examining the role cultural hierarchy still plays in Willson’s reception
can lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of him and his music. Therefore, my
dissertation examines how cultural hierarchy operates in both the past and present.
Willson’s relationship to cultural hierarchy elicits differing interpretations which reveal
much about American musical culture in the present and the past.
2
We can reason that existing
between two musical realms is not terribly unusual, but we are equally, if not more likely to
explain Willson through our own perspectives as musicians. These varied explanations indicate
the existence of deep-seated narratives and attitudes within the culture of musicians, narratives
and attitudes I have myself observed in my many years as a student, professional performer,
scholar, and teacher working in both the jazz and classical music realms. As will become clear,
these traditional narratives cannot adequately account for figures like Willson because, in the
extreme, they view classical and popular music as separate and incompatible. Willson, however,
saw them as two sides of the same coin, and, in fact, this was a more common view than many
scholars acknowledge. There is a gap between the actual historical record and what we tell
ourselves about that same history.

2
Musical culture, in this context refers to the culture of musicians, musical organizations and
institutions, and affiliated groups; affiliated groups, who also contribute to the culture of
musicians, include, for example, arts administrators and music critics.
3

This dilemma can be understood through the ethnomusicological approach taken by
Bruno Nettl in his book Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of
Music.
3
He observes that historical narratives are important to musicians because the realm of
Western music “evaluates its accomplishments in large measure by assessing its relationship
with figures of the past, who, as a result, have a significant existence in the present.”
4
Figures of
the past, then, need to reinforce current musical viewpoints. Nettl interprets music’s vital
relationship with the past, especially its veneration of master composers, as a kind of religious
system, calling stories about composers myths “in the sense that they explain complex reality in
capsule form.”
5
He further explains that “societies which have factual information through
detailed written records may nevertheless ignore them in favor of interpretations of history based
on mythical, social, or political values.”
6
In this context, narratives or myths in the “religion” of
Western music ignore Willson and people like him because they do not represent present values.
Instead, the “religion” values the separation of classical and popular music so that the present can
be made to align with a European past in which art music was both elite and distinctly separate
from popular music– this, in spite of the fact that the actual present does not align so neatly with
this past, making elements of this disparity into narrative myths.
7

In Willson’s case, there are two myths at work, one classical and the other jazz. The
classical myth– summarized from my own observations– says that classical and popular music
are diametrically opposed; it says that because cultivated music is superior, it has always enjoyed

3
Although Nettl focuses on the culture of music schools, his work is equally applicable to the
culture of professional musicians since there is a great deal of overlap between the two.
4
Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 12.
5
Nettl, 28.
6
Nettl, 97.
7
I use the term myth, only to point out that certain musical beliefs fit Nettl’s definition, not to
disparage them.
4

elite status in the United States and been distinctly separate from popular music– that, in fact,
popular music is directly responsible for the gradual decline of classical music’s status. This
perspective looks down upon Willson and sees him as a failure because he was not talented
enough to make a living as a classical musician alone. This view became evident to me when a
former timpanist colleague of mine gave up his music career altogether and became a computer
programmer instead of playing non-classical music to supplement his orchestra jobs. The popular
music myth, specifically that of jazz, says that before World War II most music called jazz was
simply a whitewashed, appropriated, and commercialized approximation of authentic African-
American music. The conclusion drawn from this perspective says that Willson was not playing
real jazz. Neither of these conclusions are really accurate.
Still, these myths have power, not only as intellectual frameworks but also as instruments
of real-life consequences. In the case of the separate classical and popular myths, their power can
be seen both in elitist attitudes that question the value of popular music and in the way that many
music schools and departments separate performance majors into distinct classical and jazz
programs. While there may be validity to this approach, it does not reflect the current reality of
the musical world. Jobs in which musicians play classical music or jazz exclusively are scarce,
and most successful musicians are versatile enough to play a variety of styles. To be sure, myths
can be useful, but sometimes they need to be reevaluated. Willson’s biography cannot be
explained by either the classical or popular myth because neither can account for all of the
nuances of Willson’s career and works.
Putting Willson’s career in its historical context while also examining the myths of the
“religion of Western music” can create space for a wider conversation about twentieth-century
American musical culture and the present relevance of the attitudes and narratives that
5

accompany that culture. Willson’s biography documents a musical figure engaged in two
different realms of music, a type of figure often passed over by traditional narratives and
methods. His biography, then, highlights the existence of these traditional narratives, allowing a
closer examination of their nature, their present usefulness, and their change over the course of
the twentieth century. Willson’s career spans the greater part of the century, from 1919 to his
death in 1984, and, although the musical landscape changed around him, he largely remained
committed to the same musical ideals. Moreover, his career and the questions it elicits are still
relevant today because the musical community is still governed by myths– often ones largely
derivative of those from the twentieth century– especially ones that are focused on the divisions
between classical and popular music.

A Usable Past
A few critics have challenged the usefulness of historical narratives that rely on myths. For
example, in his book Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, Joseph
Horowitz observes classical musicians’ unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances. He
specifically blames the failure on one aspect of the classical narrative, a belief in the primacy of
music performance. Horowitz claims that after World War I, “the act of performance became the
defining focus of American classical music: the great orchestra, the great opera house, the great
conductor, violinist, pianist, or singer.”
8
The reevaluation of narrative myths due to their
usefulness was also a concern for the American literary critic Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963),
who, writing much earlier in 1918, blamed literary scholars for creating and perpetuating a
particular historical narrative that stunted the growth of an American literary tradition:

8
Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 2005), 269.
6

It seems to me significant that our professors continue to pour out a stream of
historical works repeating the same points of view to such an astonishing degree
that they have placed a sort of Talmudic seal upon the American tradition. I
suspect that the past experience of our people is not so much without elements
that might be made to contribute to some common understanding of the present,
as that the interpreters of that past experience have put a gloss upon it which
renders it sterile for the living mind.
9

Brooks’s “Talmudic seal” functions much like the historical myths described by Nettl,
creating a particular narrative about the past only partially grounded in historical facts. As
it was a fabrication by “our professors,” Brooks simply suggested inventing a new past
that was better able to foster a contemporary literary culture.
There are, however, some instances where the usefulness of historical myths is not so
clear. There is truth to the narrative that laments classical music’s decline, but faulting popular
music or a decline in musical taste seems naïve in today’s musical climate. Studies by the
National Endowment for the Arts and the League of American Orchestras show that the adult
audience for classical music declined by almost 30% from 1982 to 2008, but it is consistent with
a broader decline of adult participation in a number of traditional activities and the rise of
participation in new ones, many of which are tied to computers and technology.
10
In other words,
adults replaced classical music with activities like video games and Internet surfing, not popular
music. The most successful orchestras and musicians today have found inroads into these new
forms of leisure instead of trying to revive past strategies. Joseph Horowitz, who concedes that
the rise and fall of classical music in America “has largely run its course,” suggests that the
failure to adapt lies in musical training:
11

9
Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial 64 (11 April 1918): 337.
10
League of American Orchestras, “New Audience Research Findings,” available from
https://americanorchestras.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/NEA_memo.pdf; Internet; accessed
7 April 2022.
11
Horowitz, xv.
7

For many gifted young instrumentalists, music school is a type of job training: they want
to know how to play the notes and how to win an audition. This parochial agenda is
reinforced by teachers of piano and violin who with their time demands and vested
interests hold hostage more nuanced institutional priorities. And yet never before have
external conditions– the challenged professional world of music and music-making, the
insufficiency of instrumental training in America's schools– so demanded a variegated
post-classical curriculum including jazz, improvisation, and ethnomusicology, as well as
music education and audience development as likely components of most careers.
12

Thus, even if there is truth in myths, they can still blind us to current realities and prevent us
from addressing the challenges of the music profession.
In Willson’s case more specifically, his work in both popular and classical music in the
1920s, says very little about his talent. The myth that connects the status of classical music in
America with that of Europe fails to recognize that classical music in America, though revered,
did not always enjoy the same elite and exclusive status as in Europe.
13
In nineteenth-century
America, successful orchestras and opera companies were largely commercial ventures, not state
or patron sponsored. The career of Theodore Thomas (1835–1905) is a case in point. Much of his
conducting career was spent touring the country with famous vocalists and eventually with his
own orchestra. He and his cohort of musicians needed to play large cities and small towns across
the country to be financially viable. His concerts also needed to include a variety of music, not
just symphonies. These circumstances made music fairly accessible. Orchestras only became
fixed, elite, and formidable cultural institutions when wealthy business moguls began supporting

12
Horowitz, 534–535.
13
Lawrence Levine makes this argument largely by tracking the cultural changes brought about
by the development of institutions which supported classical music; it is countered mainly on
aesthetic grounds by Ralph Locke and Johnathan Spitzer; my point here is simply to highlight
the changing landscape for musicians, not to interrogate aesthetic or cultural implications; see
Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Ralph Locke, “Music Lovers, Patrons, and
the ‘Sacralization’ of Culture in America,” 19th-Century Music 17, no. 2 (Autumn, 1993), 149–
173; and Jonathan Spitzer, ed, American Orchestras in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 370.
8

them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such was the case for Thomas when he
was invited to be the conductor of the newly formed Chicago Symphony, which would not have
existed without the support of a group of wealthy businessmen. Only then could orchestras
present programs dominated by symphonies. Still, most orchestras did not offer full-time
employment in the manner of today’s major orchestras. For example, the New York
Philharmonic offered fewer than twenty concerts annually until it was reorganized and funded by
wealthy patrons in 1909.
14
Even then, it did not resemble the musical institution it is today until
it merged with the New York Symphony Society in 1928. Before a corporate model of
governance predominated in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere, orchestral musicians often
played several jobs throughout the year, including jobs that involved popular music such as
theater and later radio orchestra work.
15
In other words, they made a living in much the same
way that most musicians do today, by having a diversified skill set. This better explains why
Willson, who was talented enough to join the Philharmonic in 1924, continued to play several
other jobs. The peak of symphonic music support in America did not occur until the late 1960s.
In the early part of the decade, no orchestra offered full-time employment for its musicians.
Thanks to a major investment in American orchestras by the Ford Foundation in 1966, six
orchestras offered full-time employment by 1970 and another five offered nearly full-time

14
At this point, the orchestra’s season was expanded to thirty-two weeks; Lisa A. Kozenko, “The
New York Chamber Music Society, 1915-1937: A Contribution to Wind Chamber Music and a
Reflection of Concert Life in New York City in the Early 20th Century,” PhD diss., The City
University of New York, 2013, 18.
15
For an explanation of the corporate model of orchestra organization see Mark Clague,
“Building the American Symphony Orchestra” in American Orchestras in the Nineteenth
Century, Jonathan Spitzer, ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 29.
For an account of the life of orchestral musicians in New York City see Kozenko, 17–20.
9

work.
16
The model that most orchestras follow to this day owes much to this expansion of
symphonic activity.
While classical music has been thought to be in a steady state of decline over the
twentieth century, the internal narrative of jazz is almost the opposite, describing growth,
maturation, and diversification. As Scott DeVeaux notes in his article “Constructing the Jazz
Tradition,” these associations are important because, “the progress of jazz is mapped onto the
social progress of its creators– Black Americans.”
17
Thus jazz is associated with the integration
or assimilation of Blacks and Black culture and the progress from a folk tradition to an art
music.
18
The similar jazz narrative I absorbed considers bebop as the centerpiece, not only from
a pedagogical point of view but also from aesthetic, cultural, and evolutionary viewpoints. In
other words, jazz learning begins with bebop because it is the earliest style that still resembles
jazz today and also reflects the values that are ascribed to jazz: aesthetic autonomy, personal
expression, and rootedness in African-American culture. This learning only reaches back to
ragtime and big band (the swing era) as needed because jazz prior to bebop does not entirely fit
the narrative above. DeVeaux calls this “the gradual shedding of utilitarian associations with
dance music, popular song, and entertainment.”
19
In the process, jazz has become another kind of
classical music, indigenous to Black culture and reflecting Black values but “following the same

16
Horowitz, 483.
17
Scott DeVeaux, “Constructing the Jazz Tradition: Jazz Historiography,” Black American
Literature Forum 23, no. 3 (Fall 1991), 545.
18
Ibid.
19
DeVeaux, 543; the idea of jazz as “America’s classical music” has a long history dating back
to Billy Taylor’s promotion of the idea as part of the Black Arts movement beginning in the late
1960s; see Tom Arnold-Forster, “Dr. Billy Taylor, ‘America's Classical Music,’ and the Role of
the Jazz Ambassador,” Journal of American Studies 51, no. 1 (2017), 117–39 and William
“Billy” Taylor, “Jazz: America’s Classical Music” The Black Perspective in Music 14, no. 1
(1986), 21–25.
10

pattern of institutionalization in conservatories and repertory groups.”
20
This, of course, has
benefits as well as drawbacks.
Jazz’s current boundaries fail to account for the kind of jazz (or popular music) Willson
and many others were playing in the 1920s and 30s, leaving it in a historical and stylistic limbo.
Jeffrey Magee makes a similar argument in regard to the dismissal of Fletcher Henderson and his
band by a number of their contemporary critics for trying to appeal to Black and white middle-
class audiences. Magee writes:
together, these writings have constructed a clear message linking race, musical style, and
commercial inclination: black jazz is improvisatory, authentic, and noncommercial and
therefore “true,” and white jazz is written down, diluted, and commercial, and therefore
“false.” This rigid, essentialist dichotomy– which still resonates in jazz criticism –
diminishes the achievements of black and white musicians alike.
21

As DeVeaux admits, jazz was “a catch phrase of considerable vagueness, indiscriminately
applied to all kinds of popular song and dance music of the 1920s” and only later came to be a
more precise term.
22
But this does not necessarily indicate that there was one continuous lineage
of “authentic” jazz going back to its roots while all others were “fake.” Rather, it indicates the
complex interactions between jazz styles, Black musicians and white musicians, and critics that
contributed to future definitions of jazz. Leaving pre-bebop jazz outside the current boundaries
sets aside the connection between debates about the nature of jazz in the past and those
happening in the present.
Both jazz and classical narrative myths, as capsulated versions of complex realities, tend
not to recognize the real effects that they can have. Many musicians who straddled classical
music and jazz in the mid-twentieth century faced serious difficulty doing so yet set the

20
DeVeaux, 552.
21
Jeffrey Magee, “Before Louis: When Fletcher Henderson Was the ‘Paul Whiteman of the
Race,’” American Music 18, no. 4 (Winter, 2000), 392.
22
DeVeaux, 531.
11

groundwork for those who do so today. My late teacher, Fred Buda, was one of these pioneers.
In addition to playing in several jazz groups, he was the long-time drummer of the Boston Pops
and also the timpanist of the Boston Ballet Orchestra. As a youth, Fred had to justify to his
teacher that playing jazz was the only way he could make enough money to afford lessons. To
his jazz colleagues, who were suspicious of him studying classical percussion, he excused it by
telling them that it improved his drumming chops. He could not admit that he wanted to do both
until he was well established in his career. His colleague at the New England Conservatory,
Gunther Schuller, faced similar criticism for playing jazz and for daring to draw from elements
of both classical and jazz into new compositions. In a 2009 interview, he recalled as a young
man telling his father, a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, about listening to Duke
Ellington, saying “‘You ain’t gonna like this, but in the hands of the greatest practitioners of
jazz, that music is as great as Beethoven’s.’ Wow, he nearly had a heart attack.”
23
To temper
objections to combining classical and jazz in compositions, Schuller called his music a “third
stream.” In a1961 article, he wrote, “I had hoped that in this way the old prejudices, old worries
about the purity of the two main streams that have greeted attempts to bring jazz and ‘classical’
music together could, for once, be avoided. This, however, has not been the case. Musicians and
critics in both fields have considered Third Stream a frontal attack on their own traditions.”
24

As these examples show, the established narrative myths of both classical music and jazz
are insufficient for understanding these dualisms, and they are insufficient for understanding
current realities in musical culture too. Cultural conditions have drastically changed, especially

23
Frank J. Oteri, “Gunther Schuller: Multiple Streams,” available from
https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/gunther-schuller-multiple-streams/; Internet; accessed 5 May
2009.
24
Gunther Schuller, “Third Stream” in Musings: The Musical Worlds of Gunther Schuller (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 115.
12

the relationship between classical music and jazz (and popular music in general). Several
indicators can describe this change so I will name just a few. The beginnings are vividly
illustrated by the composer John Adams (b. 1947) when he described counting tone-rows in
Webern as a student at Harvard and then returning to his dorm room and listening to Cecil
Taylor, John Coltrane, and the Rolling Stones.
25
Younger generations simply did not see the
urgency of maintaining a rigid divide between classical and jazz, high and low art. In the early
1970s, George Rochberg famously abandoned serial composition because he felt it had limited
expressive abilities.
26
The divide continued to soften as postmodernism came to influence both
art and thought, enough that the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen could declare an end to this
Great Divide in 1986.
27
In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism,
he wrote that “high modernist dogma has become sterile and prevents us from grasping current
cultural phenomena.”
28
Conditions continued to change as the Cold War ended, the Internet
came to be widely used, and Americans became more attuned to cultures around the world.
The culture of music and musicians in America is rapidly changing through a softening of
the division between classical and popular music as well as through the growing influence of
musical traditions from around the world, yet the narratives young musicians absorb, especially
through their training, have failed to adjust to this new reality. To move forward, young
musicians need better narratives that more comprehensively reflect the history of their discipline
in the context of American culture. In other words, they need a past that is usable. The

25
Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 169.
26
String Quartet No. 3 (1972) was Rochberg’s first piece to do this.
27
See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
28
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), viii.
13

“Talmudic seal upon the American tradition” needs to be reevaluated and reexamined in order
for music in America to reach its full potential.
My dissertation sets out to reexamine narrative myths and suggest new ones by
illuminating the music and musicians who have traditionally been left out of the American
musical narrative and by contextualizing them within the broader cultural trends of the twentieth
century. We have collectively forgotten or neglected the many classically trained musicians who
worked in theatre, radio, film, jazz, and popular music: Paul Whiteman, Alfred Newman,
Richard Rodgers, Morton Gould, and Oscar Levant and overlooked the dual aspects of others:
William Schuman, Cole Porter, William Grant Still, Robert Russell Bennett. Nevertheless, the
list becomes shorter in the decades after World War II. One of several reasons for this is the
influence of cultural stratification, which accelerated shortly after the war.

Willson and The Music Man Scholarship
The relative lack of musicological scholarship on Willson can be attributed to the breadth of his
work over its depth and to the lack of access to most of his personal papers.
29
He receives the
most attention for his work in musical theatre, but he is not one of Broadway’s main figures like
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II or Stephen Sondheim. Out of his four musicals,
three made it to Broadway, and only one is still regularly performed. Dominic McHugh’s recent

29
The musicological scholarship which treats Willson in any substantial way are Dominic
McHugh, The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from “The Music Man” to “1491”
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Cara Leanne Wood, “Representing the
Midwest in American Stage and Film Musical 1948–1962,” PhD diss., Princeton University,
2010; Carol J. Oja, “West Side Story and The Music Man: Whiteness, Immigration, and Race in
the US during the Late 1950s,” Studies in Musical Theatre 3, no. 1 (August 2009), 13–30;
Roberta Schwartz, “Iowa Stubborn: Meredith Willson’s Musical Characterization of his Fellow
Iowans,” Studies in Musical Theatre 3, no.1 (August 2009), 31-41; and Valerie A. Austin, “The
Orchestral Works of Meredith Willson.” PhD diss., University of Florida, 2008.
14

book the Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from “The Music Man” to “1491” (2021) is
the first book-length study of his musicals and the first to be written with access to his personal
archive. Willson’s archives only became available in 2012 as they were held by his third wife
until that time. Still, biographical sketches of Willson, scholarly and non-scholarly, leave out
most of his career up until he began writing musicals and only include elements from before that
when they are relevant to his musicals.
30
It creates the impression that Willson did not do
anything notable or worth researching until the 1950s. Valerie Austin’s 2008 dissertation “The
Orchestral Works of Meredith Willson” is the only scholarly work that focuses on something
besides his musicals. My research builds upon and complements these sources without
duplicating them.
The research and analysis I present here serve several purposes related to Willson
scholarship and musical theatre scholarship but are also significant beyond these subjects. Much
of the archival material I use has not been examined previously. This includes, the score for the
O. O. McIntyre Suite, Willson’s radio scripts, and the correspondence relating to his appointment
to the National Council on the Humanities, among other materials. Using archival materials and
theoretical analysis I was also able to verify his relationship with Julius Gold and uncover the
influence of Bernhard Ziehn’s methods of composition on Willson’s work. I have connected
disparate sources to uncover more details about his biography related to his tenure at the New
York Philharmonic and his performances with the New York Chamber Music Society, the

30
Biographical information can be found in Willson’s three memoirs And There I Stood With My
Piccolo (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1949; But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959); and Eggs I Have Laid (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1955) as
well as two biographies; Bill Oates, Meredith Willson, America’s Music Man: The Whole
Broadway-Symphonic-Radio-Motion Picture Story (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2005) and
John C. Skipper, Meredith Willson: The Unsinkable Music Man (El Dorado, CA: Savas
Publishing Company, 2003).
15

International Composers’ Guild, and the League of Composers. Previously unexamined
newspaper articles and trade journals proved to be key in documenting Willson’s early career as
well. Nevertheless, because of the relative lack of scholarly sources and the desire to
contextualize Willson, I have had to draw upon other scholarship within and outside of
musicology to illuminate certain themes and historical currents.

Optimism
Throughout his career, Willson expressed a kind of cultural optimism in his works as well as his
words. His constant reinvention of himself shows that he always believed there was a way
forward in spite of cultural obstacles, debates, and crises. Likewise, in 1917, the poet James
Oppenheim encouraged artists and writers to embrace “adapting oneself to a life full of surprises
and uncertainties and all the hazards and risks of transiency.”
31
The breadth of Willson’s musical
activities in the 1920s shows that he did just this by embracing the many opportunities that
presented themselves. In large part, Willson’s optimism was rooted in civic responsibility and
pluralism– meaning that there was room for a wide variety of opinions and beliefs and that they
would eventually come together and yield better results. This was a common view held among
those hoping for a distinct American cultural tradition. The critic and art collector Leo Stein,
older brother of Gertrude, believed that multiplicity and breadth defined American life, writing,
“our culture and our social tendencies, our larger hopes and aspirations, point rather toward
broader, leveling characters. We tend rather toward the large appeal and wider distribution.”
32
In
Willson’s case, his “broader, leveling” vision did not see popular culture as a threat to high

31
James Oppenheim, Untitled Editorial, Seven Arts 1, no. 3 (Jan. 1917), 268.
32
Leo Stein, “American Optimism,” Seven Arts 2, no. 1 (May 1917), 88. (72–92)
16

culture. For example, in a 1953 article he expressed his belief that “fellows like Beethoven and
Tschaikowsky wrote tunes for the same reason Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael do.”
33

In contrast, critics of culture from H. L. Mencken to Dwight Macdonald saw a gradual
degradation of culture with little hope for reversal. Oppenheim derided such critics for turning to
“pessimism for something strong and abiding and absolute” in the “rainbow welter of
optimism.”
34
Indeed, after World War II American intellectuals felt that it was necessary to
anchor the country in absolute ideas about culture as a means of resisting Communism and
totalitarianism. For Macdonald, this meant an utter rejection of mass and middlebrow culture
(masscult and midcult). He believed that the conditions of mass society had caused Americans to
“lose their human identity and quality,” making them unable to make sound judgments about
culture.
35
Nevertheless, Willson remained committed to “broader, leveling characters” in spite of
the backlash that his ideas aroused after World War II.

Cultural Hierarchy
Culturally hierarchy, meaning the division of culture into separate realms, plays a primary role in
my dissertation both as a social backdrop and as a means for excavating a particular viewpoint
that often ran counter to general trends. I primarily use the terms highbrow and lowbrow– and
middlebrow when applicable– and also classical and popular when specifically referring to
music.
36
Willson never used the terms highbrow or lowbrow, preferring the terms long hair and

33
Jack Long, “Long-Hair Music Gets a Haircut.” The American Magazine, July 1953, 105.
34
Oppenheim, 267.
35
Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 59–73 (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1957), 69.
36
Classical refers to highbrow music in general rather than a style period; although the term
classical may not be the best term, I use it because it is less value laden than terms like art music
or serious music.
17

short hair instead.
37
Middlebrow was not part of his conception of cultural hierarchy, even after
the term became popularized.
38

Willson’s beliefs about the hierarchy of musical culture connect with similar ideas
advanced by cultural critics in New York City shortly before his arrival there in 1919. In 1916, a
group of intellectuals, sometimes called the Young Americans, proposed that a new era in
American culture was arriving in which the “arts cease to be private matters” and become “not
only the expression of our national culture but a means to its enhancement.”
39
This
pronouncement inherently implied that American culture would be unified rather than stratified
into high and low as it was at the time. It took the next generation of intellectuals, particularly
Gilbert Seldes (1893–1970), to articulate a means to unify high and low. Rather than create a
middle ground, Seldes called for a complete dismantling of cultural hierarchy and a new standard
by which to judge literature and the arts, namely the quality of its execution and craftmanship.
Willson extended this idea to music by holding up melody as the chief means of assessing the
quality of music, creating a standard which could be applied to both classical and popular music.
In short, Willson’s beliefs were grounded in the idea that classical and popular music were not
set in opposition to each other but rather two sides of the same coin. Interpretations of this
particular strain of thought have sometimes bundled it with “middlebrow.” While some of its
cultural manifestations may fit that label, the underlying ideology does not, for Willson and his

37
This term, seemingly referencing the long hair worn by nineteenth-century composers like
Beethoven and Liszt, was in common parlance in the mid-twentieth century; the term appears in
everything from Sinclair Lewis’s popular 1922 novel Babbitt to the 1949 episode of Looney
Tunes, “Long-haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny parodies Leopold Stokowski.
38
According to Google ngrams, the usage of the term during Willson’s lifetime began its
ascendance in 1942 and peaked in 1960; see “Google Ngram Viewer,” available from
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=middlebrow&year_start=1925&year_end=1984
&corpus=26&smoothing=3; Internet; accessed 17 April 2022.
39
Untitled editorial, Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (November 1916), 52.
18

predecessors were not calling for an additional layer of hierarchy but rather the dissolution of the
ideas that divided culture in the first place. They were, in essence, railing against the highbrow
mindset of cultural critics, artists, and musicians.
The word middlebrow appears in my dissertation only as it relates to music and its
contemporaneous cultural context during Willson’s lifetime, when some might presume it would
appear more often as a generalized label. The term is not particularly relevant to my study of
American cultural optimism up to World War II. Though the term was invented in England by
the mid-1920s and used in the United States by the early 30s, it was probably first applied to
music in the mid-40s, and then only in the context of music as a commodity.
40
In
contemporaneous critical discourse on music it simply was not present before World War II, and
since my dissertation focuses on cultural history and context, I want to avoid the confusion that
may arise from using it as a generalized term. Sometimes when it is used as a modern analytical
term, intention, contemporaneous context, and scholarly interpretation can be unintentionally
conflated. Furthermore, middlebrow has historically been a pejorative term that favors
generalization over nuance. Using the label in retrospect can signal to some readers, at least, that
those same connotations apply.
Originally, middlebrow primarily referred to people, not cultural objects. In its earlier
uses, it referred to a relatively fixed class of people existing between highbrows and lowbrows.
The primary feature of middlebrows was their desire to be associated with high art even though
they were unable to grasp the full understanding of it. For example, in Margaret Widdemer’s

40
See “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow” in Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York:
Harper, 1955); the first known usage of the term was in a 1925 issue of the British satirical
magazine Punch; the first known usage of the term in the United States was in 1933; see
Margaret Widdemer, “Message and Middlebrow,” The Saturday Review of Literature, ed. Henry
Seidel Canby, 18 February 1933, 433–4.
19

“Message and Middlebrow” she describes “Meanings” of life young women derive from popular
novels.
41
She is at once criticizing their inability to grasp anything more complex and the lack of
meaning in the novels themselves. Virginia Woolf gave a more detailed account of all three
brows and mostly agrees with Widdemer. She describes middlebrows as those who “saunter…in
pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed
indistinguishingly…with money, fame, power, or prestige.”
42
She later describes them as
“hungry sheep” who “look up but are not fed” because their literature is not humanity but merely
“geniality and sentiment.”
43
An important point is that both authors are primarily delineating
classes of people and not types of cultural objects– though Woolf does accuse the BBC of being
middlebrow. Middlebrow culture is mainly that which middlebrows prefer because of their
personal qualities.
The concern over a culture industry deliberately creating culture to appeal to specific
classes of people and for commercial gain does not enter into the discussion of middlebrow until
after World War II. This is not to say there was no concern about mass culture before the war,
only that it was not yet explicitly associated with middlebrow. There were rumblings in 1939
when Clement Greenberg’s “Avante-Garde and Kitsch” was published. Although he never used
the term middlebrow, his kitsch had similarities and was a result of industrial production. Much
like the literature read by middlebrows, kitsch is something that can imitate art and pretend to be
art, but for the first time in the discourse surrounding middlebrow, it is intentionally being
produced as kitsch. In other words, it is a cultural product rather than a descriptor for a person or

41
Margaret Widdemer, “Message and Middlebrow,” The Saturday Review of Literature, ed.
Henry Seidel Canby (February 18, 1933), 433–4.
42
Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1942), 180.
43
Woolf, 182.
20

a novel. Although it may be inferred already, in 1960 Dwight Macdonald explicitly equated
middlebrow, or Midcult, to mass culture. For him, Midcult “has the essential qualities of
Masscult– the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity.”
44
Here
Macdonald is nearly conceding that middlebrow is, in fact, mass-produced culture masquerading
as high culture. One supposes that when the term middlebrow is used today, it refers
approximately to Macdonald’s formulation, but it is difficult to know for sure.
The idea that middlebrow had been delineated before the term was coined comes from
the misinterpretation of early twentieth-century cultural critics. In Van Wyck Brooks’s
influential study from 1915, America’s Coming of Age, his discussion of highbrow and lowbrow
leads to an assertion that “personality can be made to release itself on a middle plane between
vaporous idealism and self-interested practicality.”
45
To begin, Brooks’s definitions of highbrow
and lowbrow were not associated with class in the same way they are today nor did they refer to
cultural objects. They were ways of describing the two primary forces at work in the American
psyche.
46
He disliked both highbrowism and lowbrowism and, therefore, was suggesting a new,
singular way of combining the two forces. In other words, his “middle plane” was not intended
to exist within the current paradigm; it was a new paradigm lacking division. Without this closer
reading of Brooks, it is easy to misinterpret highbrow and lowbrow in the more traditional sense.

44
Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” Part II, Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960), 592–593.
45
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), 33–34.
46
This idea is discussed in greater detail in “The Young Americans” section and further
supported by Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph
Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: The
University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 115–116.
21

In one example his “middle plane” is then interpreted as a “compromise” between the two,
instead.
47

Gilbert Seldes, in his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, comes closest to describing
middlebrow culture when he discusses the “middle or bogus arts,” arts that present only the
illusion of quality. In fact, he was in England, where the term originated, when he wrote his book
and may well have been aware of it. In this instance, though, he sets up the bogus arts in
opposition to the “great arts” and “lively arts” (popular arts), not as part of the traditional cultural
hierarchy. Instead, the great and lively arts have equal merit and quality. Furthermore, Seldes
makes a distinction between these, which are types of culture, and the highbrow-lowbrow
dichotomy, which are, rather, “separate ways of apprehending the world,” a formulation similar
to Brooks.
48
Within this construction Seldes does mention a “third division,” referring to the
indecisiveness of the middle class, but again, this is not a type of culture. Some scholars, like
Victoria Kingham, equate the middle/bogus arts with Brooks’s idea of a “middle plane” and
conclude that “Seldes thus sought to eliminate such tastes rather than to conciliate the people
who held them, an aim which precluded Brooks’s idea of compromise.”
49
Despite similar
terminology, Brooks and Seldes actually used the idea of the middle in completely different
ways. For Brooks, the “middle plane” was a source of vitality and renewal, much like Seldes’s
“lively arts.” The trouble with equating Seldes’s bogus arts with middlebrow today, though, is
that the paradigms are different; we have no present equivalent antithesis to middlebrow like
Seldes had with his “lively arts.” Furthermore, Seldes considered Gershwin and Whiteman to be

47
See Victoria Kingham, “The Excluded Middle: Cultural Polemics and Magazines in America,
1915–1933 in Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows, 1920–1960, Erica Brown
and Mary Grover, eds. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 115–116.
48
The Seven Lively Arts, 350.
49
Kingham, 117.
22

practitioners of the lively arts, not the bogus arts/middlebrow. This point is sometimes
overlooked. In Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s, Nicholas M.
Evans suggests that Seldes not only revised “the binary defined by the categories ‘lowbrow’ and
‘highbrow’” to include middlebrow but also that Seldes applied the term to Whiteman’s music.
50

Another problem with reinterpreting pre-World War II music critics is that the term was known
in the U.S. by the early 30s. If, after this time, critics had meant middlebrow, they would have
said it.
As Erica Brown and Mary Grover have note in their edited volume Middlebrow Literary
Cultures, in general, the meaning of middlebrow depends on time, place, and medium.
51
For this
reason, it is “difficult to define…because as a product of contested and precarious assertions of
cultural authority, it is itself unstable.”
52
In recent times, it has been resurrected by cultural
historians, most notably by Joan Shelley Rubin in The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992), as
a means to interpret specific literary projects of the past, such as Charles W. Eliot’s “five-foot
shelf of books”– the Harvard Classics– and the “great books” movement begun by John
Erskine.
53
Rubin defines middlebrow somewhat narrowly as culture that reaches an audience
through an expert mediator.
54
Many scholars have built upon Rubin’s work, including
musicologists.

50
Nicholas M. Evans, Writing Jazz: Race, Nationalism, and Modern Culture in the 1920s (New
York: Garland, 2000), 96.
51
Erica Brown and Mary Grover, eds. Middlebrow Literary Culture: The Battle of the Brows,
1920–1960 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–2.
52
Brown and Grover, 2.
53
Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1992).
54
Joan Shelley Rubin, Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in
Postwar America. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 2.
23

In music scholarship, the term has generally been used as an interpretive or analytical
framework in the same manner as Rubin but used more broadly. Whereas I examine how the
terms of cultural hierarchy (highbrow, lowbrow, middlebrow) were used in the past and what
they meant to those who used them, other music scholars use a modern definition of middlebrow
based upon past definitions– but focused on the process of mediation– and then apply that
definition to historical instances in which mediation occurred. Middlebrow, in most cases, was
not a label applied to these examples contemporaneously, only in retrospect, even though the
historical meaning of middlebrow might fit the example. This approach has yielded valuable
scholarship, and it could certainly be used for the material I present in my dissertation.
55

The term has been defined quite clearly in a recent colloquy on music and the
middlebrow. Christopher Chowrimootoo and Kate Guthrie appropriately differentiate the three
ways the term may be used: to describe a method or approach, a person or a group of people, or a
cultural product. Although they first focus on people– “those artists, mediators, and audiences
who sought to combine these putatively oppositional aims [entertainment and aesthetic
autonomy]”– the emphasis is on the people’s aims or approaches rather than their personality
traits.
56
Chowrimootoo and Guthrie’s second definition more directly addresses people, the
target audiences “who looked to culture for aesthetic education, social elevation, and spiritual

55
This scholarship includes Christopher Chowrimootoo, Middlebrow Modernism: Britten’s
Operas and the Great Divide (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018) and
“Copland’s Styles: Musical Modernism, Middlebrow Culture, and the Appreciation of New
Music,” The Journal of Musicology 37, no. 4 (2020), 518–559; as well as John Louis Howland,
“Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, ‘Glorified’ Entertainment, and the Rise of
the American Musical Middlebrow, 1920–1944” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2002) and
Kate Guthrie, The Art of Appreciation Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain
(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2021).
56
Christopher Chowrimootoo and Kate Guthrie, “Musicology and the Middlebrow,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 73, no. 2 (2020), 328.
24

edification.”
57
Lastly, they describe “cultural products—literature, films, and music— that
catered to this distinctive constituency.”
58
Nevertheless, the ideas and trends I uncover require a
different approach and a much narrower definition of middlebrow.
While Willson certainly did mediate classical and popular music, his beliefs and
motivations for doing so were antithetical to the concept of middlebrow as defined above.
Willson acknowledged the oppositional aims of highbrow and lowbrow, but he did not believe
that classical and popular music themselves were diametrically opposed. Combining them was
largely a way to demonstrate his belief to others. As I have already stated, Willson’s beliefs were
rooted in a particular strain of criticism that was against hierarchical distinctions and sought to
dissolve or minimize their effects. But these beliefs had much deeper roots that existed outside
the confines of cultural hierarchy and, instead, in anti-industrialism, political economics, and
American philosophy.
59
A middlebrow framework, then, fits these beliefs into a context that was
not delineated until well after they were in circulation.
Although many cultural critics viewed highbrow and lowbrow or entertainment and
aesthetic autonomy as having “putatively oppositional aims,” the critics and musicians who
populate my dissertation did not.
60
The labels of cultural hierarchy did not delineate fixed
repertoires, social classes, or aims; the boundaries between them were always contested, nor did
everyone ascribe to the hierarchical concept. In other words, highbrow, lowbrow, and
middlebrow did not represent an all-encompassing paradigm but was one of several. Musicians
like Willson, Schuller, and Gould did not share beliefs consistent with the predominant cultural
hierarchy. For them, highbrowism, or put more generally, cultural purity, was a negative force

57
“Musicology and the Middlebrow,” 328.
58
Ibid.
59
This will be discussed more in Chapter 1.
60
“Musicology and the Middlebrow,” 328.
25

they encountered as an obstacle to enacting a different paradigm. Middlebrow and lowbrow
played minimal roles in their concept of stratification. The historical usage of the terms
highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow demonstrate that highbrow was by far the most common
term throughout the twentieth century.
61
It would seem that the most pressing concern was
highbrow elitism and that the particularities of the tripart hierarchy was limited to a smaller
population, suggesting that among the general population, there was far less opposition to
middlebrow and lowbrow than we may like to admit. Certainly, there were very real effects of
cultural stratification which cannot be understated. While the framework of middlebrow “as a
space of compromise, ambivalence, and contradiction” is applicable in many cases, it is more
valuable in my specific case to use a framework that views the middle much differently.
Willson and the intellectual predecessors I discuss in Chapter 1 were operating from a
perspective that viewed highbrow and lowbrow as a unity that once existed but had since been
torn asunder. Bringing them together, in this light, was a reunification, not a mediation. This
perspective had historical underpinnings in political economy, artistic movements, and American
pragmatist philosophy. For many intellectuals the biggest threat to society was industrialization,
and one of the most vocal and influential early voices was the English artist and writer John
Ruskin (1819–1900). In particular, Ruskin used his writings on architecture, especially his three-
volume study of Venetian buildings, The Stones of Venice (1851/1853), to critique the division of
labor under industrial capitalism. Ruskin believed the division of labor was between thinking and
working, and, contrary to the idea of cultural hierarchy, wrote that “the two cannot be separated
with impunity.”
62
Ruskin’s conception proved to be an important influence on Van Wyck

61
“Google Ngram Viewer,” available from
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=middlebrow%2Chighbrow%2Clowbrow&year
_start=1901&year_end=2000&corpus=26&smoothing=3#; Internet; accessed 17 April 2022.
62
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, (New York: Merrill and Baker, 1853), 2:169.
26

Brooks’s idea of highbrow and lowbrow. The artist, writer, and designer William Morris (1834–
1896) used Ruskin’s ideas to form a company in which designers and workers collaborated to
make textiles and other decorative products, an endeavor that sparked the Arts and Crafts
movement in England and the United States. When Brooks imagined a reunification of highbrow
and lowbrow, he had Morris in mind.
Discussions of cultural hierarchy in the United States often accompanied (and were
inherent to) the debate about how art should function in a democratic society, and there was no
greater influence in this debate than the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). To begin,
Dewey’s Pragmatist philosophy eschewed any kind of moral absolute, rejecting much of the
philosophical underpinnings of the idea of high art. Instead, Dewey believed that truths revealed
themselves through discourse, action, and experimentation. In a democratic society this meant
that all individuals deserved respect but that they also had a responsibility to be educated and
engaged if social problems were to be addressed. This kind of collective wisdom and active
engagement influenced countless artists and musicians. In Willson’s philosophy, it was manifest
in his belief that classical music was not the prerogative of just an enlightened elite but a
universal heritage. He believed that many of the rituals surrounding classical music
unnecessarily mystified music performance and listening. For many artists and musicians,
Dewey’s philosophy also implied that Americans would collectively arrive at a national musical
style that reflected the unique character of the country.
63
This was true for Willson as well, and
the breadth of his work demonstrates his various attempts to facilitate that process.
The unitary and pluralistic idea of culture came under attack with the rise of the Cold
War and a renewed intensification of cultural hierarchy. Scholars from a variety of fields have

63
This collective process was not limited to a national scale; it could also occur at other levels of
community organization.
27

written on the topic of cultural stratification and its causes. Cultural historian Lisa Szefel sums
this up best, explaining that after World War II “public intellectuals, writers, artists, academics,
and even national security leaders across the political spectrum became convinced that, in order
to save democracy from totalitarian terror and dogma, Americans had to develop critical thinking
skills, read widely and deeply and, in the realm of culture, privilege difficulty, and
complexity.”
64
The way this came to affect American composers is well documented, but it also
impacted working musicians. I have already alluded to the difficulties my teacher faced playing
both classical and jazz, and he was not alone. Today we are still facing the repercussions, as I
described in my own experiences. By connecting the cultural conditions after World War II to
these real effects, we can see that the same conditions no longer exist, in other words, that
cultural stratification is a relic of the mid to late twentieth century, an aberration in American
culture and not the norm. This point has been articulated forcefully by Huyssen in After the
Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. He observes that the distinction
between high art and mass culture was dominant mainly in the two decades after World War II
and has now been replaced by a postmodern paradigm that does not treat them as being
diametrically opposed.
65
Today’s musician can also move forward by understanding that the
“Talmudic seal” is no longer useful.

The Jazz Age: Modernism and National Character
Modernism and national character play underlying roles in my dissertation, and for a period of
time in the early part of the twentieth century, concerns over both of them converged.

64
Lisa Szefel, “Critical Thinking as Cold War Weapon: Anxiety, Terror, and the Fate of
Democracy in Postwar America,” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 1 (March 2017), 35.
65
Huyssen, viii–x.
28

Intellectuals and artists conceptualized how to achieve national character in literature and the arts
under the conditions of modern society. Rather than pursue a traditional or prescribed type of
nationalism, they were more concerned with pursuing American values such as pluralism and
democracy. In music, jazz was thought to be a pathway to both national character and modernity.
As Michael Broyles contends in Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, the
American musical world remained largely untouched by modernism into the 1920s.
66
Without a
modernist frame of reference, many American composers turned to jazz as a means of embracing
modernism. Indeed, when Rhapsody in Blue premiered in 1924, it was one of just a few
modernistic compositions by an American composer to which anyone could point. At the same
time, jazz was viewed by those concerned with national character as an appropriate expression of
the people to be used as a basis for new compositions.
While Willson came to adopt similar views, they had little effect on most of the
American musicians working at this time. Broyles writes that musicians “did not connect to the
other arts around them; when it came to modernism they just didn't get it.”
67
Instead American
musicians looked to European composers and pursued the same paths as American composers
who came before them. Composers pursuing an American national style or character in the early
twentieth century continued to borrow from Native American and African American sources.
68

American composers who fully embraced modernism formed a small cadre that was initially

66
Michael Broyles, Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004), 98.
67
Broyles, 102.
68
A thorough discussion of the ways in which American composers pursued nationalism can be
found in Douglas Shadle, Orchestrating the Nation: The Nineteenth-Century American
Symphonic Enterprise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

29

centered in New York City. Broyles calls this group led by Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger, and
Henry Cowell the ultramoderns.
69

Modernism in American music did not reach its peak until after World War II, when
American composers began to engage in earnest with European modernism and, in particular,
twelve-tone composition. As I discuss in Chapter 3, this also marked a period of decline for
composers who continued to pursue Americanist music– Roy Harris, Roger Sessions, Howard
Hanson, to name a few. Willson, who persisted in his views of musical pluralism and democracy,
was also greatly affected by this trend.
My dissertation has four main divisions. The Chapter 1 explores the ideas and activities
that came to influence Willson, focusing especially on intellectuals who were at work in New
York City while he was there. This section ends with an exploration of one of Willson’s early
attempts at composing in an American style, the O. O. McIntyre Suite (1934), a composition that
had been entirely forgotten until recently. Chapter 2 discusses Willson’s biography as it relates to
the development of his music philosophy, providing insights and some new information about
his career path. Then, using recordings and archival radio scripts, I analyze how he articulated
that philosophy and how it musically manifested itself in his radio programs and commercial
recordings. Chapter 3 traces Willson’s confrontations with highbrow attitudes after World War
II, and Chapter 4 describes how Willson’s own ideas about cultural hierarchy are manifested in
his masterpiece, The Music Man, and his other musicals.

69
Broyles, 114.
30

CHAPTER 1: INTELECTUAL AND MUSICAL FOUNDATIONS

But recently another note has been heard. It is still rather timid because what it
implies is the complete annihilation of the whole hierarchy of the arts. It suggests,
in effect, that a well-made motor-car body may be as beautiful as a Roman chariot,
that a well-built chassis may be as attractive as a painting, or a page of advertising
copy as illuminating as a three-volume novel.
70

– Gilbert Seldes

Meredith Willson arrived in New York City in 1919 at time when literary and artistic activity in
the city was expanding. Of this time, historian Charles C. Alexander writes that “American
intellectual and cultural life was changing in unforeseen ways and moving with accelerating
velocity in uncharted directions.”
71
In music specifically, Carol Oja describes the 1920s as a time
when both modernist composers and songwriters of popular music “worked to challenge long-
held distinctions between ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow.’”
72
But cultural historians place the origins
of this activity more specifically in Greenwich Village between 1908 and 1917, calling it the
“Little Renaissance.”
73
The Little Renaissance constituted at once a revolt from what
philosopher George Santayana called the Genteel Tradition of nineteenth-century Victorianism
and also a hope for a “democratic indigenous culture.”
74
This hope was articulated in the
numerous, small-circulation literary and art journals, known as little magazines, and manifest in

70
Gilbert Seldes, “Outlaws from Parnassus,” Saturday Evening Post 200 (Nov. 5, 1927), 181.
71
Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century
America (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 1980), 28.
72
Oja, “Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s,” 646.
73
See Alexander, 28; Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of
Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and
London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 122; and Arthur Wertheim, The New
York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture (New
York: New York University Press, 1976), xi.
74
Blake, 122.
31

literature, poetry, painting, photography, theatre, and music. Among the significant activities in
Greenwich Village, the intellectual historian Casey Blake includes the 1913 Armory Show, the
circle of modern artists around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and the socialist writers and
artists associated with the Paterson Pageant (1913) and the Masses.
75
Although by the time
Willson arrived the most significant events had already occurred, the spirit of the Little
Renaissance lived on, and, whether deliberate or not, Willson absorbed some of the central tenets
of this intellectual and artistic tradition, a tradition that remained central to his work throughout
his life.
76
Of course, he was not the only person to articulate and put into practice these tenets.
The intellectuals, critics, artists, and musicians that appear in this chapter, as well as many
others, were part of the legacy of the Little Renaissance. I have chosen to highlight those who
were the most articulate and influential, and, by doing so, I suggest a lineage through which
Willson may have encountered the intellectual and artistic legacy of the Greenwich Village
Renaissance.

The Young Americans

The prominent ideas coming from the Little Renaissance were most clearly articulated by a
group of intellectuals sometimes called the Young Americans, which included Van Wyck
Brooks (1886–1963), Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), Waldo Frank (1889–1967), and Lewis
Mumford (1895–1990). Although they formulated new ideas, the Young Americans drew
inspiration from the English radicals John Ruskin and William Morris and the American
pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. Like Ruskin and Morris, Brooks envisioned a craft model

75
Blake, 122; the Paterson Pageant, held at Madison Square Garden, was a theatrical
presentation staged by the mill workers on strike from the Paterson New Jersey silk mills.
76
Arthur Wertheim’s dates for the Little Renaissance are 1908–1917; see his book The New York
Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture (New York:
New York University Press, 1976), xi.
32

of culture as an antidote to industrial capitalism. This is what Blake calls a “romantic critique of
capitalism,” which differs from a socialistic critique because it looks back to pre-industrial
models of social and economic relations rather than forward to a planned industrial model.
77

According to Blake, this difference is often missed because the Young Americans’ inspiration is
“far removed from the categories of conventional… socialist politics in the twentieth century.”
78

The Young Americans combined the influence of Ruskin and Morris with the civic
republicanism of John Dewey, and the combination of these two influences resulted in a focus on
democratic, artistic, and participatory communities.
The most pressing obstacle to the ideal of community was the division of labor in society
that had been accelerated by industrial capitalism. But rather than focus on capital and class
divisions, as in socialism, the Young Americans focused on two primary activities they called
theory and practice, which referred to intellectual versus practical labor. Thus, theory and
practice could exist together as they did in the Puritans, who felt both the “imminent eternal
issues,” meaning God and religion, and the “equally imminent practical issues” related to
surviving in a new world, even though there was nothing to “mitigate, combine, or harmonize
them.”
79
Nevertheless, by the turn of the twentieth century, a rift had opened between the two
and had become embodied by distinctly different groups of people, what Van Wyck Brooks
called Highbrows and Lowbrows. These terms, then, did not refer to social or economic class or
types of culture as many came to interpret his usage of them. For example, Brooks called upper
class Andrew Carnegie a Lowbrow because he was concerned with the practical matters of
business and making money without any intellectual grounding.

77
Blake, 3.
78
Ibid.
79
Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), 9.
33

The Young Americans’ solution was just as radical as their critiques: a renewal and
transformation of culture that would reunite theory and practice and eventually lead to social
change. The key to this was personal fulfilment through expression of the self. Brooks and
Bourne, in particular, believed that self-expression was a means of liberating one’s personality
from the entrapments of social position and class in an industrial society.
80
This required,
concurrently, the existence an of egalitarian community in which to achieve personal
fulfillment.
81
The creative implications of personal fulfillment meant that authors and artists
should focus on expressing their own experiences rather than blindly adhering to traditional
conventions. The result would be a culture that engaged with the experience of living rather than
one relying on predetermined aesthetic values or forms. The Young Americans felt they could
aid in this process through cultural criticism, and to this end, they created The Seven Arts literary
and cultural magazine.
Though the Young Americans were not clear or specific about what would need to
happen beyond these general recommendations, they spent quite a bit of time envisioning the
result. A more broadly shared culture would knit communities together that were dedicated to
“mutual aid, and a sense of the common good.”
82
Brooks, who was influenced by Williams
Morris, imagined a greater focus on craftsmanship and artisanship as opposed to mass
manufacturing and isolated artistic creation. His colleague Waldo Frank, believed that the
transformation would build upon pre-industrial American culture.
83
Randolph Bourne focused on
how political and economic institutions would grow out of communitarianism, or what he called

80
Blake, 50.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid., 3.
83
Ibid., 143.
34

the “beloved community.”
84
These slight variations notwithstanding, their work at The Seven
Arts came to influence a generation of critics, authors, and artists, even though they themselves
are little known today. Cultural historian Paul R. Gorman calls the magazine “one of the most
influential modernist magazines of the early twentieth century.”
85

More than any other component of the Young American’s project, they most clearly
articulated and expounded their criticism of the current conditions in the United States, criticism
inspired by the work of British and American intellectuals. In 1908, Brooks became the first
Young American to articulate his ideas in print with The Wine of the Puritans where he argued
that cultural stagnation was caused by the divide between isolated intellectuals and artists and the
relentlessly laboring industrialists and their workers. His critique continued more forcefully in
America’s Coming of Age (1915), the more influential of the two books. Brooks was certainly
not the first to observe a dualism in industrialized society. His observations were informed by the
work of John Ruskin and William Morris. “The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter from Ruskin’s The
Stones of Venice (1851 and 1853), was an especially important text for William Morris and other
critics of industrialized society. In it, Ruskin argues against the loss of artistry in mass-
manufacturing, writing:
We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two [intellect and labor]; we
want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a
gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking,
and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As
it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the
mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by
labor that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labor can be made
happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.
86

84
This term was borrowed from the American philosopher Josiah Royce and, after Bourne, was
used prominently by Martin Luther King, Jr.
85
Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 55.
86
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, (New York: Merrill and Baker, 1853), 2:169.
35

Much like Brooks, Ruskin primarily had in mind the effect of industrialism on artistic and
artisanal creation and social relations, not on wealth or class. Ruskin later writes that “the
distinction between one man and another be only in experience and skill, and the authority and
wealth which these must naturally and justly obtain.”
87
On the other hand, William Morris
became an avowed socialist and Marxist later in life. His lectures that later became published
essays on the alienation of labor, for example his collection Hopes and Fears for Art (1882),
were regarded as important theoretical texts for like-minded socialists. There was also mutual
inspiration between Brooks and the Harvard philosopher George Santayana.
88
In 1911,
Santayana observed two inclinations in Americans, either to retreat into religion and tradition or
to act boldly without much thought.
89
In America’s Coming of Age Brooks merged his earlier
critique of industrial capitalisms with Santayana’s idea of dual American impulses.
For the means to unite the dual impulses– theory and practice or intellect and labor– the
Young Americans turned to John Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy and ideas about democratic
participation. Bourne had studied with Dewey at Columbia and his influence can be seen in
Bourne’s emphasis on personality and multi-culturalism. Dewey viewed democracy as a tool for
the ongoing quest to best organize American society.
90
The innovation and flexibility required to
achieve optimal societal organization would be based on “collective experience but expressing
the imagination of reflective individuals.”
91
From this, the Young Americans derived both their

87
Ruskin, 2:170.
88
Brooks encountered Santayana as a student at Harvard.
89
George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy and Character and Opinion
in the United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 3–20.
90
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European
and American thought, 1870-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 194.
91
Ibid.
36

emphasis on personal artistic expression and their belief that a national culture was both possible
and preferable.
In America’s Coming of Age Brooks outlined the history of theory and practice in the
United States. According to him, “highbrow” and “lowbrow” began to diverge in the eighteenth
century. He held up the figure of Jonathan Edwards, the minister, preacher, and theologian, as
highbrow, and the figure of Benjamin Franklin as lowbrow. The highbrow tradition, passing on
to Emerson and the other transcendentalists, became so far removed from daily life by the end of
the nineteenth century that it had become synonymous with pretension, refinement, and
aloofness. Randolph Bourne argued that elite culture had become aesthetically impoverished in a
society in which masterpieces were consumed and collected as a commodity.
92
Brooks called
this “the apotheosis of Lowbrow consumption as Highbrow pretention.”
93
Even the attempt to
lift the lowbrow elements of society had failed. Bourne was particularly critical of the American
disciples of Matthew Arnold, who wanted to uplift and enlighten the working classes through
education in high culture. He called their efforts a form of social control and lamented the
“joyous masses who might easily, as in other countries, have evolved a folk-culture if they had
not been outlawed by this ideal.”
94
The political equivalent to cultural uplift, the Progressive
movement, was also rejected by the Young Americans because of the way it created a
bureaucracy of experts removed from the people who would benefit from it.
On the other hand, lowbrow elements had taken hold and accelerated with industrial
capitalism where the concern was the utmost practicality and efficiency. The problem, according

92
Blake, 95.
93
America’s Coming of Age, 136.
94
Randolph Bourne, “The Cult of the Best” in The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911–1918
(New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 193.
37

to Brooks, was the resultant contemporary business practices and advertising.
95
Waldo Frank,
associate editor of the Seven Arts, echoing Brooks, argued that industrialists’ failure to develop
new values to deal with rapidly changing technology resulted in self-aggrandizement and the
worship of power.
96
He and Bourne also criticized the effect industrialism had on the working
classes. They believed it sapped their capacity for self-reflection and conscious intervention.
97

Instead, "the clerk dulled and depressed by the long day, and the factory worker– his brain a-
whirl with the roar of the machines” had to seek fulfillment through mindless entertainments and
amusements.
98
Due to industrialism, the working class was not in a position to receive Arnoldian
uplift and enlightenment.
The cultural renewal espoused by the Young Americans differed from Progressivism as
well as other social and political movements of the early twentieth century. While progressivism
relied on intellectuals who assumed power “as a professional priesthood,” the Young Americans
understood that cultural renewal required a shift in power relations.
99
That is why culture could
not be art for its own sake, did not require any specialized knowledge to receive it, nor served the
purpose of enlightenment. Unlike progressivism, cultural renewal was not intertwined so deeply
with moral cultivation in part because culture served the very practical purpose of forging ties
within the community. In fact, the Young Americans’ view of a multicultural community was
much broader and inclusive than that of the Progressives.
100
Any sort of specialization required

95
America’s Coming of Age, 10.
96
Blake, 268–269.
97
Ibid., 143.
98
Randolph S. Bourne, “In the Mind of the Worker,” Atlantic Monthly 113 (June 1914), 378;
similar conceptions can be found in the works of several others including William Morris,
Theodor Adorno, and in Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947).
99
Blake, 118–119.
100
Blake, 123.
38

in Progressivism to heal the ills of society was frowned upon because it only reinforced societal
divisions between theory and practice.
Cultural renewal seems to share values with Marxism, socialism, and the Labor
Movement; Waldo Frank was a socialist and others flirted with it, but cultural renewal was
distinctly different. Although they disdained the current state of industrial capitalism, the Young
Americans did not see structural change to economic and political systems as the solution.
According to Charles Alexander, the Young Americans conceded that socialism might be the end
result but it could not serve as the cause for self-realization and national personality.
101
As
devotees of democracy and civic republicanism, they expected governance and economic activity
to be rooted in community rather than dictated from above. The societal divide they observed
was not between labor and capital. Therefore, the struggle was not primarily based in class
struggle and rights, even if Brooks’s Lowbrows share some resemblances with socialism’s
proletariat. Brooks certainly believed that there was greater “humanity, flexibility, tangibility,”
and vitality in the lower classes, but his conception of Highbrows shares no similarities with the
bourgeoisie.
102

This is where Brooks differed from other critics of his generation, especially H. L.
Mencken and his Smart Set colleagues, even though he was just as, if not more, effective in
tearing apart current social, cultural, and political conditions. Mencken and his like-minded
contemporaries, such as Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser were contemptuous of middle-
class passivity and pessimistic about redemption for lower classes. Mencken was also an avowed
elitist, while all of the Young Americans were distinctly anti-elitist. Both Frank and Bourne

101
Alexander, 39.
102
Brooks, 28–29.
39

believed that societal elites were exploiting lower classes and encouraging conformity.
103

Moreover, they believed in the potential of the mix of ethnicities unique in the United States. In
1916, Bourne wrote that “America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of
imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.”
104
In
America’s Coming of Age, Brooks discussed the “ferment in the immigrant folk of one, two, or
three generations” and the “more vivid, instinctive, and vital civilization in their own past.”
105
If
the Young Americans were clear about America’s problem and the solution, they were more
vague about their methods for enacting their vision and describing the resulting transformation.
The clearest expression of their two-pronged method is laid out in the first issue of the
Seven Arts from November 1916. The first goal was to promote writers and artists who
connected their work to lived experiences, works that were “simply self-expression without
regard for magazine standards” and created with “joyous necessity.”
106
These themes of self-
expression and disregard for traditional conventions would permeate the work of the Young
Americans. Along with the traditional literature and arts, the avant-garde was also disdained.
Later in the opening editorial, Frank criticizes artists who are too “self-conscious and
intellectual” because their art “could not meet the tests of life and death” brought to the forefront
by the war.
107
The second goal, and the one in which the Young Americans could most readily
contribute, was to offer criticism that gave “vistas and meanings rather than monthly survey or
review.”
108
They were not merely journalists; they were Ivy-League-educated intellectuals, and
they would use every resource available to reveal the falseness of contemporary art and the

103
Blake, 172
104
Randolph S. Bourne, “Trans-national America,” Atlantic Monthly 118 (July 1916), 91.
105
America’s Coming of Age, 162.
106
Waldo Frank, Untitled editorial, Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (November 1916), 53.
107
Ibid., 56.
108
Ibid., 53.
40

vitality of self-expression. More fundamentally, The Seven Arts was designed to create a
community of writers, artists, critics, and its readers.
In a sense, The Seven Arts was designed as an experiment in creating the kind of
“beloved community” the Young Americans envisioned. A shared culture, at least at the local
level, would reinvigorate democratic participation and a sense of belonging, which serve as a
challenge to industrial civilization. Brooks was particularly influenced by William Morris and
imagined a society that focused on artisanship rather than mass manufacturing that was in
dialogue with designers and artists, working together rather than in isolation. Art would be more
practical but remain an expression of the artists’ experiences. In this kind of community, neither
adherence to tradition nor a relentless search for innovation– innovation for its own sake– would
be necessary or valued.
109

It is difficult to imagine how the “beloved community” could become a reality. Its
proponents offered no clear path to creation nor did they have the resources or backing to even
attempt. A major flaw in Brooks’s formulation was that, despite his contempt for class structure,
he came to believe that cultural renewal needed a strong and influential set of writers, artists, and
intellectuals to guide it to fruition. After only a year of operation, the Seven Arts lost the backing
of its primary financier, Annette Rankine, because she disagreed with the magazine’s staunch
antiwar stance. Even though James Oppenheim, the editor, secured other funding, the primary
writers and critics involved could not agree on how to share control over the magazine. Randolph
Bourne, regarded as an intellectual giant in the making, died a year later, a victim of the 1918 flu
pandemic. Brooks spent several years dealing with mental health issues and after recovering,
turned to more traditional literary history and criticism. With the rise of concerns over mass

109
Blake, 140.
41

culture beginning in the 1930s, the vision of cultural renewal became even more tenuous. Casey
Nelson Blake writes: “The posthumous idealization of the Seven Arts reflects a widespread
sentiment, on the part of its survivors and historians, that the journal was itself part of a
‘potential America’ crushed in the stampede to total war, antiradical hysteria, and ‘normalcy’”
110

Nevertheless, The Seven Arts and the ideas of the Young Americans became extremely
influential in the literary and art worlds.

The Seven Arts

The views expressed by Brooks and the other main figures of The Seven Arts seem to allow for a
great variety of literary and artistic expressions. After all, Brooks expressed the problems with
both Highbrow and Lowbrow activities. It would be easy to presume he supported some sort of
literature which drew from elements of both elite and popular culture. He decried the isolated
Highbrow and celebrated the vitality of the lower classes. This sounds like a ringing
endorsement of popular culture. Paul Rosenfeld, the primary music critic for the magazine,
expresses the potential in the songs of Stephen Foster in the first issue. He goes further later in
his article writing that “The music of all races and all ages, from that of Asia to the songs of our
negroes and aborigines, the fierce rhythms of our rag-time, are before us, to teach, and to be
used.”
111

But the Young Americans remained committed to elite culture. In the next issue, when
pressed to be more specific, editor James Oppenheim describes pure art and distinguishes it from
trash, “music that sets the feet dancing and turns heart-throbs into syncopation.”
112
In his essay,

110
Blake, 123; normalcy refers to Warren Harding’s use of the term as President, meaning an
end to Progressivism and to foreign entanglements.
111
Paul Rosenfeld, “The American Composer,” Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (November 1916), 94.
112
James Oppenheim, Untitled editorial, Seven Arts 1, no. 2 (December 1916), 153.
42

“The Splinter of Ice,” Brooks disdains the idea that “the function of art is to turn aside the
problems of life from the current emotional experience and create in its audience a condition of
cheerfulness that is not organically sprung from experience but added from the outside.”
113
Here,
he is echoing a common complaint of the time– and even of today– that popular culture is
shallow and escapist. Waldo Frank, in his essay “Vicarious Fiction” portends future criticisms of
mass culture when he suggests that man has become enslaved by the technologies he creates. For
him, art can be a means to freedom or “a mere expression of the materials from whose tyranny it
rightfully should free us.”
114
It would be a misconception to view the Young Americans as
supporters of anything but high culture.
Nevertheless, they welcomed Seven Arts contributors who, while mostly aligned with the
editors’ main effort, offered different points of view. The modernist painter and writer Marsden
Hartley in his essay, “The Twilight of the Acrobat,” laments the disappearance of acrobats on
stage and in variety shows, calling vaudeville too polite.
115
Theater and film critic Kenneth
MacGowan weighs the strengths and weaknesses of the theater and movies, allowing that movies
provide creative opportunities that the stage does not.
116
More importantly, he introduces the
idea that “the popularity of a film is not diminished by the beauty with which its story is told;” in
other words, artistry and popularity are not mutually exclusive.
117
Theater critic Harold Stearns
encourages readers to accept the output of the American stage rather than avoid or deny it.
118
In

113
Van Wyck Brooks, “A Splinter of Ice,” Seven Arts 1, no. 3 (January 1917), 277.
114
Waldo Frank, “Vicarious Fiction,” Seven Arts 1, no. 3 (January 1917), 294.
115
Marsden Hartley, “Twilight of the Acrobat,” Seven Arts 1, no. 3 (January 1917), 287–291.
116
This point is later explored in Dziga Vertov’s film Man With A Movie Camera (1929) and
“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935).
117
Kenneth MacGowen, “Cross-Roads of Screen and Stage,” Seven Arts 1, no. 6 (April 1917),
653.
118
Harold Stearns, “A Poor Thing, But Our Own,” Seven Arts 1, no. 5 (March 1917) 515–521.
43

short, the Seven Arts as a whole sparked a conversation about the future of American culture
rather than espousing a rigid doctrine.
It is probably no accident, though, that recurrent themes arise in the pages of the Seven
Arts, particularly with regard to attacks and defenses of jazz and other popular arts.
119
There are
few outright celebrations of popular arts. Instead, most instances compare jazz, the movies, or
the popular stage with their elite counterparts. In this way, the critics are able to lead from
criticism of high culture directly to American cultural optimism and appreciation for the popular
arts. Nevertheless, writers who do discuss the popular arts do not always agree which elements
are worthy of merit. For example, is jazz worthy because of its distinctive style or for the way it
readily borrows tunes from other music genres?
The major complaint used as evidence by supporters of the popular arts was that
American culture had become stale. Victorian high culture had been taken to such an extreme as
to be valued for the status it conferred rather than its content and form. Randolph Bourne and
Van Wyck Brooks were particularly critical of the way in which art was commodified. Brooks
argued that accumulating cultural objects allowed elites to share in “all of the pearls of the oyster
while neatly evading in their behalf the sad responsibility of the oyster itself.”
120
An analogous
complaint in music was that symphonic programming was bowing too much to the tastes of its
benefactors, thereby privileging certain composers over others and stratifying musical styles. For
example, the composer and critic Daniel Gregory Mason accused the New York Philharmonic
Society of performing too many works favored by its major patron, Joseph Pulitzer– chiefly

119
Terminology is problematic in this case because the term most often used in the Seven Arts is
ragtime, but since descriptions of the music are often vague, it is difficult to determine whether
or not its usage aligns with current usage. To avoid the confusion, I am instead using jazz in its
most general sense: popular music with a syncopated feel.
120
Van Wyck Brooks “The Culture of Industrialism” Seven Arts 1, no. 6 (April 1917), 660.
44

works by Wagner, Liszt, and Strauss. In Mason’s judgment, this resulted in a preference for
“non-musical aspects of music, such as the physical power of fascination of great or subtly
varied volumes of tone, the interest of oddity or novelty, or the satisfaction of curiosity as to the
personalities of soloists.”
121
Similarly, composer Ernest Bloch called orchestra concerts “dead
museums” for playing works of the past that flattered patrons.
122

For the critics of The Seven Arts, commodification and the vogue of scientism in the arts,
led to conformity and a lack of creativity. Editor James Oppenheim, a poet by trade, believed art
had become too self-conscious, formulaic, and scientific.
123
Theater critic Harold Stearns thought
this kind of conformity and snobbery was frightening American playwrights from
experimenting.
124
Instead, they were trying to model European traditions. Several of the Seven
Arts music critics complained that there was too much concern for method and manner of
composition over content. Throughout the short life of the magazine, Bloch, Rosenfeld, and
Charles Buchanan, criticized current composers for being too concerned with technique and
procedure. Rosenfeld, in particular, believed this was the major obstacle for American
composers– not that they lacked technique, as many critics believed. Instead, Rosenfeld charged
that the American composer had not drawn “the substance of his art from out the life that surges
about him.”
125

In fact, for Seven Arts critics, disconnection of art from daily life was the next step in the
dismantling of the current culture. In this instance they tended to criticize the disconnection less
and, instead, focus on optimistic aspirations. Thus in the first issue, rather than rehash complaints

121
Daniel Gregory Mason, “The Philharmonic Again: Daniel Gregory Mason, Asks If Old Ideals
Have Been Maintained,” New York Times, 28 January 1917, p. X10.
122
Ernest Bloch “Music and Man” Seven Arts 1, no. 5 (March 1917), 498.
123
Frank, Untitled editorial, 56.
124
Stearns, 515.
125
Paul Rosenfeld, “The American Composer,” Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (November 1916), 91.
45

about the exclusivity of high art, Oppenheim declares a renascent period when “arts cease to be
private matters” and become “not only the expression of our national culture but a means to its
enhancement.”
126
He saves the critique for the end of his editorial: “He who creates an artificial
world of intellect, and is suddenly confronted by the real world, loses the one and is utterly lost
in the other.”
127
In “The American Composer,” Rosenfeld attributes the shortcomings of
American music to its “utter innocence of any vital relationship to the community,” but focuses
mainly on its potential.
128
The art critic Leo Stein, who is even more optimistic, contrasts the
general character of Americans with that of Europeans and their American followers. He writes
that, unlike Europe, “we tend rather toward large appeal and wider distribution” and that
esotericism, “delicate selection and choice exclusion are not things of primary importance.”
129
In
a later issue, a similar tack is taken, only applied more specifically. Hiram Kelly Moderwell
writes that ragtime is the perfect expression of the American city “with its restless bustle and
motion, its multitude of unrelated details, and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a vague
Somewhere.”
130

Their final criticism leading to an appreciation of the popular arts was the lack of artistic
production worthy of merit, a trope which finds its roots in the writings of Brooks dating back to
The Wine of the Puritans and is a corollary to a general rejection of culture from the past. This
trope allowed critics a way of bringing in the issue of the popular arts. For example, on theater
Waldo Franks writes:
It is important that Mrs. Hapgood's [Emilie Bigelow Hapgood] presentations were no
better– were in some ways worse– than many by her much-attacked, much-patronized

126
Frank, Untitled editorial, 52.
127
Ibid., 56.
128
Rosenfeld, 84.
129
Stein, 88.
130
Hiram Kelly Moderwell, “Two Views of Ragtime,” Seven Arts 2, no. 3 (July 1917), 370; later
in life the author changed the spelling of his last name to Motherwell.
46

neighbors on Broadway. And it is important that as entertainment or a sheer piece of
competent craft exploiting with economy a given amount of talent this contribution of
Mrs. Hapgood to the American stage could not compare with half-a-dozen unregenerate
Broadway comedies. And all this is important because it gives us at least a comparative
respect for the commercial drama.
131

Hiram Kelly Moderwell, in his essay on music, “A Modest Proposal,” begins with the
observation that American music is not given recognition because the works that are held up as
examples have no distinction.
132
He goes further than Frank, suggesting that musicians should
pay more attention to ragtime. In that vein, he offers a program of ragtime and other popular
music that he once suggested for an American singer travelling to Europe.
Example 1. Suggested Program from “A Modest Proposal”
133

.

131
Waldo Frank, “Playing a Joke on Broadway,” Seven Arts 2, no. 1 (May 1917), 126.
132
Moderwell, 368–382.
133
Ibid. 374.
47

Moderwell, one of the few voices in The Seven Arts to express outright positivity for
popular arts, did so with qualifications, mainly by comparing ragtime with art songs.
134
For
example, he admits that ragtime usually does not have distinctive melodies or rhythms, but he
argues that the same is true of impressionistic art songs from the recent past.
135
In both instances,
the harmony and accompaniment are the primary sources of originality. Moderwell also
compares lyrics, a verse by English poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes and lyrics from “I Love a
Piano” by Irving Berlin, to demonstrate the positive qualities of ragtime. Likewise, in discussing
the positive aspects of movies, the critic and future film producer Kenneth McGowan believes
that movies will not measure up to theater but that there are certain advantages they have, such as
lighting effects, quick scene changes, framing, and the ability to reach a broader audience.
136

By employing a succession of arguments and critiques, the Seven Arts critics created a
framework upon which a wider criticism of the popular arts was built. Moderwell, MacGowan,
and Hartley helped construct this framework in their contributions, even if the critics who laid
the foundation for them disagreed with the direction they took. Their work allowed later writers
to criticize the popular arts without having to establish such a strong connection with the high
arts.
Furthermore, the spirit of cultural renewal and democratic pluralism continued beyond
the demise of The Seven Arts and the end of the Little Renaissance, both in 1917. Several Seven
Arts contributors also appeared in The Dial, most notably Randolph Bourne. When the magazine
was reconstituted in 1919 under the editorship of Bourne’s friend and colleague Scofield Thayer,

134
Based on his program, Moderwell has a broad definition for ragtime, which was not
uncommon at the time.
135
I suspect that when he uses rhythm here, he is specifically referring to the rhythm of the
melody because at other times in the article he refers to ragtime’s underlying rhythm,
presumably referring to the accompaniment.
136
MacGowan, “Cross-Roads of Screen and Stage,” Seven Arts 1, no. 6 (April 1917), 649–654.
48

he remade it in the image of The Seven Arts, inviting contributions from Brooks, Rosenfeld, and
others from the defunct magazine. Gilbert Seldes, the drama critic and sometime managing
editor of The Dial was similarly aligned with Thayer’s vision. The spirit of cultural renewal also
continued through other publications, The American Caravan, an annual published sporadically
between 1927 and 1936, and Twice-a-Year (1938–48).
137

Gilbert Seldes

Working in the wake of the Young Americans and the other writers from The Seven Arts, Gilbert
Seldes (1893–1970) became notable for addressing the cultural issues they expounded. Seldes
knew many of the writers personally through their mutual work at The Dial, and his writings
demonstrate a particularly keen understanding of Brooks, perhaps because of their shared alma
mater, Harvard.
138
Seldes took their critique of high culture and formulated a new set of aesthetic
standards by which to evaluate both high and low art, effectively creating a new category, the
lively arts, that encompassed the best of both. Although his meaning of that term varied slightly
in different contexts, taken collectively, the lively arts described a type of art that had the same
quality of execution as high art but drew from the vitality present in low art.
139
In doing this,
Seldes articulated a more concrete vision of renewed culture than the Young Americans. With
this unified vision of renewed culture in place, he argued for the complete dissolution of cultural
hierarchy, something which Brooks implied but never stated outright. Seldes’s collection of
essays on popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), that expounded his ideas was the first of

137
Wertheim, 238.
138
Brooks and Seldes were not at Harvard at the same time, but they studied with some of the
same professors.
139
As will become clear, Seldes sometimes used the term to refer to the segment of popular art
that fit his standards and sometimes to refer to both the high and popular arts that fit his
standards.
49

its kind in the United States. His engagement with the ideas of his predecessors, especially the
concept of cultural hierarchy, sparked an intense dialogue among critics over how to deal with
it.
140
As a result, Seldes was well-known among both critics and artists: actors, musicians,
illustrators, and humorists, among others.
In The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes uses some of the same critiques of high art used by his
older colleagues. One of the most effective, of course, was that the quality of high art was
lacking. It is no surprise that he drew particularly from fellow theater critic Waldo Frank. In
reviewing a series of plays in The Seven Arts, Frank comments that they “could not compare
with half-a-dozen unregenerate Broadway comedies.”
141
Discussing the Metropolitan Opera in
his book, Seldes similarly argues that production “is so haphazard and clumsy that if an [sic]
revue-producer hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway.”
142
Seldes
complains further, that the difference is “the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and
complacently permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART.” Seldes’s critique goes
beyond Frank because he then extrapolates: “The same thing is true in other fields– in producing
serious plays, in writing great novels, we will stand for second-rateness we would not for a
moment abide in the construction of a bridge or the making of an omelette [sic], or the
production of a revue.”
143

Another important similarity is the rejection of art as a carrier of moral values. The idea
that art should serve a higher purpose, to enlighten or uplift, was a remnant of progressivism and
the influence of English critic Matthew Arnold. Waldo Frank decried art for attempting to

140
Michael G. Kammen, The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural
Criticism in the United States (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 89.
141
Frank, “Playing a Joke on Broadway,” 126.
142
Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924), 132–133.
143
Ibid., 133.
50

convey moral uplift. He writes, “To uplift theater is like pulling a tree from its roots.” In other
words, he is arguing that art with a moral purpose disconnects it from its vitality. While it was
certainly rejected in the pages of The Seven Arts, it was expressed even earlier by Brooks in
America’s Coming of Age. He rejected the moral value of art because it had become both
codified and bereft of its original intention and audience. In short, the project had been proven to
be ineffective.
144
Removing the moral purpose of art opens up the possibility of other purposes.
For Seldes, this meant that art could have “high seriousness” but that “high levity” was also an
acceptable purpose.
145

Seldes frequently discussed the problems presented by established culture. His
predecessors from The Seven Arts cited the problem of commodified high art and the
stratification that results, but Seldes, no longer needing to make the argument, simply called it
snobbery. Yet he recognized the appeal of snobbery. In his criticism of both grand opera and
intellectual drama he alludes to the presumed social benefit the audience gains from association.
He writes that these types of work appeal “not to our sensibilities but to our snobbery.”
146
Of
course, the implication is that they have little artistic interest, and because of this “tradition that
says what is worthwhile is dull” the greater danger to Seldes is that audiences “assume that the
reverse is true.”
147
In other words, works that appeal only to snobbery ultimately create
confusion about what is worthwhile art. Here, Seldes goes beyond the criticism of his
predecessors.

144
See Chapter 1 of Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch,
1915), 3–35.
145
The Seven Lively Arts, 348.
146
Ibid., 314.
147
Ibid., 310.
51

On a simpler level, Seldes blames the effect of the “genteel tradition,” a phrase borrowed
from the philosopher George Santayana, his teacher at Harvard, on critics for preventing a proper
appreciation of the popular arts. Seldes must have been influenced by another Seven Arts theater
critic, Harold Stearns as well.
148
Stearns makes the same charge, except that the object is
American theater, not the popular arts: “We bring to our stage an incredible amount of cant and
snobbery which has the effect… of muddying and thwarting our own interpretation of American
plays.”
149
While there are echoes of this in the preceding paragraph, the difference is that here,
the problem is the critics, not necessarily the audience. Stearns continues by describing the
“infinite harm” done to American playwrights by the “coldness of the academicians,” the
highbrow critics.
150
Seldes echoes this sentiment, claiming that the popular arts receive only
abuse from critics rather than constructive criticism that would help improve them.
151

Seldes also addresses Brooks’s highbrow-lowbrow dichotomy, but instead of applying it
as a criticism, he gives an alternate interpretation. He clearly understood Brooks’s original
meaning well, describing highbrow and lowbrow as two ways of understanding the world “as if
it were palpable to one and visible to the other,” rather than as types of culture.
152
To this, Seldes
adds a “third division,” a middle class of people who are indecisive and look to others for
guidance. But he argues that these should not be confused with types of culture because,
the lively arts are created and admired chiefly by the class known as lowbrows, are
patronized and, to an extent, enjoyed, by the highbrows; and are treated as imposters and
as contemptible vulgarisms by the middle class, those who invariably are ill at ease in the
presence of great art until it has been approved by authority.
153

148
It is not surprising since they were classmates at Harvard.
149
Stearns, “A Poor Thing but Our Own,” 516.
150
Ibid., 518.
151
The Seven Lively Arts, 349.
152
Ibid., 350.
153
Ibid.
52

Instead, Seldes described a division of culture between the true arts, which included both the
“great arts” and the “lively arts,” and the middle or bogus arts. These were works that simply
gave the illusion of being great or lively, but were essentially fake. Brooks, who denied that there
could be mediation between highbrow and lowbrow, did concede that “personality can be made
to release itself on a middle plane between vaporous idealism and self-interested practicality.”
154

Casey Blake characterizes Brooks’s middle plane as “a literary culture rooted in modern
experience,” which is more akin to Seldes’s lively arts than to his bogus arts.
155
Brooks believed
personal expression was the key to reinvigorating arts and culture, and there is no doubt Seldes
felt the same way about the lively arts.
One of the major currents that ran through the work of the Young Americans, The Seven
Arts, and Gilbert Seldes was optimism. Despite the harsh criticism levelled at nineteenth-century
culture, the Young Americans expressed belief in a way through the cultural stagnation. In fact,
the question whether culture could continue in a meaningful way or was irredeemable is a theme
throughout the twentieth century. The Seven Arts was an attempt at a solution, and the work of
the Young Americans came to fruition in the person of Seldes, even though they probably did
not think of it that way. Seldes was unequivocally enthusiastic about the prospect of the lively
arts and their place as a force in American culture. This is expressed not only in his language but
also in the attention and detail with which he gives to the popular arts. The true achievement of
The Seven Lively Arts is that Seldes applies intellectual criticism to arts which had previously not
received the attention.

154
Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age, 33–34.
155
Casey Nelson Blake, “Greenwich Village Modernism: ‘The Essence of It All Was
Communication,’” in The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution, eds. Marilyn Satin
Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt (London: D Giles Ltd., 2013), 89.
53

The optimism projected by Seldes and his predecessors sharply contrasts the pessimism
expressed by a group sometimes called the debunkers, the chief among them being H. L.
Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Sinclair Lewis. The debunkers were particularly critical of
the middle class for being too easily persuaded by current trends, and Mencken made a sport of it
by calling them “boobs.” Seldes defended the middle class as the bastion of a democratic society
and argued that the elites were just as susceptible to trends and fads only snobbier.
156
The other
main problem was the debunkers lack of context. Seldes criticized them for continuing to attack
late Victorianism without acknowledging more recent cultural developments. Moreover, they
failed to recognize and understand historical and cultural developments in America, only
applying European standards.
157

In this way, Seldes created an affirmative view of the popular arts, without always
needing to disparage the high arts. His primary strategy was to focus on their execution more
than their content, and he gave detailed reviews and analysis of everything from movies and
comic strips to dancing and jazz. For example, in his chapter on vaudeville, “The Damned
Effrontery of the Two-a-Day,” he discusses the technical mastery of Fanny Brice. In vaudeville
he concedes that “the materials they use are trivial,” but in order for Brice and other entertainers
to succeed in their performances “the treatment [of the materials] must be accurate to a hair's
breadth,” just as in any other art.
158
Therefore, quality popular arts and quality high arts have
much in common. He argues that “the great arts and the lively arts have their sources in strength
or gaiety– and the difference between them is not the degree of intensity, but the degree of
intellect.”
159
Later in the book he elaborates further on the similarities: “what impresses us in a

156
Kammen, 136.
157
Ibid., 137.
158
The Seven Lively Arts, 253.
159
Ibid., 318.
54

work of art is the intensity or the pleasure with which the theme, emotion, sentiment, even ‘idea’
is rendered.”
160

A concern over culture in a democratic America underlies much of Seldes’s early work.
In the arts, Seldes expressed his commitment to democratic values by arguing that no specialized
knowledge was needed to understand and appreciate them. He conceded that intellectuals might
be able to pick out more subtleties and articulate why they enjoy a work of art, but he railed
against those who “followed the score so closely that they haven't heard the music.”
161
His
commitment to democratic culture is also evident simply in the way he aligns the great arts with
the popular arts. Additionally, and perhaps because of this commitment, Seldes also advocated
for new expressions of American art that were not derivative of European art.
162
In fact, he
believed the lively arts were a much better expression of America than anything from Europe.
Like the Young Americans before him, who believed in the power of criticism to spark cultural
renewal, Seldes believed that greater critical attention to the popular arts could improve them and
help create a native American culture.
Although the essays in The Seven Lively Arts were not the first to comment on popular
arts, the volume was the first published collection in the United States devoted solely to them,
and it proved to be groundbreaking. In the next several years, many other critics published their
own books dealing with popular arts, including much older and more entrenched critics like
William Crary Brownell.
163
Seldes’s influence went far beyond the small circle of New York
critics because he took a very public role in advocating for the lively arts, frequently giving

160
The Seven Lively Arts, 348.
161
Ibid., 353.
162
Kammen, 130.
163
Brownell (1851–1928), who published Democratic Distinction in America in 1927, spent
most of his career as an art critic and literary advisor and was considered to be an American
disciple of Matthew Arnold.
55

lectures, writing program notes, and appearing on the radio. In fact, he cultivated relationships
with many of the days’ leading popular culture figures like cartoonist George Herriman,
humorist Ring Lardner, and musicians George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and Louis Armstrong.
For example, Seldes frequently wrote program notes and gave pre-concert lectures for
Whiteman. He collaborated with Louis Armstrong (and many others) on the 1939 Broadway
musical Swingin’ the Dream, an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, serving as producer
and book co-writer with Armstrong starring as Bottom. Much later he hosted the television
program The Subject Is Jazz featuring pianist Billy Taylor as music director and was the
founding dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
In short, Seldes was widely known among critics, artists, and the general public.
Seldes’s criticism was also significant because of his position as a Harvard-educated man
of letters and his democratic approach. His cultural authority and use of a more sophisticated
type of criticism than others writing about popular arts legitimized the field of popular criticism.
His approach, to apply a universal set of aesthetic standards to both high and low culture, made it
possible to reveal the “lively arts.” In this way, he was enacting in criticism the same thing he
was promoting in the arts– a sort of “lively” criticism. It enabled him to claim “that a well-made
motor-car body may be as beautiful as a Roman chariot, that a well-built chassis may be as
attractive as a painting, or a page of advertising copy as illuminating as a three-volume novel.”
164

This new framing of cultural hierarchy– or lack thereof– gave others like Whiteman and Willson
a foundation on which to build. Although Willson cannot be directly connected to Seldes, he at
least inherited the foundation through Whiteman.

Paul Whiteman

164
Gilbert Seldes, “Outlaws from Parnassus,” Saturday Evening Post 200 (Nov. 5, 1927), 181.
56

Paul Whiteman (1890–1967) is a central figure in early twentieth-century popular music because
of the influence he exerted on many younger musicians and his ability to draw together a diverse
range of composers; at the same time, his life story is representative of a generation of American
musicians coming of age at the turn of the twentieth century. Whiteman employed several
talented musicians, including such varied figures as Bing Crosby, the Dorsey brothers, Ferde
Grofé, and William Grant Still, all of whom went on to have notable careers. Beyond this direct
influence, he and his band served as a model for other dance band leaders who began emulating
his band’s style and organization. For example, ensembles became larger and band leaders began
to employ their own arrangers rather than use stock arrangements issued by publishers. Also,
Whiteman was an American-born, American-trained musician entering a profession dominated
by foreign-born players, composers, and conductors. His approach and attitudes toward music
reflected this changing dynamic and echoed a rapidly shifting American culture in which
Victorian norms were becoming stale and untenable. Most importantly for this discussion, he
drew together a wide range of composers through commissions or by featuring their works on his
programs, especially his concert series of “Experiments in Modern Music” and later, on his radio
program Music Out of the Blue. Willson was just one of many musicians who looked to
Whiteman for inspiration.
As someone so important and influential in American music, he rarely appears in
histories of American music. The omission of Whiteman and others like him result in historical
narratives that are not fully representative of the early twentieth century. Even more, Whiteman
was part of a younger generation of American musicians who had a major influence on
twentieth-century musical culture in the United States and abroad. Therefore, he is important as a
connecting point between Seldes and Meredith Willson, as a representative of his generation, and
57

also as an important musical figure in his own right. In short, understanding Whiteman adds to
the richness of American music history.
A prototypical American musician of his time, Whiteman was born outside of major
centers of culture and came from a middle-class background yet was highly trained in music. His
father, the supervisor of music for Denver public schools was college educated. Unlike the more
economically advantaged musicians of his time, he did not have the resources to study in Europe
and did not have the educational opportunities present in cities like New York and Boston.
Although playing classical music with the Denver Symphony was his way of earning a living, he
was equally fascinated by the music he heard and played at the theaters and so-called “hot
jazz.”
165
When Whiteman later moved to San Francisco to play in the symphony there, inspired
by the dance bands in the city, he created his own. The reality of professional orchestras of the
time was that few could offer full seasons without substantial support from philanthropists. In
1915, Whiteman’s first year with the San Francisco Symphony, the season lasted for sixteen
weeks, and he earned $25 per week.
166
As a result, Whiteman and his colleagues also supported
themselves with other, non-classical jobs. Unlike most in the San Francisco Symphony,
Whiteman embraced and welcomed these other jobs, striving to create the same musical
excellence present in his primary job. Whiteman carried his musical training and ideas into his
work as a band leader.
Although he became a commercial success, his primary drive and goal was to experiment
with and create new music. His band’s arrival in New York in 1920, one year after Willson’s,
made this more of a reality, as the city was the center of musical activity in the country.

165
During this time, hot jazz referred to the highly improvised style emanating from New
Orleans.
166
The pay was eventually raised to $40 per week; see Joshua Berrett, Louis Armstrong and Paul
Whiteman: Two Kings of Jazz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 2.
58

Although Whiteman may not have been aware, nearly a decade earlier James Reese Europe and
the Clef Club Orchestra were giving concerts that included ragtime. Europe, as well as many
other Black and white bandleaders and songwriters, were already adapting classical tunes for
popular songs. New York Bandleader Vincent Lopez, who became popular because of his radio
broadcasts beginning in 1921, was a leading proponent of “jazzing the classics,” as it was often
called in the press. It was he who likely first used the term modern American music to refer to
symphonic jazz that was later adopted by other bandleaders. Fletcher Henderson was also rising
to prominence around the same time. Although his band was made up of Black musicians, he
employed similar strategies, building a group of “reading” musicians, playing specially written
arrangements, and performing in spaces traditionally reserved for white bands. In 1924, he
transitioned from primarily recording music for Black Swan Records to leading his band live at
Club Alabam and the Roseland Ballroom. There also had already been talk in the press that jazz
could serve as the foundation of a new American tradition. For example, in a 1915 issue of The
New Republic, Hiram Moderwell suggests that composers should use jazz as the basis for an
American national style in same way that Russian composers had used folk songs.
167

In November 1923, singer Eva Gauthier, the Canadian-American mezzo-soprano known
for interpreting works by modernist composers, gave a recital that included a set of popular
songs (featuring George Gershwin accompanying on piano). Whiteman’s vision brought together
these ideas by commissioning new works that presented jazz in a symphonic, concert setting.
This culminated in a series of “Experiments in Modern Music,” concerts which took place in
New York City beginning in 1924.

167
Hiram K. Moderwell, “Ragtime,” New Republic, 16 October 1915, in Jazz In Print (1856–
1929), ed. Karl Koenig (Hillsdale NY: Pendragon Press, 2002), 103.
59

Example 2. Program for Eva Gauthier's Recital in 1923

60

In addition to arrangements made for his band, his “Experiments in Modern Music,” held
over the course of fourteen years (1924–1938) featured new music by leading composers. Most
famously, he commissioned George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for his first concert in 1924.
But he also performed works by William Grant Still, Deems Taylor, Ferde Grofé, Morton Gould,
Duke Ellington, David Diamond, Richard Rodgers, and Victor Herbert, among others. This list
of composers alone, aside from the numerous popular songs featured, speaks to the breadth of
music featured on these programs. Beyond these concerts, Whiteman remained steadfast to his
vision. When he later worked for the Blue Network– the predecessor of ABC– he commissioned
several symphonic works specifically for the medium of radio from composers such as Aaron
Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Roy Harris, Victor Young, and Leroy Anderson as well as previous
commissionees Duke Ellington, Morton Gould, and Richard Rodgers. The pieces were featured
on his program Music Out of the Blue beginning in 1943.
168

To give voice to his vision, Whiteman relied upon his publicists to bring together a
network of journalists, music critics, and musicians. For him, input from the musical community
at-large was important, and he frequently hosted luncheons and dinner parties for the press and
musician friends.
169
Notable supporters included Victor Herbert, Leopold Stokowski, Walter
Damrosch, Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifitz, Willem Mengelberg, Henry Osgood, O. O. McIntyre,
Deems Taylor, Carl Van Vechten, and Gilbert Seldes, among others. Seldes, in particular, was a
friend and strong ally of Whiteman’s music. He was featured prominently in Seldes’s
groundbreaking collection of criticism The Seven Lively Arts (1924). He, along with Taylor,

168
John Louis Howland, “Between the Muses and the Masses: Symphonic Jazz, ‘Glorified’
Entertainment, and the Rise of the American Musical Middlebrow, 1920–1944” (PhD diss.,
Stanford University, 2002), 513.
169
See, for example, Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music (Lanham, MD:
Scarecrow Press, 2003), 391 and Paul Whiteman and Mary Margaret McBride, Jazz (New York:
Arno Press, 1974), 95.
61

wrote program notes for Whiteman and was also enlisted to give talks before or during
concerts.
170
Taylor’s composition Circus Day (1925) was featured on Whiteman programs in
1925 and 1926. With a host of supporters as well as a paid publicity team, Whiteman was able to
communicate his vision widely. It was one of his publicists, Estella Karn who revived the title
that had been bestowed upon him in 1919, the “King of Jazz.”
171
She was also instrumental in
enlisting her domestic partner, Mary Margaret McBride, to co-author Whiteman’s book Jazz.
Whiteman and his successors, though part of the fabric of American culture for the next
few decades, fell out of the eye of most critics and scholars. Despite his real influence on jazz,
his legacy is complicated. Early reception of Whiteman by Black audiences was largely positive
and enthusiastic as his style and his aesthetic of elevating jazz appealed to many middle-class
African-Americans, but this was not universal.
172
Others situated him within a broader tradition
that effectively diminished his influence or charged that his music did not retain its fundamental
connection to African-American source material.
173
While the latter conception of Whiteman
may be partly associated with ideas of purity, anti-commercialism, and Black masculinity that
emerged in the 1930s– all antithetical to Whiteman– the fact that his outsized role in jazz
overshadowed the contributions of Black musicians accounts for at least some disregard in
Whiteman.
174
Of course, it is also partly due to the fact that his band was supplanted by the big
bands of the swing era. After World War II, and particularly with the intensified attack on mass
culture, ideas from the 30s that positioned jazz as anticommercial and fundamentally rooted in

170
Taylor and Seldes had a connection themselves as Seldes had a brief affair with Taylor’s first
wife, Jane Anderson.
171
Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press,
2003), 94.
172
Christopher J. Wells, “‘The Ace of His Race’: Paul Whiteman’s Early Critical Reception in
the Black Press” Jazz and Culture 1 (2018), 79.
173
Wells, 88–89.
174
Gershwin and Whiteman were both said to have “made a lady out of jazz;” see Howland, 1.
62

African-American culture further diminished the role of any jazz that did not fit these criteria.
The primacy of the big band eroded, and bebop came to be viewed as more “authentic.” Another
problem in the reception of Whiteman since then is described by jazz historian Ted Gioia:
Most chronicles of musical activity in the 1920s will draw an implicit delineation
between popular music, jazz, and classical composition. Hence accounts of the evolution
of jazz tend to present a polarized landscape in which hot bands… thrive, develop, and
change in complete isolation from other musical currents. Such categorizations may make
the narrative structure of a music history book flow more smoothly, but much is lost in
the process. This approach is especially maladroit when dealing with an artist such as
Whiteman…
175

Nevertheless, Whiteman is significant for the way he translated ideas set forth by Seldes and his
predecessors into musical rhetoric. He engaged most vigorously with ideas regarding cultural
hierarchy and American arts, particularly as it related to jazz, and he was also aware of other
aspects of the project of cultural renewal. It is not surprising that he would be engaged in these
conversations as Whiteman was always conscious of debates surrounding jazz and his place
within those debates. As I already described, he was deeply involved with the press. But
Whiteman did not just parrot critics and journalists; he contributed new ideas to the discourse,
describing his objectives and charting a course for the future of symphonic jazz. Many of his
ideas would come to define a particular approach taken by musicians who followed his example.
There are certain qualifiers that go along with examining Whiteman’s rhetoric. First,
Whiteman tended not to use personal correspondence frequently.
176
He did, however, leave
behind an extensive record of quotations in print articles and interviews as well as three books.
The materials, of course, also served the purpose of self-promotion, and his books were co-

175
Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 84.
176
The lack of personal correspondence is noted by one of his biographers, Thomas A. DeLong,
in Pops: Paul Whiteman, King of Jazz (Piscataway, NJ: New Century Publishers, 1983), xi and
in personal conversations with Laurel Rhame, archivist for Whiteman’s papers at Williams
College in Williamstown, MA.
63

authored. Nevertheless, Whiteman’s rhetoric remains consistent across the spectrum of books,
articles, and off-the-cuff remarks. In his first book, Jazz, it is worth mentioning his co-author,
Mary Margaret McBride. McBride was a relatively inexperienced journalist at the time, but she
later became famous for her ground-breaking interview radio programs geared toward women.
Some of her journalistic instincts and training are evident at certain points, especially when the
book gives contextual information. Second, his writings are also a product of his times and
sometimes digress into inaccurate historical pronouncements as well as racial stereotypes.
In his book Jazz, Whiteman demonstrates his awareness of the cultural rhetoric among
critics and intellectuals who preceded him. The book as a whole could be taken as a response to
Van Wyck Brooks’s call for creating a “usable past.” In his 1918 essay “On Creating a Usable
Past,” Brooks laments the accepted literary canon because it stifles present creativity. He writes:
It seems to me significant that our professors continue to pour out a stream of historical
works repeating the same points of view to such an astonishing degree that they have
placed a sort of Talmudic seal upon the American tradition. I suspect that the past
experience of our people is not so much without elements that might be made to
contribute to some common understanding of the present, as that the interpreters of that
past experience have put a gloss upon it which renders it sterile for the living mind.
177

Later, Brooks questions: “But is this the only possible past? If we need another past so badly, is
it inconceivable that we might discover one, that we might even invent one?”
178
By the time he
wrote the article, Brooks had already laid out his criticisms of contemporary literary culture in
The Wine of the Puritans and America’s Coming of Age. In this essay, he calls for a reassessment
of the past as a means of cultivating a more vibrant American literary future.
Brooks’s reasoning without a doubt would have resonated with Whiteman. As a veteran
of the Denver and San Francisco Symphonies and the string quartet of Giulio Menetti, he

177
Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial 64 (11 April 1918), 337.
178
Ibid., 339.
64

experienced the primacy of a point of view that treated the old masters with reverence, resulting
in a similar crisis in music and musical creativity. Similar to Brooks, he blamed it on the
perpetuation of this reverence by those who “always set music up on a pedestal as something too
high and holy for everyday life.”
179
He continues, “The trouble with people who think of music
in this way is that they don't really know its history or its meaning in terms of human life,” which
recalls Brooks’s “living mind” formulation.
180
Like Brooks, he lays some of that blame on
teachers as well: “It seems to me that most music teachers must be teaching music…as though it
were a dead language, something without any meaning in real life.” Whiteman’s own opinion of
the old masters differed:
I have never had the feeling that I must keep my hands off the “dead masters,” as people
feel they must not speak the truth of the dead unless it is a complimentary truth. The
masters are not dead to me. I think of the great writers of music, not as gods who finished
their jobs forever in seven days, but as plain human men, as human as any of the rest of
us.
181

Although Whiteman does not explicitly tie music’s contemporary state to a lack of musical
creativity, as Brooks does with literature, he implies it in his language, insisting that “music is a
language all right but a living, changing, vital language. The solemn respect some people give it
belongs only to things dead and canonized.”
182
This kind of re-framing is a primary objective in
Jazz. In a sense, he is inventing his own usable past to justify his forays into jazz in the face of
the negative criticism they had received.
Whiteman’s strategy to create a usable past often mirrors that of Brooks. In the first
chapter of his story of jazz, he manages to mention two key ideas present in the early writings of
Van Wyck Brooks. First, he discusses the way early settlers in America had to balance their

179
Whiteman, 26.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid., 61.
182
Ibid., 51.
65

ideals with the need for survival, writing that “our pioneer grandfathers were too busy keeping
alive in the wilderness to spend any time learning to be ‘cultured.’”
183
Whereas Whiteman calls
early settlements “a completely materialistic proposition,” Brooks calls the need for survival an
“imminent practical issue.”
184
In both of their narratives, the eventual result is the same,
industrialization. Whiteman is critical of the effects of industrialism, accusing it of “crushing all
the normal impulses of human beings” and standardizing everything.
185
He appreciates the
comforts provided by manufactured goods but admits that “machines supplied everything but
beauty– the beauty of art, music, literature.”
186
Brooks and his colleague Randolph Bourne had a
similar but more specific view. According to Casey Nelson Blake, they believed that the
industrialism system was a hindrance to culture because “its separation of planning and
execution deprived most people of the knowledge and skills necessary to cultural production and
appreciation.”
187
Whiteman’s second point is the oft-repeated trope that Americans had had no
art.
188
He uses this to explain how the melting pot then created a wealth of art, mentioning
Whitman, Hawthorne, and Poe, and ending with jazz.
189
Brooks uses the fact that “in American
literature something has always been wanting,” to propose Whitman as the precipitant to a new
American culture. For the two this was partly a rhetorical strategy because they both ultimately
believed in American art; they simply believed that an intervention was needed.
Whiteman also acknowledged certain criticisms of the Young Americans and Gilbert
Seldes regarding the current state of American culture, particularly that it was too reliant upon

183
Whiteman, 128.
184
Whiteman, 5–6 and America’s Coming-of-Age, 9.
185
Whiteman, 153–154.
186
Whiteman, 8.
187
Beloved Community, 79.
188
Whiteman, 8.
189
Ibid. 8–9.
66

European models and that it was largely disconnected from everyday life. He addresses the first
criticism by both calling out highbrows and by drawing from his own experience. He calls
highbrows “ignorant worshipers of European culture or imitators of it” and charges that they
“scorn everything American because being American, it can’t be artistic.”
190
This rhetoric was
surely informed by the views of Seldes. Michael Kammen explains that after returning from a
trip to Europe in 1927, Seldes made the observation that “for almost a century the arts in
America had been imitative, derivative from Europe.”
191
That same year Seldes wrote an article,
“Outlaws from Parnassus,” for the Saturday Evening Post discussing the issue:
With European ideals of form well fixed in his mind, and with a delicate contempt for
American materials, the run of American artists of the past century turned out some of the
emptiest poems, and the flightiest novels, the most stultified paintings and statues, the
tinkliest music, that have ever won a nation an honest name in the history of art.
192

Whiteman makes a similar comment and even mentions two important subjects of Seldes’s
article, the motor car and skyscrapers:
“We have assimilated the arts of Europe, yet made none of them our own. If we made a
play, it was patterned after [George] Farquhar, or [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan. When we
painted a portrait, we fixed a reverent gaze on Sir Joshua Reynolds. When we fashioned a
public building, we bowed before the shrines of [Christopher] Wren and [James] Gibbs.
Our music followed the same lines. And that is not the best way. We’d not have had a
Ford if we had been satisfied with European ways– nor perhaps a phonograph, nor a
steamboat, nor a skyscraper.”
193

More personally, Whiteman recounts the effects this has on American musicians.
“I knew singers, nice American boys and girls, who were unable to get a hearing in their
own country until they had studied in Italy or France. They were not particularly
improved by the European period that I could see. On the contrary they usually lost
something– whatever it was that made them distinctive.”
194

190
Whiteman, 26 and 126.
191
Kammen, 130.
192
“Outlaws from Parnassus,” 181.
193
Whiteman, 275–276.
194
Ibid., 70.
67

Once again this has echoes from “Outlaws from Parnassus,” as Seldes recounts the trend of
American artists studying in Europe to demonstrate the persistent favorability of European-
derived art in the United States: “It is still the ambition of most American students of architecture
to go to Rome, of painters to study at Beaux Arts or at a Parisian studio, of composers to go to
the Conservatory.”
195

For Whiteman the idea that high art was disconnected from the everyday lives of
Americans is a corollary of the points already made. The pedestal on which music was placed
removed it from daily life, but Whiteman firmly believed that “music is as much a part of life as
the heart beat.”
196
With the developments in music of which he was involved, he hoped that
music would be “put back into its proper place in the home and the community, making it in
American towns what it is already in European village life– a vital factor.”
197
Brooks was of the
same mind, and Whiteman’s rhetoric contains echoes of America’s Coming of Age. Of course,
Brooks’s entire project was to point out the divisions within society, but he is more specific
when he discusses how American literature “stands remote from life” and “achieves its own
salvation by avoiding contact with actuality.”
198
Brooks longed for an organic connection
between art and American life, something which he and his colleagues observed existed in
European culture.
199
It is interesting then that Whiteman also refers to life in Europe. Now, with
a critique of the current state of music firmly in place, Whiteman could lay out a new course.
Whiteman expresses his uncertainty about the future of his brand of jazz but affirms his
commitment to helping it grow. He writes, “I sincerely believe in jazz. I think it expresses the

195
“Outlaws from Parnassus,” 181.
196
Whiteman, 61
197
Ibid., 287.
198
America’s Coming-of-Age, 110.
199
Beloved Community, 128.
68

spirit of America and I feel sure it has a future– more of future than of past or present. I want to
help that future pan out.”
200
This cautious optimism is similar to that of Brooks’s colleagues at
the Seven Arts magazine a decade earlier. In the first issue, the editors declare, “It is our faith and
the faith of many, that we are living in the first days of a renascent period” in which the arts
“become not only the expression of the national life but a means to its enhancement.”
201

Whiteman more directly echoes this later when he says that jazz “catches up the underlying life
motif of a continent and period, molding it into a form which expresses the fundamental emotion
of the people.”
202
He is even more explicit when he notes that “the jazz music movement is
accompanied by the same tendency in art and literature.”
203
Nevertheless, he was well aware of
the obstacles that jazz and jazz musicians faced.
Whiteman understood, for example, that everyone would not necessarily embrace modern
American music immediately and that there would be a period of experimentation in which some
efforts were unsuccessful. This, however, was better than valorizing European music. He writes,
“Our attitude does not necessarily mean that we do not appreciate what other countries have
done, but why shouldn't we scout around a bit for ourselves, pioneer fashion?”
204
Seldes echoes
Whiteman only a year later in the Saturday Evening Post, writing, “We no longer ask you
[Parnassus] to judge us by your standards– we are going to strike out on our own tack.”
205

Whiteman concedes that striking out on an entirely new path like he has done “does not mean of
course that we shall immediately create art,” but he will continue to forge ahead.
206
Near the end

200
Whiteman, 11.
201
Untitled, The Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (Nov. 1916), 52.
202
Whiteman, 130.
203
Ibid. 284.
204
Whiteman, 26.
205
“Outlaws from Parnassus,” 181.
206
Ibid., 275.
69

of his book he issues a call for further experimentation by declaring that “young composers may
have the assurance at all times that ours is one organization from which the native product may
get a hearing” and then goes on to note that “whether jazz will make music or not cannot be
settled by arguing about it. The only way is to try it out.”
207
Whiteman’s sentiments are
reminiscent of an article in The Seven Arts by cultural critic Harold Stearns regarding the state of
American theater. Although he feels that American dramatists are currently lacking, he blames it
on the drama critics who are beholden to European cultural values. Instead, he encourages
American dramatists to forge ahead, writing, “We must cease to be ashamed of our medium, and
cease to long so intently for alien gold that we cannot complete the original statue in clay. The
deeper fineness will come only with the time that will make our whole national life finer.”
208

Stearns’s has a deep concern about the effect of snobbish critics on creativity in
American drama. Earlier in his essay he writes:
We bring to our stage an incredible amount of cant and intellectual snobbery which has
the effect not merely of muddying and thwarting our own interpretation of American
plays, but of likewise intimidating our playwrights. They are frightened into furtive
imitations of what they have been told is correct in an older and more sophisticated
tradition; they are ashamed of that portion of their work which is truly American as
flippant or shoddy and hide it.
209

Though Whiteman is less eloquent, he also believes that “snobbish worries about art have never
done much but annoy and hinder the real artist.”
210
He goes on to say that “All the masters have
suffered heartbreak and discouragement because the cultured few whose judgment was taken as
a criterion refused to countenance anything new.”
211
But if cultured critics are not the arbiters of
taste, who is?

207
Whiteman. 294–295.
208
Stearns, 520.
209
Ibid., 516–517.
210
Whiteman, 125.
211
Ibid., 126–127.
70

Whiteman certainly believed in the value of critics, but he did not believe expertise was
necessary for the enjoyment of the arts. He asks, “Isn’t it possible that the so-called masses have
considerable instinctive good judgement in matters of beauty that they never get credit for? My
notion is that beauty is for everybody.”
212
In fact, from his experience touring with his band, his
concerts draw “bookworms, bank presidents, village loafers and what not.”
213
In this, Whiteman
draws from Seldes, who writes that “the appreciation of aesthetic qualities is universal,” as he
explains that, though they might experience them differently, people from all sectors of society
can appreciate the arts.
214
Later, Whiteman states this more directly when he says that “nobody
needs a long course of schooling in order to respond to beauty.”
215
These sentiments have roots
that go all the way back to John Dewey and made their way to Seldes and Whiteman through
Randolph Bourne of The Seven Arts. Dewey’s idea of a democratic society was that “personal
growth could occur only when men and women had full access to the intellectual and artistic
resources of their society.”
216
The Seven Arts writers understood this to mean that the arts needed
to be accessible to everyone in the United States.
Whiteman’s central point was that jazz was the best music to express the American spirit,
and for him, it represented a kind of optimism in music that contrasted with attitudes about
classical music. He writes, “Jazz is the spirit of a new country. It catches up the underlying life
motif of a continent and period, molding it into a form which expresses the fundamental emotion
of the people, the place and time so authentically that it is immediately recognizable.”
217
In
another chapter, Whiteman is more specific about what aspects of life jazz captures, alluding to

212
Whiteman, 89.
213
Ibid., 253.
214
The Seven Lively Arts, 351–354.
215
Whiteman, 127.
216
Beloved Community, 87.
217
Whiteman, 130.
71

industry and perhaps the bustle of the city: “The rhythm of machinery became the rhythm of
American civilization– a clanging, banging, terrific rhythm full of an energy that promised
accomplishment.”
218
This was a common association among jazz critics. In 1917, Hiram
Moderwell argues that jazz is the perfect expression of the American city “with its restless bustle
and motion, its multitude of unrelated details, and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a
vague Somewhere.”
219
Seldes, who consulted with Moderwell for his expertise on jazz, also
touches on a similar theme when he writes, “Once in a while a foreign composer comes to
America and, after listening to the noises of the Loop, to the frantic driving of the riveter, to the
crashing sounds of the steel mills, he announces that the octave and the orchestra are wholly
inadequate to express America in music.”
220
He also expresses something more fundamental
about jazz, that it is “the normal development of our resources, the expected, and wonderful,
arrival of America at a point of creative intensity.”
221

Part of this belief came from the recognition that the current state of the arts, and classical
music more specifically, was not suitable to express the American spirit. Paul Rosenfeld, writing
in The Seven Arts, states that “The fatal shortcoming of nine-tenths the music produced in
America is its utter innocence of any vital relationship to the community.”
222
This is a recurring
theme in The Seven Arts and in the writing of Gilbert Seldes. Seldes believed that newer classical
music was intended to appeal more to the audience’s high-mindedness than to its sensibilities.
223

Whiteman experienced this first-hand, even if he did not express as succinctly. In Jazz, he

218
Whiteman, 7.
219
Hiram Kelly Moderwell and Charles L. Buchanan, “Two Views of Ragtime,” The Seven Arts
2, no. 3 (July 1917), 370.
220
“Outlaws from Parnassus,” 186.
221
The Seven Lively Arts, 84.
222
Paul Rosenfeld, “The American Composer,” Seven Arts 1, no. 1 (November 1916), 91.
223
The Seven Lively Arts, 311–314.
72

recounts how he became dissatisfied with his work in the San Francisco Symphony because there
was no room for innovation.
224
He makes it more personal, reminiscing that he took up jazz
because he was “listless, dissatisfied, despondent” about his work in classical music.
225

Whiteman felt that jazz had a greater vigor. Even early on he recognized that it had
“vitality, sincerity and truth.”
226
The more he worked with jazz, he admits, “the surer I was that
its authentic vitality would take root and develop.”
227
The vitality of recent developments in the
arts was also recognized by others. In 1915, Van Wyck Brooks took note that “this nervous and
acutely self-critical vitality, is in our day in a strange ferment. A fresh and more sensitive
emotion seems to be running up and down the old Yankee backbone.”
228
Seldes recognizes this
specifically in jazz when he observes that “if we give up jazz we shall be sacrificing nearly all
there is of gaiety and liveliness and rhythmic power in our lives.”
229

For all the affinities Whiteman had with Seldes and the Seven Arts writers, there are some
more obvious connections, especially between Whiteman and Seldes. For example, in Jazz,
Whiteman directly references the term lively arts twice. Early in Whiteman’s story he writes, “it
wouldn't have done to say anything about jazz being an art, even a lively one.”
230
This blatant
reference is followed later by his assertion that “ten men out of two hundred and ten in a third
school have announced that they hope to join the liveliest art [jazz] of all.”
231
He and Seldes
were, in fact, closely aligned in their beliefs, but Whiteman wanted to draw a more obvious

224
Whiteman, 31.
225
Ibid., 35.
226
Ibid., 33; the use of the term vitality in jazz rhetoric repeats a long-standing racial stereotype
that views jazz as music charged with emotion but largely devoid of intellectual content; see Ted
Gioia, “Jazz and the Primitivist Myth,” The Musical Quarterly 73, no. 1 (1989), 137–138.
227
Ibid., 52.
228
America’s Coming-of-Age, 161.
229
The Seven Lively Arts, 83.
230
Whiteman, 70.
231
Ibid., 158.
73

connection so there is no doubt. It would be easy to conclude that Whiteman was simply
parroting the views of others, but there are times when he injects new ideas.
Example 3. Photograph of Paul Whiteman with Fellow Bandleaders

Notes: Seated on floor (L to R): Horace Heidt, Ray Noble, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Ray Hendricks; Crouching (L
to R): Jimmy Walsh, Wilbur Hatch, unknown, unknown; Sitting (L to R): Willson, Lou Bring, Leith Stevens, Kay
Kyser, Lud Gluskin, Bobby Dolan, unknown, unknown, unknown, Whiteman, Billy Mills; Standing (L to R):
unknown, Harry Barris, unknown, Mahlon Merrick, Rudy Vallée. Source: Paul Whiteman Collection

These new ideas are important because of the way in which they influenced other
bandleaders. Many of them idolized Whiteman, or at least looked to him as a leader and
innovator. A simple proof of this is the number of bandleaders who turned out for a Los Angeles
74

reception for him when he made a visit to the city in December of 1941.
232
Hosted by Meredith
Willson, the gathering included at least twenty-five Los Angeles-based musical figures including
Bing Crosby, Rudy Vallée, Cy Feuer, Horace Heidt, and Kay Kyser.
233
The inscription in the
album reads, “The undersigned Maestros hereby tender to Paul Whiteman their esteem and
appreciation for the inspiration of a truly great American career.”
234
Furthermore, by 1941, many
bandleaders had taken up the challenges Whiteman posed in Jazz.
Whiteman laid out the possibilities for the future of modern American music. He
sanctioned the use of materials from classical music both to show that beautiful melodies were
timeless and as means to introduce classical music to a wider audience. He justifies this by
reminding his readers that the masters “didn’t scruple to take any material they could lay their
hands on to help them either.”
235
Whiteman reaffirms his respect for the classics but then says “I
doubt if it hurts Tschaikowsky or even Bach when we rearrange what they have written.”
236
It is
okay because bands can “play to people who haven’t heard good music before.”
237
Whiteman
also challenges composers, saying, “ I want to see compositions written around the great natural
and geographical features of American life– written in the jazz idiom.”
238
He argues, “We must
make traditions. It is time we began. Jazz can help by catching our national themes fast in
composition.”
239
While Whiteman is “encouraged occasionally by musicians like Leopold
Stokowski, John Alden Carpenter and Fritz Kreisler who tell us that jazz will live,” he wishes

232
This information is drawn from a signature book and photograph album in the Paul Whiteman
Collection at Williams College.
233
Although Feuer is best known for being a Broadway producer, in 1941 he was working in
Hollywood as a music director for Republic Pictures and as a film composer.
234
Paul Whiteman Collection, Williams College.
235
Whiteman, 61.
236
Ibid.
237
Ibid.
238
Ibid., 287.
239
Ibid.
75

that there were more composers writing jazz.
240
He understands that serious composers might not
take up jazz composition, and if that is the case “we must train the popular composer to become
a better musician.”
241
Whiteman assures them that his own band is eager to play new works by
American composers.
242

Whiteman’s rhetoric is also notable for the ways in which he identified the hypocrisy of
the musical establishment. In essence, he questions whether highbrows really care about the state
of music in the country:
The strange thing is the spectacle of the patrons of music in America, who for years have
been keeping good music barely alive in this country by artificial stimulation, by
maintaining splendid orchestras that had to be subsidized by the rich, while they lamented
the lack of a musical public in this country. One would think they would rejoice, to see
music [jazz] rising like a wave and engulfing America, to see people music-mad. But a
great many of them don’t.
243

Whiteman suspects that the motivation of patrons of music is to exclude the masses of
Americans from access for fear that they might someday inhabit the upper echelons of music
culture. He notes that “some of them raise their hands in horror, and say that jazz is vulgar. Well,
it is, in the good old Latin sense of the word. It is vulgar; that is, it is a possession of the common
people.”
244
Because of the same fear “wealthy patrons of music will pour out millions for
symphonies and not a cent for music in the public schools.”
245
Whiteman understands that there
is a danger in making music more exclusive, that eventually the audience for classical music will
diminish. He asks rhetorically, “Who goes to symphony concerts to-day?” and then answers,
“Except for music students, mostly men and women over forty.”
246

240
Whiteman, 277.
241
Ibid., 288.
242
Ibid., 294–295.
243
Ibid., 187.
244
Ibid.
245
Ibid., 51.
246
Ibid., 288.
76

The importance of Whiteman’s rhetoric, both that which echoes cultural critics and the
new ideas he explicates, is that other musical figures, including Meredith Willson, would take up
these themes. Not only that, Whiteman, backed by his publicity team, was effective in aligning
his rhetoric to the music his band performed. Willson must have been impressed by this quality;
Sousa possessed a similar flair, and Willson’s own talent for this can be seen in his radio
programs I discuss in Chapter 3.
Musically speaking, Whiteman’s legacy is more notable for the works he commissioned
and performed than for any particular style or sound. In her article, “Gershwin and the
Modernists of the 1920s,” Carol Oja notes just how important Whiteman’s general invitation to
American composers was at a time when few other outlets offered such an opportunity.
247

Nevertheless, the vision of modern American music varied widely among the works Whiteman
did perform. For example, two works premiered on Whiteman’s second “Experiment in Modern
Music” on December 29, 1925 demonstrate opposite poles of this vision. Deems Taylor’s Circus
Day: Eight Pictures from Memory, Op. 18 is more traditional. The suite is largely programmatic,
opening with a “Street Parade,” primarily a boisterous 2/4 march, and closing with a grand
“Finale.”
248
The other movements depict various performers and animals either
programmatically or using established styles, for example, a gallop. The lions are represented by
lumbering low brass, saxophones, and strings, and the dog and monkey show features trumpets
using wah-wah or harmon mutes. There is nothing that notably references jazz either
rhythmically or harmonically. The piece was originally arranged by Ferde Grofé, and later,
Taylor orchestrated it for symphony orchestra. The Grofé arrangement translates to a full

247
Oja, 651.
248
Ferde Grofé Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress.
77

orchestra with relative ease, suggesting there was nothing inherent in the work specific to the
dance band genre.
On the other hand, John Alden Carpenter’s A Little Bit of Jazz expressly evokes elements
of jazz style and is free of programmatic elements.
249
In its extant form, the score is already in a
dance band arrangement, presumably by Carpenter himself. If that is the case, it is plausible that
Carpenter consulted with Whiteman about the instrumentation of his group and perhaps even
conceived of the piece expressly for dance band, another contrast to Circus Day. Other
specificities to the dance band genre include several woodwind doublings, solos, and sections
marked by clear tone-color changes.
250
The most obvious jazz feature of the composition is the
pervasive use of syncopation. In certain places, Carpenter highlights the syncopation further by
changing meter for short stretches, for example, briefly moving to 5/8 from 2/4. Carpenter’s
melodies also feature chromatic inflections that suggest blues.
While these are only two of the many compositions Whiteman performed in the realm of
American symphonic jazz, they give a broader and more concrete sense of how composers
imagined “modern American music.” They are also helpful for understanding Willson’s
engagement in the concept. It is unclear how Willson first encountered Whiteman or vice versa,
but it is difficult to imagine that Willson was completely unaware of him while the two were in
New York City together. It is certain that they knew each other by 1934 and remained friendly
thereafter.

The O. O. McIntyre Suite

249
John Alden Carpenter Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress.
250
For a thorough discussion of dance band orchestration see Howland, 90–178 and for tone-
color changes more specifically see 128–132.
78

Meredith Willson’s O. O. McIntyre Suite (1934) achieves a synthesis of styles that demonstrates
his vision of American music and highlights the broader movement to redefine American music
in general. In other words, the piece may be understood as a composition specific to Willson’s
training and background and also as an emblematic contribution to the efforts to redefine and
recontextualize American music. The suite blends together elements of jazz, chromatic
modernism, and programmatic music.
251
At the same time, it recontextualizes them in a dance
band suite rather than a symphonic work. At its most basic level, it pays homage to the popular
syndicated columnist Oscar Odd McIntyre. Willson and McIntyre were friends when they both
lived in New York City in the 1920s, but the dedication goes beyond the personal. Honoring
McIntyre demonstrates Willson’s effort to reach a wide audience by connecting his music to a
relatable subject. McIntyre had a similar purpose in that he wrote observations about New York
City using the plain language and colloquialisms of a mid-Westerner. Willson celebrated this
accessibility by referencing McIntyre’s misspelled colloquialisms in the titles of two of the
suite’s movements: “Thingumbobs,” and “Thots While Strolling.”
252
Although McIntyre is
mostly lost to history, his reach to readers across the country and his popularity was unique at the
time. His biographer wrote that “Odd wrote more, made more money, and had more readers than
any other columnist of his era. When the world was hungry for newspapers and magazines, and
radio and movies were in their infancy, he carefully managed his public persona to become a

251
I use the term programmatic instead of program to avoid any confusion over the pieces lack
of connection with the nineteenth-century European musical trend.
252
This is how these titles are spelled in the manuscript arrangements done by Adolph Deutsch,
which are held in the Whiteman Collection at Williams College; in all other instances, including
the newspaper columns of McIntyre, they are spelled “Thingumabobs” and “Thoughts While
Strolling.” Either Deutsch misspelled the titles or that is how they were originally titled by
Willson. I suspect Willson deliberately misspelled them to emphasize McIntyre’s penchant for
misspelling words.
79

media superstar.”
253
Rather than focusing on his newspaper column, the other two movements,
“Sunday Night in Gallipolis” and “Local Boy Makes Good” are associated with McIntyre’s
biography, imagining a Sunday night gathering in his hometown and a triumphant return after
achieving fame in New York.
254

The suite participates in the effort to reimagine and recontextualize music in America
simply by its association with the popular bandleader Paul Whiteman. Beginning in 1924,
Whiteman and his band performed a series of concerts called Experiments in Modern Music as a
means of encouraging American composers to envision a new American music that combined
elements of the classical and popular traditions equally.
255
Whiteman called it “a bona fide
attempt to arouse interest in popular music rhythm for purposes of advancing serious musical
composition.”
256
Although the McIntyre Suite was not performed at one of these, its extant form
is an arrangement by Adolph Deutsch made for the Paul Whiteman band. According to the Los
Angeles Times, the piece was featured on Whiteman’s Music Hall program on August 30,
1934.
257
Later that year, Whiteman asked Willson if he would compose an additional movement,
apparently for a concert performance in February 1935.
258
The evidence does not indicate
whether or not the piece was performed in 1935 by Whiteman. It was, however, premiered by

253
R. Scott Williams, An Odd Book: How the First Modern Pop Culture Reporter Conquered
New York (Self-published, 2017), 2.
254
Even though McIntyre often wrote about his hometown, he never actually returned there in
his lifetime.
255
This is in contrast to the many classical composers who used elements of popular music in
their work and the popular musicians who adapted classical melodies for popular songs, which
Whiteman ordinarily did.
256
Whiteman, Jazz, 97.
257
Carol Nye, “Rudy Vallee Offers Radio Dialers Another Headline Bill Today,” Los Angeles
Times, 30 August 1934, 19.
258
Letter from Meredith Willson to Paul Whiteman, Williams College Archives and Special
Collections.
80

Willson on the radio in mid-March 1934.
259
Willson’s commitment to Whiteman’s vision is
evident beyond this one composition. Most notably he commissioned ten songwriters to compose
short concert works which he featured on his radio program in 1940 and later released on an
album titled Modern American Music (1941), the title itself being a term Whiteman frequently
used for his own brand of music.
260

Example 4. Photograph of Paul Whiteman (left) and Meredith Willson

Source: Paul Whiteman Collection

259
“O. O. McIntyre Symphony,” Variety 114, no. 1 (March 20, 1934),1.
260
This term was at least in use since 1924 and may have originated with Vincent Lopez, another
bandleader working in a similar vein as Whiteman; see “Lopez on Jazz,” The Musical Courier,
January 4, 1924. Whiteman may have taken some inspiration from Willson in turn, for a few
years later, he also commissioned several short concert works for his Music Out of the Blue radio
program.
81

The suite as first performed was in three movements, but the orchestration Willson used
is not extant. Willson did make a recording of one of the movements, “Thoughts While
Strolling,” which was released on shellac disc in 1942.
261
Although it is not certain, this
recording probably represents Willson’s own arrangement that he used for the premiere.
262
It
appears to be the case that Whiteman initially received the original three movements in 1934,
which Deutsch arranged for the Whiteman band, and sometime after that, he requested that
Willson write an additional movement, “Sunday Night in Gallipolis,” to be played second in the
suite. This movement, received by Whiteman in December 1934, only exists in a score-form
arrangement by Willson himself with no accompanying individual parts as there are for the other
three movements.
263

The McIntyre Suite celebrates jazz and popular dance music and, in a practical sense,
uses it as a programmatic tool to evoke images of the city and progress. They range from explicit
score indications to the use of what Jeffrey Magee calls “black topics,” segments of music that
contemporary listeners would associate with jazz while holding their African American sources
at a distance, “as if placing them in quotation marks.”
264
Most of the jazz topics are found in the
first movement, “Thingumbobs.” Thingumabobs was the title McIntyre used for a section of his
column in which he made random observations.
265
It is fitting, then, that the movement evokes
several different styles, and for that reason, sounds more cosmopolitan. In this way, it is tied

261
A piano reduction of “Thoughts While Strolling” was published in 1934 and Willson later
used the movement’s melody for his song “Whose Dream Are You?”
262
The recording differs slightly in form and instrumentation from the Deutsch arrangement but
not significantly enough to affect the movement’s overall character.
263
Letter from Willson to Whiteman.
264
Jeffrey Magee, “’Everybody Step:’ Irving Berlin, Jazz, and Broadway in the 1920s,” Journal
of the American Musicological Society 59, No. 3 (Fall 2006), 700.
265
E. L. Huddleston, “O. O. McIntyre Broadway Populist, American Studies 15, no. 1 (spring
1974), 80.
82

most closely with “Thots While Strolling.” The other two movements, “Sunday Night in
Gallipolis” and Local Boy Makes Good,” feature more traditional styles, a waltz and march,
respectively.
By the time he wrote the suite in 1934, Willson would have been quite familiar with jazz.
There is no definitive evidence that he played jazz, but he, without a doubt encountered it
beginning early in his career. One of his first regular jobs when he arrived in New York City was
playing in a theater orchestra under the direction of Sol Klein. Klein, a violinist, played with Ted
Lewis, one of the first white imitators of New Orleans jazz. Willson may have encountered jazz
playing under John Philip Sousa. According to Edward A. Berlin, Sousa frequently programmed
ragtime numbers and cakewalks on his concerts.
266
The most tantalizing evidence that he played
jazz comes from his time in the orchestra of the Rialto Theater, one of the grandest silent movie
theaters in New York City. According to Gillian Anderson, the music director, Hugo Riesenfeld
often gave musical interludes featuring what he called “Classical Jazz.”
267
An account of one of
these interludes comes from March 1923, which was during Willson’s time with the orchestra.
Riesenfeld staged a “Classical Jazz” performance that showed the close connection of
Jazz with what is known popularly as “the classics”… Mr. Riesenfeld dug up four good
melodies from Chopin, Gounod, and Puccini, had his orchestra play them as scored by
“legitimate” musicians, and then had the orchestra play Jazz selections which were
apparently built wholesale on them.
268

As a conductor and later, music director for NBC radio, Willson introduced several programs
featuring jazz and popular music. In 1929, he created Chiffon Jazz, which introduced popular

266
Edward A. Berlin, Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2002), 100.
267
Gillian B. Anderson, “The Presentation of Silent Films, or Music as Anaesthesia,” Journal of
Musicology 5, no. 2 (1987), 277.
268
“Critiques. Rivoli,” The American Organist 6, no. 6 (1923), 366.
83

dance tunes that were specially orchestrated with primarily strings and woodwinds.
269
Then, in
1932, he created Concert in Rhythm, a program that featured popular dance music in a concert-
like setting for an audience who preferred simply to listen rather than dance.
270
Furthermore, just
a year after he wrote the McIntyre Suite, he released an album called, Chiffon Jazz.
271

The first movement, “Thingumbobs,” includes two direct references to jazz. After an
eight-measure introduction in cut time, the piece moves to a seven-measure interlude in 4/4
which features a trumpet solo marked “Solo- Swing.” The accompaniment includes a repeated
syncopated figure and a cymbal on beats 1 through 3 (Example 5).
Example 5. Cakewalk Rhythm

The solo is actually an antiphonal melody in which the third trumpet echoes the second trumpet,
only muted. The melody prominently features the cakewalk rhythm, short-long-short-long-long,
identified by McGee.
272
When the piece returns to cut time, the clarinet takes up a version of the

269
John C. Skipper, Meredith Willson: The Unsinkable Music Man (El Dorado, CA: Savas
Publishing Company, 2003), 70.
270
Ibid.
271
The only known copy of this record, released by the Titan Production Company, is located at
the archives of the Great American Songbook Foundation in Carmel Indiana. Unfortunately, the
record is warped and the contents cannot be extracted at this time.
272
McGee, 700; as McGee notes, others have also connected this rhythm with the cakewalk,
most notably Edward Berlin, 107.
84

melody with a slight rhythmic variation. The initial four notes of the melody become compressed
into a three-beat pattern that extends over the bar line (Example 6).
Example 6. Patter Rhythm

McGee calls a similar rhythmic pattern a “patter,” which is found in Irving Berlin’s “Pack Up
Your Sins and Go to the Devil” (1922) and Zez Confrey’s piano novelty “Stumbling” (1922)
(Example 7).
273

Example 7. Patter Rhythm from “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil”
Although the rhythm is slightly different from these two examples, it has the same three-beat
repetition. Willson was certainly very well aware of these two composers’ works and the
developments in jazz in the intervening years. I suspect that Berlin was a notable influence on
Willson, if only because of the number of counterpoint songs he wrote.
274
Willson may have
been aware of Confrey through Whiteman, as he featured Confrey on his famous concert in 1924

273
McGee, 710.
274
Notable examples include “Goodnight Ladies”/“Pickalittle,” “Lida Rose”/“Will I Ever Tell
You,” “The Sadder But Wiser Girl”/“My White Night,” and “It’s Beginning to Look Like
Christmas”/“Pine Cones and Holly Berries.”
85

and also released a recording of “Stumbling” in 1922. Willson uses another three-beat pattern
later in the movement, which serves as an interlude between sections (Example 8).
Example 8. Three-beat Jazz Pattern

Though it appears to have no relation to any specific jazz topic, it is certainly jazz inspired and
particularly notable because Willson uses it repeatedly through two eight-measure interludes.
The second direct reference to jazz is the instruction “sock” at the climax of the
movement. This term can certainly be used in a number of contexts, but it is most common in
jazz. Writing in the journal American Speech in 1937, H. Brook Webb identifies this as a jazz
term coming from African-American vernacular meaning, “Play with great freedom and
abruptness of note.”
275
Luckily in the particular case of Willson, he has given his own definition.
In his pamphlet What Every Young Musician Should Know, this is how he defines sock:
This expression has a good deal to do with tempo as well as character. It means
exaggerating heavily the rhythm contour, and is the effect usually to be desired in a
medium tempo in the final strain or ensemble chorus usually accompanied by four beat
rhythm. Excepting for medium tempo, “go to town” is approximately the translation.
276

In fact, his definition appropriately describes the music at this point. The trumpets play a step-
wise melody consisting of a dotted-eighth/sixteenth-note pattern combined with syncopated
eighth notes. Shakes, a distinctly jazz effect, are notated on the long notes. The drummer plays
quarter-notes on the bass drum and the bass line consists of quarter-notes that alternate between

275
H. Brook Webb, “The Slang of Jazz,” American Speech 12, no. 3 (Oct., 1937), 182.
276
Robert Meredith Willson, What Every Young Musician Should Know (New York: Robbins
Music Corporation, 1938), 38.
86

the tonic and dominant (Example 9). This is very similar to what Jeffery McGee calls blues bass
“pounding four-beat chords in contrast to the bass-chord alternation of ragtime.”
277

Example 9. Sock Section with Blues Bass

Although his example from George Gershwin’s “Everybody Step” (1921) differs because it
features the tonic and dominant combined on every beat rather than the alternation of tonic and
dominant, the bass line and drum accompaniment in the McIntyre Suite still emphasize four beats
equally. Perhaps a more closely-fitting example of blues bass is in the third movement, “Thots
While Strolling.” After a two-measure introduction, the accompaniment consists of a very

277
McGee, 700.
87

consistent, repeating chord on every beat (Example 10). The inclusion of the flatted seventh in
the harmony, a blue note according to McGee, furthers the reference.
278

Example 10. Blues Bass in “Thots While Strolling”

The effect of the jazz topics used by Willson combined with other elements evoke the city with
its multitude of activities and diverse residents. As I demonstrate in the previous section, jazz
had already been associated with the bustle of the city by both musicians and critics. Willson’s
programmatic use of jazz topics points to other programmatic elements of the suite.
With his background in music for film and radio, it is not surprising to discover several
programmatic elements in the McIntyre Suite. One of Willson’s inspirations for this aspect of his
composition may have been Hugo Riesenfeld,. As music director of three preeminent silent
movie theaters in New York City; the Rialto, Rivoli, and Criterion; he was a leading figure in
scoring for silent films.
279
Before the practice of scoring entirely new music for a film became
standard practice, most scores consisted of a compilation of shorter, previously composed mood
pieces. The larger theatres had extensive libraries of mood music as well as standard classical
scores and popular songs. For example, Gillian Anderson estimates that Riesenfeld’s library
contained 6,000 selections. In an article from the Musical Courier, Riesenfeld explains the

278
McGee, 700.
279
After the silent-film era Riesenfeld went on to score and musically direct many Hollywood
films and remained an advocate of compilation scores; Willson collaborated with him for the
movie My Cavalier (1928) by writing the lyrics to the film’s featured song, “My Cavalier.”
88

process of compiling a film score: “When arranging a certain score, I usually divide the film into
sections according to moods. For instance, sentimental, pastoral, dramatic, heavy...ominous, or–
even every day life.”
280
In another article, he discusses the process by which a music director
chooses appropriate selections from his library: “When the score writer wishes a piece of music
giving the atmosphere of the opening scene of Macbeth, he refers to the sections marked ‘Witch
Dances’ or ‘Ominous Music.’”
281
Compositions could also depict objects or action. Riesenfeld
later explains that, “In the same way he may instantly put his hands on music which suggests the
sound of an aëroplane, [sic] anger, a runaway horse, a canoe drifting down a quiet stream.”
282

Willson surely became familiar with this system of using music to create moods and depict
action. His first published compositions were of this variety. Although he composed a total of
eight mood pieces, only one, Parade Fantastique (1928), survives and only in the form of a
recording from one of his radio broadcasts.
This recording is instructive because it informs the music at the beginning of the
McIntyre Suite. Parade Fantastique opens with a muted trumpet fanfare, a fanfare that later
returns in a full force unmuted restatement. Fanfares were commonly used in early sound film to
herald character entrances, and the McIntyre Suite follows this convention at the very beginning
as if to introduce the character of O. O. McIntyre.
283
The brass fanfare, stated first in C major
and then in A
b
major, occurs over fast moving eighth notes in the winds and strings that, at first,
feature a descending tonic triad. The triad is important because it becomes a foundational motif

280
“Hugo Riesenfeld Tells How He Scores a Film,” Musical Courier 94, no. 7 (Feb. 17, 1927),
48.
281
Hugo Riesenfeld, “Music and Motion Pictures,” The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Science 128 (Nov. 1926), 60.
282
Ibid.
283
Fred Steiner, Martin Marks, Daniel Goldmark, and Neil Lerner; “Film music, American;”
Grove Music Online, 16 Oct. 2013; Accessed 21 Mar. 2020.
89

for later sections of the first movement. In its next iteration, it is featured in the melody, played
by two solo trumpets in alternation (Example 5). Here, the descending triad evokes a military
bugle call, but its relation to any specific one is vague, leaving doubt about its programmatic
purpose, if any. The argument in favor of this and other elements of the suite being
programmatic is strengthened by the fact that, in the second movement, “Sunday Night in
Gallipolis,” the programmatic element is quite clear because Willson describes it in a letter to
Whiteman.
The picture it is intended to convey is that of the warm-hearted and sincere Sunday night
parlor gatherings, of which McIntyre is so fond of describing. We can imagine
somebody’s little girl willingly contributing to the entertainment by playing the one and
only piece of her repertoire, “Chop Sticks,” which occurs in the orchestration as a piano
obligato after the Del Segno.
284

In addition, the third movement, “Thots While Strolling,” references a frequent
synonymous segment of McIntyre’s syndicated columns in which he observes city activity and
ruminates on its possible meaning. This segment typically meanders disjointedly from one
observation to the next:
Thoughts While Strolling around New York: Crowds gaping at Esquimax children.
There’s a job– carrying a stuffed eagle. A cream white overcoat, And it looks real natty.
The wages of sin are often success. Behold in the glittering politicians in their club
lounge. W. L. George, the English novelist. Wears spats. Hot Dog! Broadway’s two
types– cuties and sweeties. But the old fashioned girl winds in the end…
285

Likewise, Willson’s movement wanders between two musical themes. It begins with an andante
section in A minor which features a meandering, ad lib flute solo (Example 11).

284
Letter from Willson to Whiteman, Whiteman Collection, Williams College.
285
R. Scott Williams, Odd Words 1920–1922: An Enhanced Compilation of Early Columns by
Odd McIntyre (Self-published, 2017), 160; Esquimax is a term used at the time to refer to
Eskimos.
90

Example 11. “Thots While Strolling” Flute Melody

Willson calls this section “a musical suggestion of those truant thoughts which are so expertly
recorded in McIntyre’s column.”
286
Then, without a cadence, the piece proceeds to a cantabile
section in A major while introducing a new melodic idea (Example 12).
Example 12. “Thots While Strolling” Cantabile Melody

This section ends unusually on an F dominant-seventh chord. The coda jumbles the two themes
even further in short succession, finally ending on A major, but as if to add further confusion– or
perhaps humor, the piano sounds a lone B to close out the movement. This is not to prepare the
next movement, for that is also in A major.
“Local Boy Makes Good,” the fourth and final movement leaves little doubt about the
suite’s programmatic elements. Whereas the first three movements primarily evoke moods, this
one depicts action and essentially narrates a scene. Set as a 6/8 march, this movement uses the
two musical themes from the previous one, stated this time with more authority. The wandering
A minor flute melody from “Thots” is now given in A major with rhythmic adjustments that
adapt it to the meter. Midway through the melody the theme briefly shifts to the minor mode, as
if to recall the previous movement. In the midsection of the piece, the narrative element becomes
more apparent. The ensemble begins quickly alternating back and forth between a C major chord

286
Meredith Willson, cover notes to “Thoughts While Strolling” by Meredith Willson (New
York: Robbins Music Corporation, 1934).
91

and B
b
major chord. The drummer is instructed to use “swatters” to achieve a “train effect” and
the trombones and low strings interject with f#s and c#s (Example 13).
287
A written-out
deceleration that begins with the alternation of the chords in eighth notes and ends with the
alternation of them in half notes occurs over the next fifteen measures. The train carrying the
“local boy,” McIntyre has arrived in his hometown. The score calls for “crowd cheering effect
records” to be played, first alone, then gradually dying out over a triumphal sixteen measure
section.
Example 13. Five Stages of Deceleration in “Local Boy Makes Good” with Train Effect

The train seems to have only made a brief stop as the next sixteen measures is devoted to a
mirroring train acceleration effect. Finally, in the coda the movement reaches closure when the
flute theme and the cantabile theme (in augmentation) from the third movement are stated
together (Example 14).
Example 14. “Thots While Strolling” Flute and Cantabile Melodies in Counterpoint from
“Local Boy Makes Good”

287
It is unclear whether the term swatters simply refers to brushes or if Willson intended the
drummer to use fly swatters. I suspect it is the latter. Because of his radio experience, he would
have been well acquainted with ways to achieve certain sound effects.
92

Willson’s suite also shows evidence of chromatic modernism, which is surprising when
contrasted with the swaths of music containing conventional harmonies. In the chromatic
sections, the harmonies themselves are extended or unexplainable using traditional theory, and
the harmonic progressions also defy rules of functional harmony. I label this chromatic
modernism because it reflects non-tonal theory.
288
The key to understanding these sections of the
suite lies in tracing Willson’s training in composition. While he clearly possessed the skills to
compose music in his New York City years, there is no evidence he had extensive formal
training. By the time he wrote the McIntyre Suite, he must have received lessons from Julius
Gold (1884–1969), a violin player and the foremost proponent of the teachings of the Austrian-
American pedagogue Bernhard Ziehn (1845–1912).
289
Willson and Gold met as early as 1933
when they were both living in San Francisco. Gold is listed as a violinist in the San Francisco
Symphony program that featured the premiere of Willson’s Symphony No.1 in 1936. Also, a
binder of staff paper in Willson’s papers at the Songbook Foundation archive features, among
other things, lessons in Ziehn’s method of composition in another person’s hand with completed
exercises in Willson’s hand. Ziehn, who taught piano and composition in Chicago, is credited
with creating a system of chromatic harmony well before others and in contrast to the leading
theories of the late nineteenth century.
290
His most notable students were the composers Wilhelm

288
Bernhard Ziehn was not a theorist, but Severine Neff calls music theory based on Ziehn’s
work, such as that expounded by Ernst Bacon, non-tonal; see “An American Precursor of Non-
Tonal Theory: Ernst Bacon (1898-1990),” Current Musicology 48 (1991), 5.
289
Most biographies of Willson mention Gold, but their relationship extended beyond his San
Francisco years; several letters to and from Willson, dating from 1933 to 1956, can be found in
the Julius Gold Collection at the Library of Congress.
290
In “Bernhard Ziehn's Models of Voice Leading and Chromatic Succession in Chromatic
Music,” Music Research Forum 27 (January 2012): 27; David Byrne indicates that the two
leading music theories of the late-nineteenth century were the Stufenlehre or scale-step method
with its use of Roman numerals and the concept of harmonic function promoted by Hugo
Riemann.
93

Middelschulte (1863–1943), Hugo Kaun (1863–1932), and John Alden Carpenter (1876–1951),
and he was also greatly admired by Ferruccio Busoni.
291

The most prominent feature of Ziehn’s teachings that is evident in Willson’s composition
is the concept of plurisignificance or Mehrdeutigkeit. As Severine Neff points out, Ziehn never
defines the term but by his examples “shows it to be the structural and functional reinterpretation
of a pitch or major or minor third in different chords.”
292
In practice, this means that both
chromatic and diatonic chords progress smoothly through the use of a common tone or common
interval but “with little apparent concern for tonality and virtually no mention of harmonic
function.”
293
Ziehn demonstrates this concept in Harmonie und Modulationslehre (1888) by
giving examples of how the note D can exist in twelve different triads, serving as the root, third
or fifth of one major, minor, diminished, and augmented triad each (Example 15).
Example 15. Explication of Plurisignificance in Harmonie und Modulationslehre
294

Ziehn applies the same concept to seventh chords, but because the chords now contain four
notes, the number of chords which contain D becomes twenty-eight. Willson’s knowledge of
Ziehn’s concept is evident in the way he explains modulations in his booklet, What Every Young
Musician Should Know (1938). In chapter five, “From Here To There,” he begins by explaining

291
Winthrop Sargeant, “Bernhard Ziehn, Precursor,” The Musical Quarterly 19, no. 2 (Apr.,
1933), 169.
292
Severine Neff, “Otto Luening (1900-) and the Theories of Bernhard Ziehn (1845-1912),”
Current Musicology, no. 39 (1985), 23.
293
Byrne, 27.
294
Bernhard Ziehn, Harmonie und Modulationslehre (Berlin: Verlag Chrs. Friedrich, 1887), 5.
94

how to modulate a perfect fourth higher by means of dominant-seventh chord that begins on the
tonic, for example, modulating from C major to F major by means of a C
7
chord, but then he
continues:
A very simple principle, and one which is of great value, is that of using a common tone
in place of a modulating chord. For example, supposing you are in the key of C. By
letting one instrument sustain any of the three notes of the C Major Triad, a modulation
can be effected into a number of other tonalities. For example: G is a tone common to
both the C Major triad so a sustained G will tie together the keys of C and E Flat with
neatness and dispatch.
295

Of course, Ziehn’s elaborations on plurisignificance were not confined to modulations but rather
to demonstrate the ways of moving from one chord to the next without the context of a particular
tonality. Willson’s understanding of Ziehn becomes more apparent when he describes how to
modulate from C major to G major. Here, using the common tone G “is not particularly
interesting…and a somewhat stronger modulation is desired.”
296
Instead, Willson suggests using
a transition chord, E
b7
, between C and G because it also contains the tone G. This example
illustrates an additional concept of Ziehn’s teachings, what Neff calls irregular cadence.
297
In
addition to the lack of dominant-tonic motion in Willson’s example, the dissonant pitch D
b
of the
transition chord is left unresolved. Although Willson applies Ziehn’s concepts correctly, unlike
Ziehn, he is using them mostly in the context of concrete tonalities. His pamphlet continues,
demonstrating how to modulate from C major to nearly every other key. For example, to
modulate to D
b
major (or minor), he suggests using an A
b7
chord as a transition. It is justified
because it contains a common tone with C major and is also the dominant of the new key.

295
Robert Meredith Willson, What Every Young Musician Should Know (New York: Robbins
Music Corporation, 1938), 17.
296
Ibid.
297
Neff, 25.
95

This hybrid use of theoretical models ends up being a recurring feature of the McIntyre
Suite. The first movement opens with a four-measure fanfare in C major which is immediately
followed by the same fanfare restated in A
b
major, an example of plurisignificance. Later in the
movement, we see traditional harmonic motion and plurisignificance together. The passage
begins with ii
7
(B minor seven) to V (E major) motion but then moves to iii. This regressive
motion is best explained by plurisignificance, as the tone E is common. The tone is retained in
the subsequent motion to E minor and then F#
7
(Example 16). A similar passage later begins
with
Example 16. Plurisignificance and Traditional Harmonic Motion in “Thingumbobs”

ii (B minor) to IV
6
(D major), but then moves to an A
b7
chord. This is also an example of
plurisignificance except with an enharmonic reinterpretation. The F
#
of the D major chord
becomes G
b
, the seventh of the A
b7
chord. Although the progression then moves to A
7
, which
cannot be explained by Ziehn’s teachings, plurisignificance continues after in the subsequent
moves to C major, in which the E and G are retained, and then to E
b
major, in which the G is
retained (Example 8). Although these are the most striking examples of plurisignificance, other,
shorter examples appear throughout the piece.
Example 17. Plurisignificance with Enharmonic Reinterpretation in “Thingumbobs”

96

In the fourth movement, “Local Boy Makes Good,” Willson makes use of another idea
presented by Ziehn, symmetrical inversion. According to Neff, Ziehn believed that the process
could help composers generate melodic and harmonic ideas.
298
For example, applying it to a
major or minor scale or a mode would create a new scale (Example 18).
299

Example 18. Generation of Scales Through Symmetrical Inversion

Though, Ziehn also applied the concept to suspensions, chords, chord progressions, and canons,
Willson’s application is rather simple. At the climax of the piece, the ensemble plays an
ascending chromatic scale and its symmetrical inversion (a descending chromatic scale
simultaneously) beginning on D (Example 19).
Example 19. Chromatic Symmetrical Inversion in “Local Boy Makes Good”

298
Neff, 31.
299
Bernhard Ziehn, Canonical Studies, Ronald Stevenson, ed. (New York: Crescendo Press,
1976), 24.
97

The effect is rather striking since the interval between the notes of the two scales gradually
increases, meeting at G
#
in octaves and finally reaching D’s two octaves apart.
As David Byrne points out, Ziehn cannot accurately be described as a theorist because he
did not draw upon any complex intellectual constructs.
300
More than anything, his ideas were
intended to describe the music of his time and provide useful tools for composers. Willson
certainly did not set out to write chromatic modernistic music, but he was drawing on the same
resources that were being used by modernist composers. Rather than using those resources to
situate himself as a modernist, he used them as a tool for creating his own style. The same can be
said of the jazz and programmatic elements of the suite. He was not writing jazz, program music,
or modernist music; he was simply using them to manifest his own notion of American music.
The McIntyre Suite is a key work in this regard because it provides a window into
Willson’s thinking in general and a document of this specific time in his career. Cultivating an
American music that encapsulated the country’s musical heritage and also reflected democratic
values was a consistent goal throughout Willson’s career. The McIntyre Suite also demonstrates
that he was continuously synthesizing and evaluating what that goal actually meant. At this
specific time, following the lead of Whiteman, the way to achieve his goal was through
compositional experimentation. He continued to explore composition in his subsequent
symphonies and in Jervis Bay (1941) for orchestra and speaker, but he later found other means to
reach his goal.

300
Byrne 31.
98

CHAPTER 2: WILLSON’S PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC
Introduction
As already noted, Meredith Willson’s beliefs about music drew upon his predecessors, both
musicians and cultural critics, but they were also deeply influenced by his upbringing, training,
and professional experiences. This chapter will examine elements of his biography that shaped
his beliefs and the ways in which he expressed those beliefs, particularly through the medium of
radio. Like the biographical backgrounds presented in Austin’s and Wood’s dissertations, I also
seek to emphasize the differences between Willson’s folksy public persona and his true life
circumstances. Since this is only the second biographical sketch to use archival documentation
from his personal papers, I additionally correct or provide greater detail to elements already
presented in the two dissertations above and in Dominic McHugh’s book. The McIntyre Suite,
for example, is part of Willson’s expression of beliefs because it demonstrates his admiration for
and affinities with Paul Whiteman, but it also shows his own personal interpretation of what
Whiteman espoused. As it was written for radio broadcast, the suite also reflects Willson’s
commitment to using the medium to introduce music to listeners across the country.
Willson’s beliefs are best characterized by their optimism, which he seemed to absorb
from his time in 1920s New York City and then brought forward into the subsequent decades. As
Carol Oja has shown, during that time period, the city was a hotbed of both modernist music and
jazz, and Willson was caught up in both.
301
In fact, the persistence of his optimism throughout
his life was informed by the ease at which he could work in both classical and popular music
early in his career. Like the intellectuals described in Chapter 1, Oja relates that both modernist

301
See Carol J. Oja, “Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s,” The Musical Quarterly
78, no. 4 (Winter, 1994): 646–668 and Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
99

composers and songwriters of popular music “worked to challenge long-held distinctions
between ‘lowbrow’ and ‘highbrow.’”
302
Willson’s optimism, then, sprung from the idea that a
new American music could break down or bridge these distinctions, not from any post-war
notions of optimism. Willson was well aware of the realities that challenged his sense of
optimism, particularly those that arose in the Cold War era.
Above all, Willson believed that appreciation for melody was the key to reconciling
classical and popular music, but he only arrived at this idea after experimenting and witnessing
other options and attempts. For example, the McIntyre Suite shows his attempt to fuse classical
and popular styles together in a dance band/radio orchestra setting. He, like many others of his
generation, were looking for ways to create and define a new American music. It would be
reductionist to label this and his other similar endeavors as middlebrow. He neither wanted to
water down classical music nor uplift popular music. Rather, Willson’s endeavors were aimed at
highlighting the similarities between classical and popular music to break down the artificial
barriers that impeded the appreciation of both. Willson’s egalitarian vision extended further.
Unlike some of his peers, he believed that no special knowledge or particular intelligence
was required to understand and appreciate classical music. This was partly because Willson did
not consider moral edification to be inherent in music. In other words, because music conveyed
no specific “message” and had no inherently uplifting or enlightening effect, there was no need
for the listener to decipher anything. This echoes Van Wyck Brooks, who rejected the idea of
moral uplift through cultural education.
303
As Willson explained in his own way, “serious music
is not so dang complicated that it requires a special kind of soul or something in order to enjoy

302
Oja, “Gershwin and American Modernists of the 1920s,” 646.
303
See Blake, Beloved Community, 139 and Brooks, America’s Coming of Age, 29.
100

it.”
304
He believed that listening to music was essentially a personal experience rather than one
that needed to be mediated. Therefore, music could have profound effects on a listener, but it
was just as likely to simply be enjoyable or entertaining. This is in line with Gilbert Seldes’s
belief that there were multiple ways of enjoying and appreciating the arts.
305
The barriers to
listening that had been created by the classical music establishment were, in truth, artificial ones
created to exclude certain types of listeners. Many of Willson’s beliefs, in fact, find resonance
with those expressed by the intellectuals I highlighted in Chapter 1.
Willson’s beliefs situated him in a curiously complicated position among his peers in
conducting and music criticism. His belief in a personal and unmediated experience with music
was shared somewhat by Theodor Adorno and Virgil Thomson, for example, but he differed with
them about the value of popular music. Thomson expressed his dissatisfaction with certain kinds
of mediation in his criticism of what he called the “music appreciation racket.” His main
complaint against music appreciation was that it was always accompanied by underlying
aesthetic judgements. In other words, music appreciation not only taught the masses about music
but also how to feel about that music. He explained that with music appreciation, “Music is
neither taught or defined. It is preached.”
306
He went on to say that the music preached was a
limited repertoire “assumed to contain most that the world has to offer of musical beauty and
authority,” adding an additional layer of mediation.
307
In his analysis of Walter Damrosch’s
Music Appreciation Hour program, Adorno likewise critiques the “pre-digested values which
cannot possibly be ‘experienced’ by the audience.”
308
More directly related to Willson’s

304
Meredith Willson, “Selling Long-Hair,” Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
305
See The Seven Lively Arts, 351–353.
306
Virgil Thomson, A Virgil Thomson Reader (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 140.
307
Thomson, 140.
308
Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour,’” The
Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer, 1994), 326; the Music Appreciation Hour aired on the
101

quotation above, Adorno later explains that “there is nothing learned or scholarly in serious
music which cannot be developed by a keen understanding of even the most trivial musical
events of everyday life.”
309
As this statement suggests, Adorno (and Thomson too) was clear in
separating music appreciation from more effective and neutral forms of music education. This
differentiation is sometimes missed by scholars who use middlebrow as a framing method.
310

Adorno sought a means of music education that allowed people to experience music directly
without any mediation. The similarity between Willson and Adorno regarding this goal will
become more apparent later in the chapter. Nevertheless, Adorno and Thomson did not share
Willson’s beliefs about the entertainment value of music and the confluence of classical and
popular music. Their views were more in line with Albert Coates, the conductor of the Los
Angeles Philharmonic.
311
Coates, who programmed Willson’s second symphony, later dismissed
him for participating in both highbrow and lowbrow musical activities.
312

On the other hand, Walter Damrosch, like Willson, was accepting of the interaction of
classical and popular music, but, unlike Willson, he heavily mediated classical music. Damrosch
had already been presenting children’s concerts for several years when he began broadcasting his
Music Appreciation Hour, but his radio program taught children about music in a more

radio from 1928 to 1942; additional details can be found in Sondra Wieland Howe, “The NBC
Music Appreciation Hour: Radio Broadcasts of Walter Damrosch, 1928–1942,” Journal of
Research in Music Education 51, no. 1 (Spring, 2003), 64–77.
309
Adorno, 342.
310
See Christopher Chowrimootoo, “Copland’s Styles: Musical Modernism, Middlebrow
Culture, and the Appreciation of New Music.” The Journal of Musicology 37, no. 4 (2020); 526;
Chowrimootoo discusses both Adorno’s and Thomson’s critiques of music appreciation in the
context of middlebrow but does not mention the alternative methods of education they both
mention nor how they might fit (or not) within a middlebrow framework.
311
After Otto Klemperer became partially paralyzed from brain surgery and fell into a deep
depression in 1939, the orchestra lacked a music director; between then and the hiring of Alfred
Wallenstein in 1943, Albert Coates and others conducted the group.
312
This is discussed in greater detail in Chapter 3.
102

systematic way, dividing the entire curriculum into four series of twelve programs each, with
each intended for different grade levels.
313
Adorno criticized Damrosch for focusing on external
elements of music, such as the instruments of the orchestra and how to identify them, and was
concerned that he was teaching listeners simply to hear the instruments rather than the music in
its entirety.
314
Moreover, Damrosch’s descriptions of the instruments gave them personalities,
almost attaching a program or character to each.
315
This was a common criticism of Damrosch
because he did the same thing to musical works without any program. For example, he stated that
the third and fourth movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony expressed “triumphant joy at
victory over the adverse forces of Destiny.”
316
Damrosch was also known for inventing lyrics to
accompany symphonic themes. For example, he set the words, “This is the symphon-ee that
Schubert wrote and never finished,” to the second theme of the first movement of Franz
Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” (Example 20).
317
Although Willson was never directly
critical of this approach, his own method, which will be described later, was vastly different.
Even if their methods were different, they did, however, share a common belief in democratizing
classical music.
Example 20. Allegro Moderato from Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B Minor, D. 759 with
Damrosch Lyrics

313
Howe, 67.
314
Adorno, 330.
315
Ibid.
316
Quoted in George Martin, The Damrosch Dynasty: America’s First Family of Music (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983), 370.
317
Martin, 371.
103

Robert Meredith Willson: Myth Versus Reality
At times it is difficult to uncover the complete truth about Meredith Willson due to gaps in
historical documentation and the numerous accounts Willson gave of himself, some of which
contradict each other or do not align with the historical record. Furthermore, when Willson’s
role in radio programs expanded beyond that of the orchestra conductor to a speaking character
as well, he often played the role of a folksy Midwesterner. While much of the part drew from his
experiences growing up in Iowa, it disguised his true level of sophistication and intelligence. The
line between the real Meredith Willson and the fabricated one became even more blurred after
The Music Man became fixed in American popular culture. Dominic McHugh says that,
“Willson almost started to embody The Music Man– not the character of Harold Hill but the
show as a whole’ and that he was “telling new stories about its writing that made it seem more
than ever like the plot simply emanated naturally from his biography.”
318
But Willson was also
keenly aware that he did not have the same pedigree or legacy that his peers had. He studied at
the Institute of Musical Art but never earned a degree, he did not have a list of illustrious figures
with whom he studied conducting or composition, and he did not have a substantial body of
work in any one field. Therefore, at times, he also exaggerated parts of his biography.
Nevertheless, a great deal can be constructed from archival information, trade journals and the
popular press, and his own memoirs. There are three currents that emerge from his biography:
his true level of sophistication and intelligence, the vast eclecticism of his career, and a clear and
consistent pursuit of his musical beliefs and values.
Contradicting assumptions, Robert Meredith Willson was born into a prominent family in
Mason City, Iowa on May 18, 1902. His paternal grandfather, Alonzo Willson, was a significant

318
McHugh, 214.
104

landowner in the nearby Owen’s Corner, and he set up a business to manage his real estate and to
loan money to local farmers. Alonzo was a benefactor and prominent citizen in the early
development of Cerro Gordo County and its county seat in Mason City. Meredith’s father, John,
earned a law degree from the University of Notre Dame and, after a time practicing law, worked
for his father in his business endeavors. Meredith’s maternal grandfather was a prominent lawyer
in Illinois, and his mother Rosalie was also college educated. She studied kindergarten education
at the Armour Institute in Chicago and later at the Iowa State Teachers College– now the
University of Northern Iowa. In 1920, when John and Rosalie divorced, the couple still held
considerable wealth. The divorce petition estimates John’s wealth to be “at least the sum of
$100,000.00” with a monthly income of $700.00.
319
In today’s dollars, John’s wealth would be
over $2 million with a monthly income of about $20,000. Willson’s memoirs, however, suggest a
contrasting picture. For example, he says that his mother “scraped up the money” to buy him a
flute, implying that their financial situation was different than what it was.
320

Creativity, civic engagement, and Christian morality, three consistent themes throughout
Willson’s life, seemed to be instilled in him from a young age by his mother. In this, Rosalie
Willson must have drawn upon her knowledge of kindergarten education as well as her religious
piety. Mirroring the principles of kindergarten, the three Willson children were encouraged to
learn through a combination of play, activities, and creative endeavors. Meredith, for example,
recounts how they disassembled their treehouse to make in succession a fort, a pushmobile, a
clubhouse, and then the “Rose Theatre,” named after their mother.
321
Willson’s recollections of
childhood include healthy doses of drama, poetry, literature, art, and music. There was also a

319
Austin, 256.
320
And There I Stood with my Piccolo, 18.
321
Ibid., 45.
105

strong element of religiosity and morality espoused by his mother. She was involved in religious
education at the Congregational church, and she and the children regularly attended services and
other church activities. The Prussian system of education, which Rosalie likely encountered in
college, complemented her religious devotion, for she also prized civic virtue and moral
development. For example, Willson recalled that her mother used to read to him and Cedric an
etiquette book called What Every Boy Should Know.
322
She also posted short religious and moral
reminders around the house.
323
Rosalie was engaged in a number of civic endeavors herself
including the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Humane Society.
324
Meredith also
recalled that his mother was a member of the local Sorosis club, a pioneering organization for
professional women that was frequently active in issues such as women’s suffrage and prison
reform.
325
In all of this, the Willson children were afforded a rich and rare childhood experience
that set them all on paths to success.
Willson’s musical experience and training was varied and eclectic from the beginning.
His entire family was musical; his father played the cornet and guitar, and his mother played the
piano. His older siblings, Dixie and Cedric also played instruments and sang. Meredith’s earliest
lessons were on piano, first from his mother, then from the organist at their Congregational
church, Ed Patchen.
326
A few years later, he began playing flute, first taking lessons with locals,
then from the bandleader Squid Hazelton. Willson played with Hazelton’s dance band, possibly
also learning the banjo to do so, as well as other local professional groups. After studying with
Hazelton, John Willson was able to find a flute teacher in Minneapolis who was willing to travel

322
Skipper, 9.
323
Ibid.
324
Austin, 40.
325
And There I Stood with my Piccolo, 13.
326
Ibid., 19
106

to Mason City once a week for lessons with Meredith– another indication the family was
wealthier than Meredith portrayed. Willson also played in the small high school orchestra and
sang in the glee club. As Valerie Austin notes, “this was a period of time in American music
when there were few boundaries between musical styles.”
327
Willson likely encountered a
musical culture in which “classical works played alongside popular tunes.”
328

This environment prepared Willson well for his move to New York City in 1919 where
he encountered an even greater variety of music. Willson’s primary objective was to further his
music studies, which he did by studying with the renown flautist, Georges Barrère and taking
classes at the Institute of Musical Art, one of the predecessor institutions of Juilliard. One student
who loomed large during his time there was Richard Rodgers (1902–1979). Rodgers, who was
already writing songs with Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) before he enrolled at the IMA, was known
for writing the music for the annual class show, a student production that burlesqued what they
were learning at the school. In 1921, Rodgers’s first year there, the show, Say It With Jazz, poked
fun at Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel (1909).
329
Andrea Olmstead,
author of Juilliard: A History, suggests these shows and Rodgers’s presence in general may have
influenced Willson to write musicals.
330
During Willson’s early days in New York he also
played in theater orchestras around the city, most notably under the violinist Sol Klein, who later
played with Ted Lewis’s band.
331
His first major job was with the John Philip Sousa Band
beginning in 1921. Although Willson glossed over it, the historical record shows that he returned

327
Austin, 49.
328
Ibid..
329
“Music News and Notes: ‘Say It With Jazz.’ Plans of Musicians. Music in the Movies,” New
York Times, 5 June, 1921.
330
Andrea Olmstead, Juilliard: A History (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press,
1999), 55.
331
Ted Lewis, who had a long career as a bandleader and entertainer, was one of the first white
northern imitators of New Orleans style jazz.
107

to his hometown for the summer of 1920 and played in the Mason City municipal band. The
move proved to be lucky because Frank Simon, a cornet soloist with the Sousa Band, had been
hired to play with the municipal band that summer. There Simon encountered Willson and
recommended him for the Sousa Band. Willson was hired as a section flautist and sometime
soloist and remained with the band through the 1923–24 season. The band’s touring schedule
effectively ended his studies at the IMA, where, if he stayed, he might have studied composition
and conducting more methodically and earned a diploma.
His time with the band had a lasting impact on Willson, not only instilling in him a love
of marches but also providing him an important mentor, Sousa. Much like Willson, Sousa did not
have the luxury of extended formal training because he began working as a musician at a young
age. Although Sousa did receive composition lessons, he largely learned on the job as a theater
violinist and conductor, often composing and arranging the music too. Willson took lessons and
classes, but he could only afford them because of the money he earned playing gigs around the
city. Sousa largely learned through experiences just as Willson did during his time with the band.
For example, in his memoir, Willson says that he used to carry a pocket score of The Nutcracker
Suite to make an impression on his bandmates even though he did not know how to read it.
Sousa observed what was happening and started to give Willson tips about reading a score and
about orchestration.
332
Playing with the Sousa Band reinforced the eclecticism Willson had
already encountered. Concerts usually featured a variety of pieces: classical, patriotic, and
humorous, as well as the latest musical trends including ragtime and other popular styles.
333

Programming in this manner reflected Sousa’s intuition as a showman and also his musical

332
And There I Stood with my Piccolo, 35.
333
Ramon da Silva Moraes, "The Flutists of the John Philip Sousa's Band: A Study of the Flute
Section and Soloists," (DMA diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 2018), 17.
108

beliefs. For example, he believed that well-played music, regardless of the style, would impress
any audience, a sentiment that is echoed by Willson later.
334
Sousa thought that concerts should
be entertaining and have artistic value.
335
Although Sousa’s beliefs about ragtime and jazz
fluctuated over the years, by the 1920s he embraced them, even suggesting that symphony
orchestras should consider programming jazz.
336
He believed that many orchestras were not
financially solvent because they were to bound to European tradition.
337
Willson used very
similar rhetoric years later when he encountered similar circumstances.
In the off-seasons, Willson played in the orchestra of the Rialto Theatre, which also
proved to be an important formative experience. In fact, Willson found himself among pioneers
of motion picture music and exhibition. The Rialto was managed by famous theater impresario,
Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel, who a decade earlier pioneered lavish presentations of which the
movie itself was only a small part.
338
Silent movie palaces like the Rialto were the most
important centers for motion picture exhibition in the country and Hugo Riesenfeld, the music
director at the Rialto, Rivoli, and Criterion theaters, was among the most prominent. Scholar
Mary Simonson writes that he “was a powerful figure within the film industry” because his “film
programs, presentation practices, and theater initiatives…were…held up as the gold standard for
film presentation.”
339
In this time before complete and unique film scores became standard
practice, Riesenfeld was responsible for compiling music from existing sources and writing new

334
da Silva Moraes, 11.
335
Bryan Proksch, “Sousa’s Vacillating Views on Ragtime and Jazz,” Journal of Band Research
55, no. 2 (2020), 30.
336
Ibid., 41.
337
Ibid.
338
Rothafel or Rothapfel, went on to manage the Capitol and Roxy Theaters as well as Radio
City Music Hall and was also a pioneer in radio broadcasting.
339
Mary Simonson, “Visualizing Music in the Silent Era: The Collaborative Experiments of
Visual Symphony Productions,” Journal of the Society for American Music 12, no. 1 (2018), 15.
109

music, when necessary, for every film exhibited in the three theaters. These compiled scores
frequently were used when the films were shown at other movie palaces around the country.
Film presentations at the Rialto and other deluxe theaters also included accompanying programs
that could feature dance, dramatic scenes, vocal selections, overtures, and concertos. In 1917,
Carl Van Vechten touted the quality of the music heard at these large theaters:
The accompaniment to the pictures is scarcely as yet a matter for congratulation, but the
accompaniment is only a small part of the duty of an orchestra in a theater devoted to
electrical dramas. Now a concert at a moving picture show is often a much more serious
matter than an old Theodore Thomas popular programme. Symphonies, concertos,
rhapsodies, arias, overtures (from those of Dichter und Bauer and Guillaume Tell to those
of Lohengrin and Tschaikowsky’s 1812) all figure in the scheme. At one of these theaters
more music is performed in one day than an assiduous concert-goer could hope to hear in
three in the concert halls. The duration of a symphony concert is about two hours with a
short intermission, that of a song recital about an hour and a half, but an orchestra, or an
organ, or a piano, furnishes a pretty continuous flow of melody in a moving picture
theater from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. In the large houses soloists are sandwiched in between
pictures; and sometimes these soloists are better performers than those one hears under
more holy auspices—frequently they are the same.
340

At the Rialto, Willson had the opportunity to witness film scoring practices firsthand that would
serve him well later in his career. Moreover, he absorbed a great deal from the entire musical
experience.
Several parts of that experience would affect his career and ideas about music. Once
again, Willson found himself in a setting in which several types of music existed alongside each
other. For example, as I mentioned in the previous chapter, Riesenfeld also programmed jazz.
Although Riesenfeld seemed to prefer the classics, he was open to programming popular music
and newly composed film music. The job also exposed Willson to the way new types of media
could be used to expand audiences for classical music. Riesenfeld felt that, “Added to the motion
picture, in pleasing surroundings and carefully chosen to fit the story, music and pictures blend

340
Carl Van Vechten, “Music and the Electric Theater,” Seven Arts 2, no 1 (May 1917), 99.
110

into one harmonious whole, and the audience scarcely realizes that it is getting as much good
music as it would hear at an ordinary concert.”
341
With Riesenfeld, then, it is also the manner in
which the music is introduced, something that Willson would later emphasize as well. In this
way, music could reach the “thousands whom neither propaganda for classical music nor music
school could.”
342
A few years later, when Riesenfeld had moved to Los Angeles, Willson turned
to him for help. Riesenfeld was instrumental in helping Willson with his earliest known
composition, Parade Fantastique, reviewing it and getting it published. Parade Fantastique was
the first in a series of lost compositions that Willson wrote as film music cues. According to
Valerie Austin’s research, these pieces were used in a number of early sound films.
343
Willson
also wrote the lyrics for Riesenfeld’s song, “My Cavalier,” which was the theme song for the
1928 silent film The Cavalier. Lastly, Willson met a number of other important figures through
his job at the Rialto: Abe Meyers, Riesenfeld’s assistant who later became a film music
supervisor in Los Angeles; Mortimer Wilson, a conductor and composer on Riesenfeld’s staff,
who, according to a few biographies, gave Willson composition lessons; and Victor Herbert,
whose career served as a model for Willson.
344

After these early jobs in New York City, Willson’s career expanded into more prestigious
quarters that put him in the middle of the changing musical landscape in the city and the country
as a whole. In 1924 he earned a job with the New York Philharmonic. The orchestra went
through a number of changes in the 1920s, first merging with the National Symphony Orchestra

341
“Music in the Picture Theatre,” Motion Picture News, November 22, 1919, 3729; through his
connection with Riesenfeld, Willson was also asked to record music with Lee de Forest for the
sound-on-film technology he was developing.
342
Ibid.
343
Austin, 122.
344
Mortimer Wilson is best known for composing an early complete and exclusively dedicated
film score, the score for the silent film The Thief of Bagdad (1924); Willson met Herbert when
he served as a guest conductor at the Rialto.
111

in 1921 and then with the New York Symphony Society in 1928. The new iteration of the
Philharmonic ended an era of competition and variety among orchestras in the city, consolidating
financial and musical resources into a single cultural force. Thus, Willson was witness to historic
cultural trends, including the shrinking diversity of orchestral music in New York. Willson left
the orchestra in April 1929. In a dramatic presentation of Willson’s And There I Stood on the
Hallmark Playhouse radio program, Willson says that he had been placed on probation, but he
does not explain why.
345
Although a number of musicians lost their jobs because of the merger,
Willson remained for the time being. His departure was announced later along with that of
several others in the New York Herald Tribune on June 23, 1929. The article focuses on new
members who will join the orchestra when the new season begins in the fall.
346
Since most of
those leaving were either retiring or moving on to bigger musical ventures, I suspect that these
were voluntary departures. The article states that Willson “plans to compose and conduct,”
things that he had already begun doing the year prior.
347

Willson was also a frequent performer with the New York Chamber Music Society and
other similar organizations. Although this is already known, putting together existing
scholarship, it is possible to pinpoint Willson’s activities in greater detail. Lisa Kozenko
documents a concert Willson played with the NYCMS in 1927 and also includes him as a
member of the society through 1929.
348
Willson played in other concerts too, according to his
memoir And There I Stood with my Piccolo. In 1926, for example, he performed a recital with

345
Hallmark Playhouse, 3/10/1949
346
“Ten Newcomers In Philharmonic For Next Season: Seven of Them Will…”
New York Herald Tribune, 23 June 1929, p. F7
347
Ibid.
348
Lisa A. Kozenko, “The New York Chamber Music Society, 1915-1937: A Contribution to
Wind Chamber Music and a Reflection of Concert Life in New York City in the Early 20th
Century,” PhD diss., The City University of New York, 2013, 106 and 178; the concert featured
Paul Hindemith’s Kleine Kammermusik op. 24, no. 2 (1923).
112

the modern dancer Angna Enters.
349
Willson also mentions concerts of modern music on Sunday
nights at Aeolian Hall between 1924 and 1929 and, specifically, a piece he calls “The Rat and
Death.”
350
This title must refer to “Le Rat et la Mort,” a scene from Arthur Honegger’s chamber
ballet Le Dit de Jeux du Monde (1918). Willson might have performed this in a League of
Composers concert on November 30, 1924.
351
Both the League of Composers and the
International Composers’ Guild used Aeolian Hall on Sunday nights during this time period.
This was not Willson’s only Sunday night performance; he also performed in an ICG concert on
January 24, 1926 with African-American singer Florence Mills (1896–1927), Alfredo Casella
(1883–1947), and Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936), among others.
352
This particular concert
featured premieres of works by Eugene Goossens (1893–1962), Carl Ruggles (1876–1971), and
William Grant Still (1895–1978), heady company for a 23-year-old from Iowa. Willson probably
performed in other concerts presented by these two composers’ groups even though he is not
listed by name. Some programs state simply “members of the New York Philharmonic” or “New
York Philharmonic-Symphony Society” (after the 1928 merger).
353

Despite the opportunities these concerts presented, the music made a strong negative
impression on Willson. In his memoir he writes:
A “modern” trend raised its ugly, cacophonous schnozola along about this time and
nurtured a considerable number of noisy neurotics who were particularly active in
chamber music… Certain of those chamber-music concerts from’24 to ’29 would curl

349
See And There I Stood with my Piccolo, 109–113 and Olin Downes, “Music,” New York
Times 10 May 1926, 18.
350
And There I Stood, 89; Willson simplified his recollection because Aeolian Hall closed in
1927, and not all of the concerts prior to that were at that venue.
351
See David Metzer, “The League of Composers: The Initial Years,” American Music 15, no. 1
(Spring, 1997), 61; the program for this concert only lists two other scenes from Honegger’s
ballet, not the scene in question, but I can find no other performance of Le Dit de Jeux du Monde
in New York during this time.
352
R. Allen Lott, “‘New Music for New Ears’: The International Composers’ Guild,” Journal of
the American Musicological Society 36, no. 2 (Summer, 1983), 286.
353
Metzer, 64.
113

your hair, curdle your blood, and convince you, once and for all, that music with no
melody and no beauty of harmony is just ugly, smart-alecky, contrived noise that should
have no place in our solar system at all, let alone in posterity’s affectionate bosom. And I
hope the oblivion that has swallowed up the nerve-racking, junky, mathematical monkey
business we had to perform in those days will forever remind some of the great
composers who were guilty of that garbage never to confuse trigonometric orgasms with
music again.
354

This negative impression must have pushed Willson even further away from atonality and
chromaticism and towards his preference for melody. Notably, his characterization of these
works echoes pre-war rhetoric of the Seven Arts. The Seven Arts writers were concerned that new
music was too intellectual and obsessed with technique and procedure to have any vital
connection to the American spirit. In his article “Man and Music,” Ernest Bloch writes,
Only that art can live which is an active manifestation of the life of the people. It must be
a necessary, an essential portion of that life, and not a luxury. It must have roots deep
within the soil that brings it forth. Needless to say, it cannot be the direct output of
crowds; but, however indirectly, they must have contributed to its substance.
355

Similarly, Willson describes new music in intellectual terms: mathematical and trigonometric,
and for him, the vital connection is missing more specifically because of the absence of melody.
Although he does not mention melody, Bloch uses similar terms to criticize composers, writing
that “‘serious’ composers persist in their obsession with technique and procedure… They
laboriously create their arbitrary and brain-begotten works, while the emotional element– the
soul of art– is lost in the passion for mechanical perfection.”
356
Willson also implies that these
“smart-alecky” and “contrived” works are insincere and inaccessible, contrary to his civic-
mindedness. Nevertheless, Willson is not dismissive of all new music. He praises “the Respighi
and Stravinsky and Gershwin miracles wrought in those same years.”
357

354
And There I Stood, 89–90.
355
Ernest Bloch, “Man and Music,” The Seven Arts 1, no. 5 (March 1917), 495.
356
Bloch, 494.
357
And There I Stood, 90.
114

Just as he had done with film music, Willson encountered other uses of technology
during his Philharmonic days. As a member of the group, he participated in the inaugural
broadcast of the NBC radio network on November 12, 1926. The following year, his work in
radio continued. Although he never mentions it in any recollection, Willson was hired as a
member of CBS’s first radio orchestra in 1927 under the direction of Howard Barlow.
358
Then,
in 1929, he joined the Sousa Band for a series of radio broadcasts. Willson also made at least one
recording during this time. He was a featured soloist on a 1927 recording of the opera singer
Maria Kurenko.
359
These encounters with technology would play an important role preparing
him for his career on the West coast.
In the next few decades, Willson pursued the same career avenues he did in New York-
film, radio, symphonic music- but in more ambitious ways. He also captured the eclecticism and
optimism of the 20s and brought it forward. Willson was first hired by Adolph Linden of Seattle
as a conductor for Linden’s radio station KJR and his newly formed network, the American
Broadcasting Company, not to be confused with the ABC network of today.
360
Unfortunately for
Willson, the network declared bankruptcy in August 1929. It turned out that Linden had been
financing his radio network and other ventures through improper loans he gave himself as
president of Puget Sound Savings and Loan. He later served prison time on a grand larceny
conviction for these activities. Around the same time, Willson was also in Los Angeles writing

358
“Columbia System Ready to Go,” Radio Digest, September 1927, 5;
359
Discography of American Historical Recordings, s.v., “Columbia matrix W98325. Berceuse /
Maria Kurenko,” available from https://adp.library.ucsb.edu/
index.php/matrix/detail/2000144833/W98325-Berceuse; Internet; accessed 3 November 2021.
360
The exact timing of Willson’s hire is somewhat uncertain. Several biographies as well as his
own memoir give the year 1928, but Willson was still employed by the New York Philharmonic
until April 1929. Furthermore, KJR already employed Francesco Longo as conductor for its
classical music group. Willson was definitely employed by Linden to conduct an outdoor
summer concert series in 1929.
115

film music cues for the short-lived Tiffany-Stahl movie studio, whose music supervisor was his
friend from the Rialto Theatre, Abe Meyer. By the end of the year, he was in San Francisco
serving as a music director for the KFRC radio station.
From 1929 to the early 1950s, Willson devoted the majority of his time to the medium of
radio. Charting his involvement in specific radio programs and networks is sometimes confusing.
Early radio programming changed frequently: program names changed, personnel changed,
programs changed from one network to another, and station network affiliation changed. There
were special one-time programs and summer replacement programs with the same sponsors but
different names. Bill Oates, in his book Meredith Willson: America’s Music Man, extensively
documents Willson’s radio appearances, but even this is not comprehensive. Furthermore,
Willson’s early programs were either never recorded, or, if they were, the aluminum
transcription disks have been lost, perhaps recycled for the war effort during World War II.
Therefore, little is known about their content except what can be gathered from trade journals
and personal recollections.
In his first important job at KFRC in San Francisco, Willson introduced a number of
programs that reflect the influence of his early mentors. KFRC was part of a small network
owned by Don Lee, who earned his wealth as the West coast distributor of Cadillac automobiles.
Lee’s network became affiliated with CBS but retained significant control over programming
and originated many of its own programs, some of which were broadcast nationally. At this time,
San Francisco, not Los Angeles, was the major West coast radio hub. Willson was the music
director for some of these, including its most popular program Blue Monday Jamboree, a two-
hour weekly variety show. Willson likely had little control over the content of Jamboree, but he
led some other strictly music programs, including Chiffon Jazz in 1929, a program that used
116

primarily strings and woodwinds in arrangements of popular dance music.
361
His Chiffon Swing
album from 1942, which I will discuss later, gives an indication of how the arrangements may
have sounded. In 1932, he introduced two additional programs Waltz Time, a half-hour program
featuring just waltzes, and Concert in Rhythm, a program promoting popular dance music simply
for listening.
362
There are no further accounts of these programs, but it is easy to see their
connection to the philosophies espoused by both Sousa and Riesenfeld, especially as it relates to
their embrace of popular music and Sousa’s idea of elevating it by impressing audiences with the
quality of the performance. Willson also worked on a few programs at NBC affiliates KPO and
KGO during this time, including Carefree Carnival, a variety show broadcast from Marine’s
Memorial Theatre in front of a live audience.
Around 1935, Willson began a complete transition to NBC and its affiliates in San
Francisco. CBS had purchased its own station in Los Angeles and the contract with the Don Lee
network expired in 1936, allowing CBS to produce its own content on the West Coast rather than
rely on Lee. Although the Lee network then affiliated with the Mutual Broadcasting System, its
network hook-up was in Los Angeles rather than San Francisco. Most original programming at
the station gradually transitioned to Los Angeles causing the collapse of programs originating
from KFRC. Many of the station’s employees, including Willson, left, either to work in Los
Angeles or work for NBC, which still used San Francisco as its major radio hub. Willson went to
work at the NBC affiliates KPO and KGO. The exact timing of his transition from one network
to the other is unknown, but it was probably 1935 when production of Jamboree was moved to
Los Angeles. By that time, he was hosting his own music program The Meredith Willson
Orchestra on NBC. In December, he was the conductor for NBC’s special program celebrating

361
Skipper, 70.
362
Ibid.
117

its new broadcasting studio in Los Angeles.
363
In 1936 Willson was named music director for
NBC West coast and moved to Los Angeles himself the following year.
Willson’s radio work in Los Angeles is marked by his foray into becoming an on-air
personality. This began in earnest with his work on the Good News program and continued with
the summer replace programs he hosted as well as the regular season programs he hosted
beginning in 1946.
364
Good News began during the 1937–38 season in the place of the Maxwell
House Show Boat, which had originated from New York City.
365
The sponsor, General Mills,
remained the same, and since the show was now broadcast from Los Angeles, they formed a
producing partnership with MGM to feature its in-house actors and promote its films. Because
production costs were so high, General Mills ended the partnership after a year, and the show
continued in various iterations through 1942.
366

The Good News of 1939 broadcast on May 11, 1939 is a good example of the folksy radio
persona Willson began to develop. The scene is introduced by guest Ed Sullivan, who at the time
was a newspaper columnist and not yet a famed television host. Willson, cast member Frank
Morgan, as conductor Willem van Hoogstraten, and another unknown cast member play out his
supposed first day at the New York Philharmonic.
367
When Willson first arrives to rehearsal, he

363
This studio, located at 5515 Melrose Avenue, was formerly home to Consolidated Film
Industries, a motion picture developing company; the building still stands today; in 1938, NBC
opened a larger radio broadcast complex at the northeast corner of Hollywood Boulevard and
Vine Street, which was demolished in the 1960s.
364
Radio programs usually ran from the fall through the following spring with their featured
stars. During the summer months, the time slots were held by other on-air talent but often with
the same sponsors.
365
In And There I Stood, Willson says that he moved to Los Angeles for the Maxwell House
Show Boat from Hollywood, see page 147; these were special programs under the same name,
separate but related to the weekly program that originated in New York.
366
For the 1941 season, the program was reduced to a half-hour and renamed Maxwell House
Coffee Time.
367
Actor Frank Morgan is best known for his role as the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
118

asks where to sit; the orchestra manager is surprised that he does not know. Willson says, “I’ve
never even heard a symphony, but I’ll catch on.” Van Hoogstraten then announces that the
orchestra will rehearse Tchaikovsky’s Sixth and asks, “You all know it?” to which Willson
replies, “No, Sir.” After audible disapproval from the orchestra, van Hoogstraten sarcastically
tells him, “Mr. Willson, I hope you enjoy it.” Sullivan then recounts that Willson plays the part
flawlessly and is congratulated by the conductor after the concert. These kinds of anecdotes,
where Willson appears to be uninformed but then impresses with his ability, abound in the
numerous stories about his life. It has created a false impression that he actually was clueless
even when all of the evidence is contradictory. Willson certainly knew of Tchaikovsky and had
plenty of experience playing in orchestras both professionally and at the IMA.
Like many Willson biographical anecdotes, the story has some truth but with added
exaggerations. Sullivan says that Willson was eighteen when, in fact, he was twenty-two.
Sullivan also says that Willson was “first flute.” While he likely played the first flute part, he
was not the first chair flautist of the philharmonic. Versions of the story are recounted several
times by Willson. In And There I Stood with my Piccolo, the story is the same but the piece is
instead Beethoven’s Overture to Leonore.
368
Later in the book, he hears a similar story from the
conductor Albert Coates but with different details- the orchestra, conductor, and instrument
differ and the piece is once again Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony.
369
Willson corrects Coates
that it had been, in fact, him and that the piece was the Overture to Leonore. According to the
New York Herald Tribune, the newly hired Willson did fill in for first flautist John Amans, who
was stricken with appendicitis a few days before performances were set to begin at Lewisohn

368
And There I Stood, 61.
369
Ibid. 164–165.
119

Stadium in July 1924.
370
The Overture to Leonore was not on the first concert July 3, but it did
open the program two days later on July 5.
371
Interestingly, Coates conducted some New York
Philharmonic stadium concerts beginning in 1928, putting him in a position to hear the story.
372

This radio episode also features a Willson composition introduced with dubious information,
Parade Fantastique, which is well documented, even if no score survives. Sullivan says that the
piece was performed by the New York Philharmonic three years later, 1927. There is no record
that Willson had any works performed in 1927. He did have a work performed at Lewisohn
Stadium on July 23, 1929 with van Hoogstraten conducting. The title of the piece listed in the
program simply reads, “March,” and it is certainly possible it was, in fact, Parade Fantastique.
The late 30s and early 40s was also Willson’s most prolific time for composition.
Between 1936 and 41, he composed two symphonies, an orchestral piece for radio, two film
scores, and his first hit song. His first success expanding upon his work in classical music came
when he conducted the premiere of his Symphony no. 1 in F Minor in 1936 with the San
Francisco Symphony. He was touted as the youngest person ever to conduct the orchestra– at
thirty-three. A programmatic work, the four-movement symphony paid homage to the history
and culture of San Francisco. Similar to the McIntyre Suite, the first symphony includes many
programmatic elements, this time referring to the 1906 earthquake and its aftermath. In her
analysis of the symphony, Valerie Austin concludes that, “The application of musical elements
prompt thoughts of a film score, and that is how the work presents to an audience.”
373
This

370
“Music Notes,” The New York Herald, New York Tribune, 13 July 1924, p. E18.
371
See New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives, “Concert program, 5 Jul 1924,
Program ID 13008,” available from https://archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/d0ceeaf5-bab6-
4332-8174-0a796a248f38-0.1; Internet; accessed 13 January 2022.
372
It does not appear that Willson ever played under Coates with the philharmonic, but it is
possible; Willson spent the summer of 1928 in Seattle, and Coates did not conduct in 1929.
373
Austin, 194–195.
120

summation is not surprising given his background, and it also presages his work just a few years
later. According to Willson, Charlie Chaplin had heard the symphony and wanted to hire its
composer to work on his next film, The Great Dictator (1940). Willson co-wrote the score with
Chaplin. The same year, Willson’s Symphony no. 2 in E Minor: The Missions of California, was
premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. As the title suggests, Willson’s second symphony is
even more outwardly programmatic than his first. It too has similarities with the McIntyre Suite
in that it uses harmonies borrowed from popular music as well as modernist harmonic techniques
like bitonality.
374
Late in 1940, Willson was inspired by the story of the HMS Jervis Bay, and he
composed a piece to accompany “The Jervis Bay Goes Down,” a poem by the author and
screenwriter Gene Fowler. In November, the ship, a former ocean liner outfitted with guns to
escort supply convoys across the Atlantic, encountered the German warship Admiral Scheer on
its way to England. Completely outmatched, the captain ordered the Jervis Bay to engage the
German vessel to allow the rest of the convoy to scatter, heroically commanding the ship until it
was sunk. The Willson composition was given its premiere on the radio in February 1941, with
Ronald Coleman as narrator, during a joint network broadcast to raise money for the Greek war
effort.
375
Around the same time, Willson scored the film The Little Foxes (1941), based on
Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play and wrote the song “You and I.” The song became a hit when Bing
Crosby recorded it the same year.
376

Willson’s work on the Greek war relief program as well as other special programs
provided a natural transition for when he joined the army and was appointed the music director
of the newly created Armed Forces Radio Service in 1942. Instead of airing over U.S. radio

374
Austin, 242.
375
The Greek army had recently pushed out an invading Italian force.
376
The opportunity to write a popular song might have come about because in 1941 radio
stations were boycotting music written by members of ASCAP and needed new material.
121

networks, these programs were recorded to disk, shipped overseas and broadcast for American
troops in combat. Programs such as Command Performance and Mail Call featured the top talent
in radio, film, and music on a regular basis. In addition to stars like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope,
Willson worked with the enlisted musicians, many of whom went on to greater success, most
famously, Les Paul. During this time, Willson’s output of patriotic songs increased as well. After
the war, he continued the practice of writing marches and anthems for patriotic and civic use. For
example, he wrote the Iowa Fight Song for the University of Iowa and “Chicken Fat” for John F.
Kennedy’s President’s Council on Physical Fitness.
Although Willson had already made several forays into the role of on-air talent, the bulk
of this work came after World War II, when he was either featured alongside top talent or on his
own regular-season programs. He left behind his role as music director for NBC, even though
some of his programs still aired on the network. In 1946, NBC revamped Maxwell House Coffee
Time by hiring George Burns and Gracie Allen, who in turn asked Willson to serve as their
music director. The same year, he had his own regular season program Sparkle Time on CBS,
sponsored by Canada Dry. After changing sponsors to Ford, the program continued as the Ford
Music Room or Meredith Willson’s Music Room through 1953. Willson also served as music
director for The Big Show, starring Tallulah Bankhead, between 1950 and 1952. The Big Show
attempted to bring listeners back to radio from television, but the extravagance of the show
proved to be too costly to continue it. Although Willson hosted a few other radio programs and
was also featured in television specials, he largely abandoned radio and television in the early
fifties to work on other endeavors: writing a novel, Who Did What to Fedelia? (1952), his second
memoir, Eggs I Have Laid (1955), and The Music Man as well as making guest conducting
appearances around the country.
122

A Different Evaluation
Although Willson never earned a college degree or received sustained training in conducting or
composition, he continuously built on his experience and, in the process, developed a
sophistication and musical awareness inclusive of the diversity of his work. For example,
Willson’s only formal training in conducting was perhaps some lessons with Henry Hadley, the
associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic at the time, but in California, Willson
developed a reputation for his precision and the way he could bring out the most from his
musicians. These are things he would have learned more from playing under some of the finest
conductors of his time, not to mention the tightly controlled time restraints of radio broadcasting,
than his lessons with Hadley. The same could be said of his compositional activities and writing
endeavors. His symphonies would not have come to fruition without the O. O. McIntyre Suite or
Jervis Bay, and The Music Man would not be the same if not for Who Did What to Fedalia?
Willson possessed the ability to synthesize what he had learned formally with what he absorbed
from his diverse musical experiences to achieve success and acclaim. Characterizations that paint
him as naïve and simple misread his optimism, kindness, and self-deprecating humor. As
someone with such a diverse skill set and without the musical pedigree of many of his peers,
Willson was, at times, self-conscious, and this made him a keen observer of the musical culture
around him.
As early as 1936, Willson’s observations began to form into an ideology or philosophy of
music, which he consistently pursued once formed.
377
His commentary on his time in New York,
gleaned from memoirs and interviews, suggests that his philosophy had already begun to

377
A 1936 article, purportedly from Radio Guide, is one of the earliest sources in which Willson
explicates his ideas about American music; “Real American Music,” San Francisco Symphony
Scrapbook, R10 A.4, Meredith Willson Papers; the format of the article matches that of Radio
Guide, but it does not appear in the issue referenced in a handwritten note.
123

develop. As I mentioned above, he generally grew to dislike modern dissonant music. He also
began to question some of the conventions of classical music, for example, why it was necessary
for symphonic conductors to gesticulate in such a dramatic manner during performances but not
rehearsals.
378
Willson’s eclectic work, from classical to popular and everything in between,
surely informed his ideas about music as well. His philosophy of music and its development is
the subject of the following section.

Willson’s Philosophy of Melody

Above all, Willson believed in the importance of melody because it was a universal element of
music. A good melody was beautiful and artful no matter the genre or musical style from which
it originated. For Willson, the converse was also true; a good melody could be adapted for any
style and still be good. Compositionally, Willson’s most mature concept of melody can be found
in his musicals, which feature both counterpoint melodies and melodies presented in more than
one style. He also used melody as a tool for advancing his personal musical agenda, using the
universality of melody to dispel notions that a distinction existed between classical and popular
music. He also believed that melodies derived from American popular music would be the
foundation of a distinctly American musical culture rooted in democratic values. Willson did not
fully articulate this philosophy until later in his career. Still, two threads can be found woven
through most of his work from the beginning: an interest in and fascination with melody and a
lack of concern about the attitudes and conventions of contemporary classical music.
Willson exhibited a fascination with melody from the very beginning of his forays into
music, and it was primarily evident in his experience with adapting and borrowing melodies. He

378
Jack Long, “Long-Hair Music Gets a Haircut,” The American Magazine, July 1953, 105.
124

mentions, for example, playing mandolin in a group with his friend on ukulele and his brother on
banjo. He says, “We featured all the latest ragtime,” but also mentions adapting Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony too.
379
It was also part of his early professional experiences in New York City
as well. As I mentioned in chapter one, Hugo Riesenfeld featured performances of “Classic Jazz”
at the Rialto Theatre, which involved playing jazz compositions based on works of classical
composers. Sousa was known for featuring arrangements of opera and operetta melodies on his
concerts, not to mention the fact that many of his own marches featured layers of
countermelodies. These practices tied directly into Willson’s own work as an arranger and
composer.
Willson’s compositional uses of melody mostly fall into two categories: adapting an
existing melody to a different style and using two melodies in counterpoint. These two practices
are particularly important because they came to be integral components in The Music Man.
Perhaps his most touted stylistic adaptation was something he called “chiffon music.” In an
episode of Maxwell House Coffee Time in 1945, he describes the style using musical
vocalizations to a very confused Gracie Allen. “Well, it’s sort of a soft eight-beat, ya know,
boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick, boom-chick…while the violins go [sings a slow melody]
and the woodwinds go de-da-li-da dee… That’s chiffon.”
380
In plain terms, chiffon style sets
melodies over a double-time accompaniment, what Willson describes as eight-beat. Generally,
this is provided by the low strings and rhythm section, minus drums, with sixteenth-note
interjections from the woodwinds. The melody is supplied by the high strings and sometimes

379
Great American Songbook Foundation Digital Archives, “Ford Showroom 9/17/47, p. 3,”
available from https://songbook.historyit.com; Internet; accessed 17 December 2021.
380
Old Time Radio Downloads, “Maxwell House Coffee Time, 9/20/45,” available from
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/actors/meredith-willson; Internet: accessed 17
December 2021.
125

muted brass instruments. The absence of drums and full-throated brass gives chiffon style its
distinctive flavor. More notably, the double-time accompaniment allows for a smooth transition
into a swing feel. The bass line, playing on all four beats, gives the impression of a walking bass,
providing a back drop for swing syncopation. The upbeats (or chicks) sometimes remain, which
creates subtle two-against-three cross rhythms, but the sixteenth-note interjections either drop out
or provide punctuation only at the ends of phrases. This is likely why Willson sometimes called
it chiffon jazz. The best examples can be found on Willson’s album Chiffon Swing (1942). In
“The Sunshine of Your Smile” by Lilian Ray and Leonard Cooke, Willson takes a song that had
been sung as a ballad by the likes of famed Irish tenor John McCormack and incorporates his fast
accompaniment. The melody remains at the ballad tempo, thus creating the double-time feel.
[Example?] The other chiffon-style songs on the album are treated in much the same way,
including other popular songs and Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Mirlitons” and Frédéric
Chopin’s “Minute Waltz,” Valse in D Flat Major, Op. 64, No. 1.
This was not the only time Willson adapted classical music to popular styles. In 1942, he
featured a song called “And Still the Volga Flows” on his Johnson Wax radio program. Willson
set melodies from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18, to lyrics of
his own creation. While he was well aware that other songwriters had done this before, he may
have been inspired by Edwin Lester, founder and long-time director of the Los Angeles Civic
Light Opera.
381
Lester produced a number of operettas from Robert Wright and George Forrest,
who fashioned classical music into songs. Their most famous work, Kismet (1953), which used
the music of Alexander Borodin, became a hit on Broadway. Willson was well aware of their

381
Lester would later produce Willson’s fourth musical 1491, but their collaboration became
highly strained because of creative disagreements.
126

work. In 1947, he featured a singer on his Ford Showroom program who performed music from
one of their other hits, Song of Norway (1944), which used the music of Edvard Grieg.
Willson made adaptations in the reverse direction, treating popular songs as classical or
concert works. In Ford Showroom episodes from 1947, Willson frequently had his orchestrator,
Earl Lawrence, create what he called “concert versions” of songs. On the June 18 episode, for
example, Willson’s orchestra accompanied cast member Ben Gage singing Cole Porter’s “I’ve
Got You Under My Skin.” The orchestra then played a piano concerto version of the song
featuring the show’s piano soloist Paulena Carter. This became a regular feature of his show that
year. Willson seems to have done this at least occasionally prior to this. In 1946, an episode of
his summer replacement program of Maxwell House Coffee Time featured a concert version of
“Surrey with the Fringe On Top” from Oklahoma! (1943). This arrangement is notable because it
features a perfectly executed fugue in the middle. Willson’s numerous adaptations are indicative
of his belief in the interchangeability of good melodies, which I will discuss in greater detail
later. These examples also point to the evolution of his thinking about music that manifested
itself in the 1950s.
Willson manipulated melodies in other ways, most notably by presenting two melodies in
counterpoint with one another. In fact, the “Surrey” example above also falls into this category.
In all likelihood, this practice originates from his time with the Sousa Band. Willson loved
marches, often featuring them on his radio programs. Sousa marches, of course, feature an
abundance of melodies and countermelodies. The first time Willson used counterpoint melodies
was probably in his O. O. McIntyre Suite. As I described in my earlier analysis, the finale of
movement four presents the two primary themes from the previous movement in counterpoint.
127

He also liked to write counterpoint melodies to existing tunes. Willson’s “Calico Square
Dance” from the album Encores! Melodies for Orchestra Composed by Meredith Willson
(1952?), features a melody he wrote to fit with the tune “Old Joe Clark.” In the album’s liner
notes Willson claims that the piece is in two keys at once, which likely refers to the fact that the
first part of “Old Joe Clark” implies Aeolian mode (Example 21).
382

Example 21. “Old Joe Clark” from “Calico Square Dance”

The melody, in its complete binary form, is actually Mixolydian, but Willson only uses the first
part. In “Calico Square Dance,” which clearly draws influence from Copeland’s “Hoe Down”
from Rodeo, Willson uses “Old Joe Clark” almost as a cantus firmus. Rather than a distinctive
melody in its own right, Willson’s sound more like an added voice. After a brief introduction,
“Joe Clark” is presented in quarter notes, as opposed to its usual notated version in eighth notes.
This is followed by Willson’s fast-paced fiddle melody (Example 22).

Example 22. "Old Joe Clark" with Willson's Fiddle Melody from "Calico Square Dance

382
Meredith Willson, liner notes for Encore!
128

These two melodies are never quite presented in counterpoint even though they do fit together.
Instead, the next section consists of measures five through eight of “Joe Clark” in augmentation-
the quarter notes now are half notes- along with a countermelody derived from Willson’s first
melody. Thus “Joe Clark” simply acts as a base upon which Willson builds quick fiddling runs
and double stops. Other pieces from Willson’s album warrant discussion as well.
Willson’s “Forth and Back,” also from Encores! and other compositional endeavors
explore melody in interesting and unusual ways. In “Forth and Back,” Willson uses four motives
and their exact melodic and rhythmic retrogrades to form the melodies that make up nearly the
entire piece- except for a brief interlude (Example 23).

Example 23. Melodic Motives from “Forth and Back”

In the first episode of his 1942 summer replacement show, The Johnson Wax Program, he
engages in a tongue-in-cheek skit with his co-host John Nesbitt that ends with a humorous
musical arrangement. Willson is introducing the sections of the orchestra, with each section
playing a different classical melody, when he is interrupted by Nesbitt:
“Oh no Meredith. Something's wrong with it. It's too highbrow.”
Willson responds, “Nothing of the kind. We'll play all of them [the classical melodies] in
less than two minutes, and just to keep from being, as you say, highbrow, we'll play, at
the same time, ‘Somebody Stole My Gal.’”
383

383
Old Time Radio Catalog, “Johnson Wax Program, 6/30/42,” available from
https://www.otrcat.com/p/willson-nesbitt-summer-show; Internet; accessed 23 November 2021.
129

Willson’s novelty arrangement uses melodic motives from Beethoven’s Symphony No.5 in C
Minor (1808), Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat Major (1849) and Hungarian
Rhapsody No. 2 (1847), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” from The Tale of
Tsar Saltan (1831), Niccolò Paganini’s Moto Perpetuo, Op. 11 (1835/1851), one of Rudolphe
Kreutzer’s 42 Études ou Caprices (1796), Charles Gounod’s “Choeur des soldats” from Faust
and “Galop” from Orphée aux enfers (1858), Gioachino Rossini’s Overture to Guillaume Tell
(1829), Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever (1896), Edwin Bagley’s National Emblem (1902), the
song “Silver Threads Among the Gold” by Eben E. Rexford and H. P. Danks, and perhaps
others. This example in particular shows how Willson engaged with the idea of highbrow and
lowbrow both conversationally and musically, for the music itself was also a tool to illustrate his
own philosophy.
The Folk Songs of Tomorrow: American Melodies
Willson’s discussion of music focused on melody because it was the key to bringing together
popular and classical music and also because songs, he believed, would become the basis for a
distinct American musical school or style independent from Europe. This was not unlike other
advocates of a national style such as Dvořák, Henry F. Gilbert (1868–1928), and Arthur Farwell
(1872–1952) except that Willson’s foundational repertoire also included popular songs of the
past and present. He frequently called them the “folk songs of tomorrow.” Willson explains:
We take these songs from everywhere in America and like to think some of them will
become the folk songs of tomorrow. Oh, we well remember that even portions of the
great symphonies are taken from little country jigs that are plain and honest as a pair of
overalls– or overhalls as we say back home– which is why we think that American
popular music, if played simply, may one day become the folk music of our
grandchildren.
384

384
Old Time Radio Catalog, “Johnson Wax Program, 7/28/42,” available from
https://www.otrcat.com/p/willson-nesbitt-summer-show; Internet; accessed 23 November 2021.
130

Like those mentioned above, he also envisioned himself as a collector of songs. Popular music
for Willson was also consistent with the democratic values he believed American music should
possess. In this, he echoed John Dewey and other like-minded intellectuals.
Willson employed several strategies for framing American popular songs as important to
a national style. In his early radio programs, such as the Johnson Wax Program, he featured
several regular segments that focused on American songs. In the summer of 1942, he introduced
a weekly segment called “Lost Songs,” which framed him as a kind of researcher or collector
mining American popular song for the very best melodies. The featured songs were generally
unpublished, cut from musicals or movies, or were once well-known but had fallen into
obscurity. For example, the first occurrence of the segment featured “A Handful of Stars,” a song
that Ted Shapiro had written for a Sophie Tucker movie but was cut.
385
Another time he
introduces the song “A Love Like Ours” by the married couple Alberta Nichols and Mann
Holiner that he had encountered while visiting them.
386
The couple had written it together just
for themselves, but Willson convinced them to allow the public to hear it.
387
These 1942
programs also featured another segment called “America Sings,” which centered around a
medley of popularly-known songs. The title of the segmented referred to the fact that they were
songs listeners would know and be able to sing. In the episode airing July 7, Willson labeled the
songs as “melodies we danced to in night clubs, or sang in rumble seats, or even whistled in the
bathroom.”
388
Such medleys became a regular occurrence on Willson’s radio programs until at
least 1947. Most featured a wide variety of songs. The medley from August 13, for example,

385
“Johnson Wax Program, 6/30/42”
386
“Johnson Wax Program, 7/28/42”
387
Ibid.
388
Old Time Radio Catalog, “Johnson Wax Program, 7/7/42,” available from
https://www.otrcat.com/p/willson-nesbitt-summer-show; Internet; accessed 23 November 2021.
131

included The Washington Post (1889) by Sousa, “Let the Rest of the World Go By” (1919) by
Earnest R. Ball and J. Keirn Brennan, “Rustic Dance,” “Peg O’ My Heart” (1913) by Alfred
Bryan and Fred Fisher, and “When You and I Were Sweet Sixteen” (1898) by James
Thornton.
389
Other times, the medley would have a theme, for example, collegiate songs.
390

Although Willson never said it himself, the variety of melodies was clearly intended to illustrate
the breadth of the American popular repertoire.
Most notably, in 1939 Willson commissioned a series of short American concert works
that he featured either on his Concert Hall program or on Good News of 1940.
391
Willson
observed that no American compositions ever figured into lists of favorite classical melodies.
392

In an attempt to rectify the situation, he commissioned ten composers to write short concert
works, each reflecting a European form or style. The group of composers was unusually diverse
for the time, including an African American, Duke Ellington, and a woman, Dana Suesse. These
compositions were later recorded and released on record as Modern American Music (1941). The
full list of selections includes: “American Waltz” by Peter DeRose, “American Arabesque,” by
Vernon Duke, “American Barcarolle,” by Harry Warren, “American Lullaby” by Duke
Ellington, “American Humoresque” by Sigmund Romberg, “American Caprice” by Morton
Gould, “American Minuet” by Harold Arlen, “American Nocturne” by Dana Suesse, March for
Americans” by Ferde Grofé, and “American Serenade” by Louis Alter.

389
Great American Songbook Digital Archives, “Ford Showroom, 8/14/47,” available from
https://songbook.historyit.com; Internet; accessed 17 December 2021; the identity of “Rustic
Dance” and its author are unknown as it is a common title.
390
Old Time Radio Downloads, “Maxwell House Coffee Time, 5/8/46,” available from
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/actors/meredith-willson; Internet: accessed 17
December 2021.
391
The 1939 article cited in the following footnote states that they will be featured on Concert
Hall, while other sources state they premiered on Good News.
392
“Ten U.S. Composers Will Get Commissions,” The New York Herald Tribune, 20 August
1939.
132

Willson made his own contributions to American melody with a number of patriotic and
civic songs. This appears to have started about the time the United States entered World War II.
One of the first was a song called, “Remember Hawaii.” He then wrote songs paying tribute to
various governmental and military organizations, including “My Ten Ton Baby and Me” for the
Truck Conservation Corps and “Hit the Leather” for the U. S. Army Cavalry.
393
He also wrote
“Iowa,” a fight song for the University of Iowa and later, the song “Chicken Fat” for John F.
Kennedy’s Presidential fitness campaign. After Kennedy’s assassination, he wrote a piece for
speaker and chorus called Ask Not, which features lines from Kennedy’s inaugural address.
Some of these, at least, were unsolicited commissions, and it appears that Willson simply felt it
to be a patriotic duty, especially in his role as music director of the Armed Forces Radio Service.
Of course, Willson wrote a number of hit popular songs as well, several of which were recorded
by Bing Crosby and other crooners.
Songs were not the only thing that could help define an American school or style;
Willson also discussed rhythm on occasion. In particular, he discussed what he called an
American parade rhythm (Example 24). The source of this rhythm is unclear, but it is something
he may have learned during his time with the Sousa Band. On a few episodes from 1947,
Willson introduces the rhythm and then plays medleys of songs whose melodies feature it.
394

Example 24. American Parade Rhythm

393
The Truck Conservation Corps was part of the U. S. Office of Defense Transportation, a
governmental organization created to supplement domestic transportation infrastructure during
World War II.
394
This same rhythm, played by the drums, appears in The Music Man in several places.
133

Willson’s endeavors in melody and American song, while multifaceted, ultimately took
their inspiration from the desire to manifest democratic values in American music. By illustrating
the interchangeability of melodies from one style and genre to another, Willson implied a kind of
equality between classical and popular music, but he also showed that they are both part of a
whole American musical culture. This was very much aligned with the idea of American
pluralism– that many distinct and unique parts could make up a collective whole. Willson also
tried to do this by featuring a wide variety of popular songs and musical guests. In addition to
singers of both opera and popular song, he also featured, for example, Josef Marais and Miranda,
a duo that sang traditional South African folk ballads, and blues singer and pianist Nellie
Lutcher. Willson’s “America Sings” segments suggested that Americans had a common tradition
but also that this popular song canon took a sort of collective effort to create. For most of the
intellectuals and musicians I have discussed already, democracy was the one thing that
differentiated the United States from Europe. Because the U.S. was the first modern country to
be founded on the principle of democracy, as opposed to other countries who arrived at it
gradually, its values were thought to be part of the country’s core character. For those musicians
wishing to manifest democratic values in music, there was no clear direction, and it was difficult
to do in an environment so much influenced by European tradition.

Classical Music and Democratic Values

In the late 1940s, Willson appeared to focus his efforts much more on classical music and how to
reconcile the ideology of high culture with democratic values. He probably did not think of it
that way himself, but the philosophy he came to espouse was very much aligned with equality
and individualism. Willson came to believe more strongly that classical music should be for
everyone on their own terms. It was true that many musical organizations such as symphony
134

orchestras had a mission to expand the audience for classical music, but Willson believed that the
rituals associated with attending a concert predetermined how a listener would react to the music
rather than eliciting a natural response. He believed that listeners should trust their own reactions
instead of relying upon experts– that no special skills or cultivation was necessary. Since
listening to music was more of a personal experience, Willson believed its ability to carry any
fixed meaning or provide any specific moral edification was subjective– that they were more
dependent on the individual rather than the content of the music.
Willson felt that many of the conventions surrounding classical music listening and
performance existed simply to create a sense of exclusivity and elitism for those who understood
them, even though the music itself could be understood by anyone. This is most evident in the
ways he encouraged his listeners not to be intimidated by classical music. In an episode from
1947, Willson says:
More people would enjoy more music if they weren’t frightened away with stuff like
allegro con brio e molto spirito ma non troppo per peacera [sic], which means “not too
fast.” Well, right now we’re going to settle at least one thing for you long-suffering
patient people– “counterpoint.” This high-class two dollar word simply means “a melody
that fits another melody.”
395

Willson goes on to illustrate counterpoint by having the orchestra play an example then tells his
listeners, “Next time somebody tries to scare you with a remark like ‘Don't you just love his
contrapuntal obligato,’ you just say ‘Ahh, your father's sideburns!’”
396
Here Willson seems to
single out the typical highbrow audience. He accuses musicians of participating in elitism too
saying, “You know, I think professional musicians who go around frightening folks with big

395
Great American Songbook Foundation Digital Archives, “Ford Showroom, 7/9/47, p. 2”
available from https://songbook.historyit.com; Internet; accessed 17 December 2021.
396
Ibid.
135

technical musical terms are downright bullies.”
397
In spite of this, Willson encourages his
listeners to be more amenable to classical music stating, “We just think that great music is more
fun to listen to if you develop a friendly attitude towards it…Sure, symphonic compositions are
longer than pop tunes. What's the matter with that? That’s no reason to be scared of ‘em.”
To engender a friendlier attitude, Willson began featuring both popular songs and
classical compositions in his radio programs beginning in 1946. This speaks to his belief in
equality, but it also shows that Willson was simply unconcerned with the predominant attitude
that the two should be kept separate. Along the same lines, Willson sometimes featured opera
arias sung in English. On July 2, for example, his guest Teresa Piper sang “One Fine Day,” Un
bel di, vedremo, from Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (1904).
398
On August 6, John Raitt
sang Largo al factorem from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia (1816).
399
Willson’s decision to
feature both popular and classical music was somewhat bold; he was one of only a few radio
personalities to do this.
400

Willson took the most significant and consequential step when he began showing his
listeners that the same melodic motives could be used in the composition of both a popular song
and a piece of classical music. It was an important step for Willson because it united his
philosophy of music– that classical and popular music were two sides of the same coin– with an
analogous musical practice. For his listeners, it was a way to conceptualize music without any
attachments to a highbrow idealogy, to– in effect– allow them to have their own experience with
classical music. Several of the episodes from 1947’s Ford Showroom feature discussions of

397
“Ford Showroom, 8/13/47, p. 4;” the Italicized words indicate handwritten words that were
added to the typed script.
398
“Ford Showroom, 7/2/47, p. 10.”
399
“Ford Showroom, 8/6/47, p. 6.”
400
Oscar Levant and Sigmund Spaeth also featured classical and popular music together on their
radio programs.
136

melodic motives as they relate to musical works. On the first episode, Willson discusses how he
used “Three Blind Mice,” the melodic motive mi-re-do, to write his song “You and I.”
401
In the
following episode he describes how the very same motive, except in the order mi-do-re, was
used in the composition of Georges Bizet’s Carrillon from L’Arlesienne Suite No. 1 (1872).
402

He explains that the purpose of using these melodic motives is to show, “how the great master
composers made wonderful music out of a couple simple scales or a handful of well worn
arpeggios.”
403
Willson does not make the full connection until the September 9 episode where he
shows that the motive sol1-do-re-mi is used in both Friedrich Smetana’s The Bartered Bride
(1866) and the popular song “Oh, I Wanna Go.”
404

Surprisingly, even though their underlying musical beliefs were starkly different from
each other, Adorno described a method of music education not unlike Willson’s, a fact that
complicates the idea of cultural hierarchy and of middlebrow more specifically:
The following method is suggested: Play or sing some well-known nursery rhyme such as
“London Bridge is Falling Down.” The children are able to follow the tune as a whole
and to memorize it very easily. It probably would never occur to them that it has a
“theme” as distinguished from the development. The next step is to analyze the tune and
show that it is developed out of one fundamental motif which is repeated, varied, and so
on, and show concretely how this is done. Then explain that a symphonic movement
follows fundamentally the same line, and that a symphonic theme basically plays no other
role than the motif does in the nursery rhyme…The pupils should be made to feel,
although in different terms, that a theme is a sort of “statement” which obtains its
meaning only within a functional unity and not as a thing in itself… In other words, the
analysis should lead to a dual postulate: that in listening to articulated music one ought to
be able to distinguish the parts, and to build out of them a unity by becoming aware of
their functional interrelationship.
405

401
“Ford Showroom, 6/18/47, p. 10”
402
“Ford Showroom, 6/25/47, p. 4”
403
“Ford Showroom, 7/23/47, p. 3”
404
“Ford Showroom, 9/10/47, p. 8–9;” I have not been able to determine where this melody
appears in The Bartered Bride or the identity of the song “Oh, I Wanna Go.”
405
Theodor Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour.’” The Musical
Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 1994), 332; Adorno’s concept of “structured listening” is more
nuanced than he describes here; see chapter 3 in Rose Rosengard Subotnik, Deconstructive
137

In a later episode of the Ford Showroom, Willson’s method follows Adorno’s mold more
closely, taking his listeners through a detailed explanation of Tchaikovsky’s use of the folk song
“In the Field Stood a Birch Tree” in the finale of his Symphony No. 4 and how the folk tune is
combined with other elements to create a unified whole.
406
Willson’s alignment with Adorno in
this particular instance says more about the idea of cultural hierarchy than about Willson or
Adorno’s position within that hierarchy. This example shows that the cultural hierarchy
described by critics, while based in reality, was still an artificial construct in which specific
examples often deviated. Willson’s seemingly “highbrow” approach is only remarkable when
seen through the lense of hierarchy. Otherwise, it simply reflects the nuanced views of a musical
figure with enough experience and wisdom to articulate specificities within musical culture.
Likewise, Willson’s simaltaneous use and endorsment of popular music in this instance is no
more middlebrow than any other supposed contradiction an individual may have.
Willson’s method of discussing popular and classical music at the same time came to
fruition in 1952 with Meredith Willson’s Music Room. In this program, the motive and its
accompanying compositions are the centerpiece of each episode, a segment called “The Long
and Short of It.” Willson and his co-host Ken Banghart are more direct in calling attention to the
difference between the classical and popular selections, labelling them long hair and short hair
respecively.
407
Willson is also more articulate about the differences and similarities. He says:
You know one of my favorite pursuits is reminding our listeners that the long hair and
short hair music both stem from the same little black and white notes on the piano. The

Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995).
406
“Ford Showroom, 9/24/47.”
407
This term, seemingly referencing the long hair worn by nineteenth-century composers like
Beethoven and Liszt, was in common parlance in the mid-twentieth century; the term appears in
everything from Sinclair Lewis’s popular 1922 novel Babbitt to the 1949 episode of Looney
Tunes, “Long-haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny parodies Leopold Stokowski.
138

chief difference is in their form. Whereas a popular song writer will take an eight bar
theme and make a thirty-two bar chorus out of it a long hair writer will take a five note
theme and make a half-hour string quartet out of it– or a symphony.
408

This is perhaps Willson’s most poignant statement expressing his egalitarian view of music. It
contains echoes of a similar statement made by Gilbert Seldes in The Seven Lively Arts: “The
great arts and the lively arts have their sources in strength or gaiety– and the difference between
them is not the degree of intensity, but the degree of intellect.”
409

Willson also echoed Seldes in thinking that listening to and engaging with music did not
require any special knowledge or education, even though they both acknowledged it could
enhance appreciation and understanding. In one epidsode of Meredith Willson’s Music Room
Banghart says, “Music is so much more interesting when you understand a little about it,” but
Willson rebuffs him: “Oh, nonsense, Ken. Music is great if people will just listen to it, regardless
of whether they understand it or not. I am merely throwing in a few tricks to get ‘em to listen.”
410

In fact, each episode also featured a “mystery masterpiece” that they played without giving any
title or background information. Willson explained that he did so to allow listeners to form their
own impressions.
411
Listeners wrote in, and before revealing the identity of the mystery
masterpiece from the previous week, Willson would read five listener responses. Again, this sort
of unmediated experience was endorsed by Adorno later in his review of the Music Appreciation
Hour:
One ought to play selections which one may safely suppose are not known to the majority
of the pupils, without giving any information about these pieces. Then one should
encourage the students to send written statements to the station concerning the formal
structure of the works as well as the interrelationship between this structure and

408
Great American Songbook Digital Archive, “Meredith Willson’s Music Room, 1/3/53, p. 2,”
available from https://songbook.historyit.com; Internet; accessed 17 December 2021.
409
The Seven Lively Arts, 318.
410
“Meredith Willson’s Music Room, 10/13/52, p. 3.”
411
“Meredith Willson’s Music Room, 10/6/52, p. 5.”
139

the concrete musical content of this very piece.
412

On the other hand, Adorno’s method seems to call for a greater intellectual effort on the part of
the listeners than Willson’s method. Here Adorno reflects the highbrow view that understanding
high art required intellect. In fact, Willson alludes to this view in an unpublished article called
“Selling Long-Hair” when he writes that “serious music is not so dang complicated that it
requires a special kind of soul or something in order to enjoy it.”
413

Willson’s post-World War II radio programs mark the gathering of several biographical
and philosophical currents in his life. The breadth of work his work in the 1920s could have led
in any one direction. Instead, he continued to maintain a presence in radio, film, songwriting, and
classical music. His compositional and civic interest in melody led him through numerous
experimentations. He had such a wealth of experience in music that he was in an unique position
to make assessments about musical culture in America. These are the currents that took shape
into a clearly articulated and well-developed philosophy of music. As I have tried to show, his
views strongly resonated with and echoed those of Seldes, John Dewy, and the Young
Americans. No one else absorbed these ideas and synthesized them with a universal idea of
melody the way Willson did. The musicologist, author, and radio commentator Sigmund Spaeth
(1885–1965) probably came the closest. His “Tune Detective” radio program during the 1930s
sought out melodies from classical music in popular songs.
414
For example, he found parts of
Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah (1742) in “Yes, We Have No Bananas” and
Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu in C Sharp Minor, Op. 66 in the song “I’m Always Chasing

412
Adorno, “Analytical Study,” 372.
413
Meredith Willson, “Selling Long-Hair,” Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
414
Mark N. Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), 219.
140

Raindbows.”
415
Willson actually mentions the latter example in an episode of Meredith Willson’s
Music Review from 1940, which is not surprising since they knew each other.
416
Nevertheless,
Spaeth did not provide the same kind of intellectual grounding for his work. Willson was not
necessarily unique in his belief in pluralistic musical culture, but no one else articulated it in the
same way so consistantly. His consistancy serves as a base line with which to gague changes in
the musical culture around him. The next chapter explicates the ways in which musical culture
changed, moving from an accceptance of Willson’s beliefs to a culture increasingly opposed and
dismissive of his egalitarian ideas.

415
Grant, 219.
416
Old Time Radio Downloads, “Meredith Willson’s Music Review, 8/20/40,” available from
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/actors/meredith-willson; Internet; accessed 13
December 2021.
141

Chapter 3: Willson and Postwar Cultural Hierarchy

The fact that cultural hierarchy in the United States after World War II intensified is commonly
accepted and may be viewed through several lenses, the Cold War and the rise of mass culture
being the most predominant ones. While these lenses are certainly relevant to Willson’s career,
his engagement with cultural hierarchy lends itself to examining the ideology of postwar cultural
critics, especially the idea of critical thinking and complexity as an antidote to Communism and
totalitarianism. Cultural historian Lisa Szefel observes that after World War II “public
intellectuals, writers, artists, academics, and even national security leaders across the political
spectrum became convinced that, in order to save democracy from totalitarian terror and dogma,
Americans had to develop critical thinking skills, read widely and deeply and, in the realm of
culture, privilege difficulty, and complexity.”
417
This perceived need for complexity played out
in music as well, especially as it relates to ideologies of serialism, the reception of Aaron
Copland’s music, and the rhetoric surrounding Americanist music, for example.
418
The profound

417
Lisa Szefel, “Critical Thinking as Cold War Weapon: Anxiety, Terror, and the Fate of
Democracy in Postwar America,” The Journal of American Culture 40, no. 1 (March 2017), 35.
418
For ideologies of serialism see Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s
Threni and the Congress for Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity:
Essays, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb, 217–45 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005), Joseph N. Straus, “The Myth of Serial Tyranny in the 1950s and 1960s,” The
Musical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (1999): 301–343, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, “Aaron Copland and the
Politics of Twelve-Tone Composition in the Early Cold War United States,” Journal of
Musicological Research 27 (2008): 31–62, and Richard Taruskin, “Afterword: Nicht
blutbefleckt?” The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009): 274-284; for the reception of Aaron
Copland’s music see Elizabeth Bergman Crist, “Critical Politics: The Reception History of Aaron
Copland’s Third Symphony.” The Musical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 232–263; For
rhetoric surrounding American music see Emily Abrams Ansari, “Musical Americanism, Cold
War Consensus Culture, and the US-USSR Composers’ Exchange, 1958–1960,” Musical
Quarterly 97, no. 3 (2014): 360–389 and Emily Abrams Ansari, The Sound of a Superpower:
Musical Americanism and the Cold War (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018).

142

effects of this way of thinking also reached Willson in ways that would shape his beliefs and
musical output.
Willson’s cultural optimism, which persisted into the Cold War and is reflected in his
musical activities, increasingly fell out of favor, and his frustration with the increased privileging
of complexity came to the forefront of his creative works. The most public conflict came in 1966
when his appointment to the National Council on the Humanities was met with stiff opposition
from seventy leading music professors from around the country. But archival documents show
that his frustrations existed well before 1966. Also during this time, his solution to bridging the
classical-popular divide came into greater focus and is most evident in scripts from his radio
programs of the late 1940s and early 50s. The reconciliation process Willson describes in these
documents is reflected in his Broadway musicals that feature dramatic and musical
manifestations of cultural reconciliation. This context calls for a reevaluation of his musicals to
see them as finely and deliberately crafted shows with thoughtful undercurrents that question
assumptions about cultural hierarchy and divisiveness in general.

American Roots of Mass Culture Critique
The perceived need for complexity that arose after World War II grew out of a critique of mass
culture that had its American roots in the ideas of Progressive Era social reformers and that
continued to evolve through the 1920s and 30s.
419
Therefore, the substance of post-war cultural
critiques partly represents a continuation of ideas already in circulation. While the concept of
mass culture had not yet taken shape, Progressive reformers were concerned that popular

419
While I generally prefer to make a distinction between mass culture and popular culture, the
interchangeability of the terms in this section reflects my desire to use the same terminology as
the authors I discuss, who mostly used them to mean the same thing.
143

entertainments such as dance halls and nickelodeons posed a threat to social uplift by causing
moral degradation. Many of their objections anticipated critiques that were found among the
New York Intellectuals and members of the Frankfurt School more than 30 years later. The years
in between, roughly coinciding with the interwar period, were a time in which popular culture
was viewed more favorably.
420
The cultural historian Paul R. Gorman asserts that this period was
“a watershed in intellectuals’ conceptions about the popular arts” and that critics “showed a
growing appreciation of the common people and their tastes and desires.”
421
In the United States,
the shift to more damning indictments of popular culture in the late 30s was spearheaded by the
New York Intellectuals. Gorman claims that, “this emerging intelligentsia, which scholars today
recognize as one of the more influential intellectual cadres of the twentieth century, almost
single-handedly revitalized the critique of the popular arts.”
422
Several of the New York
Intellectuals came together at Partisan Review, founded in 1934, but Dwight Macdonald, the
most outspoken critic of mass culture, eventually left the journal in 1943 over disagreements
with the editors and started his own journal, Politics. Macdonald’s views were profoundly
influenced by the work of the Frankfurt School, which he encountered in 1941, and then the
work of Hannah Arendt in the 1950s. Thus, the American critiques of mass culture gradually
became more informed by domestic fears of Communism and totalitarianism in the 1940s and
50s. This outline, which will be explained in further detail below, hints at the issues Willson
faced as ideas about culture changed around him.
Some of the most foundational bases for critique of mass culture can be located in the
work of American Progressives. Gorman identifies three important concepts introduced by

420
This is similar to the arguments I made in Chapter 1.
421
Paul R. Gorman, Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137.
422
Ibid., 137.
144

Progressives that later gained additional traction. First, Progressives asserted that members of the
public were generally moral with good intentions and were innocent victims of the corruptions of
popular entertainments.
423
Second, the popularity of such entertainments was a product of
commercial manipulation; in other words, business owners sought the easiest means of
generating appeal for the sake of profit. The leading reformer Jane Addams wrote,
We need only to look about us to perceive that quite as one set of men have organized the
young people into industrial enterprises in order to profit from their toil, so another set of
men…have entered the neglected field of recreation and have organized enterprises
which make profit out of their invincible love of pleasure.
424

Third, because these recreations created corrupting effects not inherent in the young people
mentioned by Addams, they would respond differently if the recreations were reformed.
425
This
last point is important because the idea that high culture could have an edifying effect and
provide an alternative to popular recreations, by mid-century, is assumed to be true by critics
advocating modernism and complexity.
Addams’s statement connects the corrupting effect of entertainments with a concurrent
negative effect caused by industrial labor, a consistent theme found also in the work of the
Young Americans and the Frankfurt School. The top-down control over labor that Addams
implies is echoed more broadly (from “a set of men” to the “economic system”) in the words of
Max Horkheimer more than thirty years later when he referred to “the prevailing economic
system which carves all men to one pattern.”
426
While the Young Americans– directly connected
to the Progressives by their association with John Dewey and others– were also concerned about

423
Gorman, 39.
424
“Some Reflections on the Failure of the Modern City to Provide Recreation for Young Girls,”
Charities and the Commons 21 (5 December 1908), 367; quoted in Gorman, 40.
425
Gorman, 41.
426
Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9, no. 2
(1941), 290.
145

industrialized labor, they focused far more on the means by which individuals could liberate
themselves rather than on the systemic causes and solutions. In fact, this was a significant point
of contention as the Young Americans felt that Progressivism underestimated individual agency
and was therefore too paternalistic, a criticism also applicable to the Frankfurt School. This is
why the Young Americans did not seek reformation of entertainments or economic systems and
instead located the solution in self-realization, community, and democratic culture.
427

Mass Culture in the World War II Era
The dramatic shift to a renewed critique of mass culture played out in the evolution of Partisan
Review, one of several outlets for the New York Intellectuals, from its initial affiliation with the
Communist John Reed Club to its transformation into an anti-Stalinist bastion of cultural
critique. The John Reed Club, named after an American journalist who became a chronicler of
and activist for communist activity in Russia and elsewhere, was an instrument of the proletarian
cultural movement whose members were charged with cultivating voices of and for the
American working class.
428
When the Communist party ordered the disbanding of John Reed
Club chapters in 1935 due to a shift in political strategy known as the popular front, Partisan
Review lost its funding source.
429
It ceased publication but was revived in 1937 as an
independent anti-Stalinist, leftist arts journal.
430
Although it initially gave voice to socialist
writers and artists, its editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, valued the arts more than they

427
Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van
Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1990), 2.
428
Gorman, 138.
429
The popular front of the mid to late 1930s refers to Communist political parties aligning
themselves with other leftist movements; international in scope, in the United States it was
marked by their support for the New Deal.
430
Gorman, 138.
146

valued Communist ideology and very soon struck a path somewhat separate from the Communist
party.
431
This was partly because of the influence of Leon Trotsky’s (1879–1940) anti-Stalinist
writings on Phillips and Rahv. Like Trotsky, they conceived the arts as a realm of superior
understanding and insight removed from everyday concerns.
432
As a result, Phillips and Rahv
revived the strict dichotomy between high and low culture that had taken shape in late nineteenth
and early twentieth-century America, but rather than celebrate low culture as proletarian art, they
looked to the Progressives’ notion of popular entertainments under industrialization, which were
designed to anesthetize the working class so it could be reconciled with capitalism.
433
In other
words, they came to conceive of lowbrow culture as a calculated top-down process rather than
one originating from the tastes of the people. As such, the masses needed to be rescued from this
state through the uplift of high culture, a project similar to that of Progressives forty years earlier.
Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) and Dwight Macdonald (1906–1982) are perhaps the
most noted cultural critics from the Partisan Review. Macdonald, one of the new editors of
Partisan Review when it was revived in 1937, believed that it was the responsibility of
intellectuals like him to be agents for redeeming American society.
434
The harsher critique he
promoted at the journal “branded ideas of aesthetic expressions that did not willingly embrace
the complexity and uncertainty of modern life as anti-intellectual and reactionary.”
435
Greenberg
was in the vanguard in this regard. While Macdonald’s early writings suggest that new forms of
entertainment like cinema might be used to create true art, Greenberg had no doubts about the

431
Gorman, 138
432
Ibid., 146.
433
Ibid., 139–142.
434
Ibid., 148.
435
Ibid.
147

pernicious effects of mass culture. This is expressed in his seminal essay “Avant-Garde and
Kitsch” (1939), which was written in response to Macdonald.
In his essay, Greenberg reveals his underlying anxiety about the current state of
American society, which can largely be observed through culture. His history of avant-garde
begins in mid-nineteenth-century Europe when “the true and most important function of the
avant-garde was not to ‘experiment,’ but to find a path along which it would be possible to keep
culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and violence.”
436
Greenberg seems to
suggest the United States is in a similar crisis and therefore also needs the avant-garde for the
same reason. He does not reveal the extent of his anxiety until the end of the essay. There, he
explains that a stable society is one in which the “contradictions between its classes” are
reconciled, in other words, that there is a ruling class with enough cultural authority that “the
axioms of the few are shared by the many.”
437
In a society like this “the masses are able to feel
wonder and admiration for culture, on no matter how high a plane of its masters.”
438
Greenberg
also admits that even in a society in which the common man resents the ruling class, “he is
silenced by the awe in which he stands of the patrons of this art.”
439
But when the common man
criticizes the culture of the ruling class, it is a more dire sign that he has become dissatisfied with
the social order. Greenberg specifically defines this as a reactionary response with political
consequences that can eventually lead to revivalism, puritanism, and even fascism.
440
Greenberg
clearly sees this happening in Europe and also sees the United States heading in the same

436
Clement Greenberg, “Avante-Garde and Kitsch,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 98–107 (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1957), 99.
437
Greenberg, 106
438
Ibid.
439
Ibid., 107.
440
Ibid.
148

direction. In addition, he notes that the ruling classes in America are no longer paying attention
to the avant-garde.
441
The culprit in both cases is kitsch, his word for the products of mass
culture.
According to Greenberg, “Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations,” enabled
by urbanization and industrialism.
442
He sees these, along with the resulting mass culture, as the
primary antecedents of kitsch in American culture. Kitsch is so invasive that, “Traps are laid
even in those areas, so to speak, that are the preserves of genuine culture.” He continues, “It is
not enough today, in a country like ours, to have an inclination toward the latter; one must have a
true passion for it that will give him the power to resist the faked article that surrounds and
presses in on him from the moment he is old enough to look at the funny papers.”
443
Observing
true culture, then, requires effort, and kitsch is responsible for creating a condition in which
intellectualism is devalued.
The ultimate values which the cultivated spectator derives from Picasso are derived at a
second remove, as the result of reflection upon the immediate impression left by the
plastic values. It is only then that the recognizable, the miraculous, and the sympathetic
enter. They are not immediately or externally present in Picasso's painting, but must be
projected into it by the spectator sensitive enough to react sufficiently to plastic qualities.
They belong to the “reflected” effect. In [Ilya] Repin, [the Russian realist painter] on the
other hand, the “reflected” effect has already been included in the picture, ready for the
spectator's unreflective enjoyment. Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect.
Repin pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a short cut
to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art.
444

This statement also reflects the influence of the Frankfurt School, especially the concepts of aura
and Geist. The “second remove” that is not “immediately or externally present” suggests a
similar formulation. With Greenberg, the importance of reflection and critical thinking as well as

441
Greenberg, 101.
442
Ibid., 102.
443
Ibid., 103.
444
Ibid., 105.
149

the difficulty of genuine art is foregrounded. Greenberg’s anxiety about the future of American
culture and society, then, rests upon the fact that critical thinking and complexity are lacking at a
time when they are needed the most to confront the tumults of the era.
The New York Intellectuals were deeply influenced by the Frankfurt School’s critique of
mass culture.
445
Even though the Institute for Social Research, whose members were only later
labelled the Frankfurt School, relocated to New York and became affiliated with Columbia
University in 1934, its impact on American intellectuals remained limited because its journal,
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was not published in English until 1941. Greenburg, who taught
himself German, may have already known about the journal when he wrote his well-known his
essay. Macdonald, on the other hand, only began reading the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, or
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, in 1941, and this first English-language issue, focused
on mass culture, had a profound influence on him. Gorman calls the change in Macdonald
“startling,” explaining that, “in 1929, he had envisioned entertainment as the common ground
between classes, a bridge across social distances. In 1944, the mass arts were portrayed as
dangerous precisely because they filled this intermediate position. They were now accused of
drawing the working classes away from their true nature and dragging the elite arts beneath their
potential.”
446

Dwight Macdonald is, in some ways, more accepting of, yet more pessimistic about
culture. Whereas Greenberg only believes in avant-garde culture, Macdonald recognizes artistry
in the films of Erich von Stroheim and D. W. Griffith. He values good science fiction, calling it

445
For more on the interactions between the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School see
Thomas Wheatland, Frankfurt School in Exile (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2009), especially chapter 3.
446
Gorman, 169; 1944 is when Macdonald’s first major critique of mass culture, “A Theory of
Popular Culture,” was published.
150

the true heir to the “classic” detective novel.
447
He also makes a distinction between satisfying
popular tastes, as past poets and authors had done, and exploiting them, as mass culture does.
448

On the other hand, unlike Greenberg, he does not believe that avant-garde culture is the ultimate
solution. An approach like Greenberg’s, which Macdonald labelled as conservative, assumes that
“the only hope is to rebuild the old class walls and bring the masses once more under aristocratic
control.”
449
But this is based on a false assumption that mass culture is “an expression of
people,…whereas actually it is an expression of masses, a very different thing.”
450
Macdonald
implies that because under mass culture people “lose their human identity and quality,” they no
longer have the capacity to be persuaded by the aristocracy.
451
On this point, Macdonald departs
from Greenburg, the Frankfurt School and Progressives, who all held out hope that high art could
affect society. Certainly Macdonald and Greenberg are mostly aligned by the time this essay, “A
Theory of Mass Culture” (1953) was published, but he focuses much more on the inability of the
masses to have any agency.
452

Similarly, Macdonald blames the mechanisms of mass culture for a lack of individual
agency. Mass culture is “fabricated by technicians hired by businessman.”
453
Later, he describes
these kinds of specialized labor that are employed in mass culture, for example, “the great
Blackett-Semple [sic]-Hummert factory – the word is accurate– for the mass production of radio

447
Dwight Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in
America, edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, 59–73 (Glencoe, IL: Free
Press, 1957), 65 and 68.
448
Ibid., 60.
449
Ibid., 69
450
Ibid.
451
Ibid.
452
Macdonald presented his article three times with revisions and additions: in 1944 as “A
Theory of Popular Culture,” in 1953 as “A Theory of Mass Culture,” and in 1960 as “Masscult
and Midcult.”
453
Macdonald, 60
151

‘soap operas.’ Or the fact that in Hollywood a composer for the movies is not permitted to make
his own orchestrations any more than a director can do his own cutting.”
454
Macdonald contends
that “Such art workers are as alienated from their brainwork as the industrial worker is from his
handwork.”
455
Genuine art “will result only when a single brain and sensibility is in full
command.”
456
Thus under mass culture the individual agency of both the “brainworkers,” in
other words, the creators, and the consumers are compromised.
457
Macdonald laments that “one
of the odd things about the American cultural scene is how many brainworkers there are and how
few intellectuals, defining the former as specialists whose thinking is pretty much confined to
their limited ‘fields’ and the latter as persons who take all culture for their province.”
458
The
dangers of this lack of intellectualism is seen, for example, in the ways mass culture treats
science. Macdonald writes, “The role of science in Mass Culture has similarly changed from the
rational and the purposive to the passive, accidental, even catastrophic.”
459
He notes that, for
example, in good science fiction, “the marvels and horrors of the future must always be
‘scientifically’ possible,’” whereas mass literature treats science as a mystery “where the
marvelous is untrammeled by the limits of knowledge.”
460
In other words, proper literature
demonstrates an intellectual approach to science rather than exploits its mystery to fashion
stories featuring pulp horror and the supernatural. Macdonald seems to imply that the

454
Macdonald, 65; Blackett, Sample, and Hummert was an advertising agency, and because in
the early days of radio advertisers bought entire segments of air time, they were often responsible
for creating the content as well.
455
Ibid., 65
456
Ibid.
457
The emphasis on both the creation of artwork and how it is to be received by its audience is
an important concept common to Frankfurt School thinkers, New York Intellectuals, and
advocates of dodecaphony.
458
Macdonald, 71
459
Ibid., 67.
460
Ibid., 68.
152

exploitation and inaccurate representation of science in literature had blinded the masses to the
true possibilities– including the dangers– of science when he writes, “From Frankenstein's
laboratory to Maidenek [Majdanek] and Hiroshima is not a long journey.”
461
By admitting this
connection, Macdonald reveals his further sympathy for the views of the Frankfurt School and
their anti-Enlightenment stance.
In fact, the subtle differences between Macdonald and Greenberg can largely be
attributed to the Frankfurt School’s influence on Macdonald, particularly Max Horkheimer’s
(1895–1973) essay “Art and Mass Culture,” the key essay in the first issue of Studies in
Philosophy and Social Science. Horkheimer’s essay laid out the ISR’s position on mass culture,
which was focused on the “prevailing economic system,” meaning industrialized capitalism, and
its ability to “carve all men to one pattern.”
462
Horkheimer surmised that the inner life that
allowed one to survive in modern society was being supplanted by leisure life consisting mainly
of popular entertainments. As a result, both elites and the masses were obeying “a mechanism
that leaves them only one single reaction in any given situation.”
463
In other words, they became
more susceptible to influence from outside themselves. Like the Progressives, Horkheimer
claimed that popularity was managed from above resulting in “unrestricted accommodation of
the people to what the amusement industry thinks they like.”
464
While Macdonald certainly
acknowledges the way that this situation can be exploited under totalitarianism, for members of

461
Macdonald, 69; Majdanek refers to the World War II concentration camp near the Polish city
of Lubin.
462
Horkheimer, 290; for a detailed examination of the Frankfurt School’s writings on mass
culture see Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the
Institute of Social Research, 1923–1950 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1996).
463
Horkheimer, 294.
464
Ibid., 304.
153

the Frankfurt School, who witnessed the use of propaganda in European totalitarian states, the
consequences of mass culture were more dire.
This is perhaps why Macdonald differs with the Frankfurt School on the subject of
culture. That is to say, the lack of immediacy for Macdonald allowed him to be more dismissive
about avant-garde culture having any impact on modern society. He derided the “Marxian
radicals” for believing that if the masses “were offered good culture, they would eat it up and the
level of mass culture would rise.”
465
This oversimplification of the Frankfurt School does contain
the truth that Horkheimer and Adorno believed that art had a social function. Horkheimer
explains that art only exists in works that “express the gulf between the monadic individual and
his barbarous surroundings.”
466
Writing sometime later, Adorno characterized art as being “the
social antithesis of society.”
467
Put plainly, art should call attention to the ills of society. At the
same time, each work of true art was autonomous, pursuing its own internal logic.
468
The
writings of the Frankfurt School, thus, went beyond the critique of mass culture leveled by the
New York Intellectuals.
The Frankfurt School also contributed much to the idea of complexity in the arts. Szefel
contends that they and other Marxist intellectuals traced “a direct line from Rousseau to Hitler
and Stalin” and “lamented that liberal architects of political philosophy had placed too much
weight on cognition and creature comforts rather than souls and sensibilities.”
469
The turn away

465
Macdonald, 69.
466
Horkheimer, 293.
467
Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, eds. Greta Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kenter (New York: Continuum, 2002), 8.
468
Horkheimer, 294; additional works pertinent to this discussion include Theodor Adorno, The
Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge,
1991) and Essays on Music: Theodor W. Adorno, ed. R. D. Leppert, trans. S. H. Gillespie et al.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
469
Szefel, 34.
154

from the Enlightenment and toward “faith, transcendent beauty, and mystery” is evident in an
early essay discussing technology, Walter Benjamin’s (1892–1940) “The Work of Art in the Age
of its Mechanical Reproducibility” (1935).
470
A primary component of this essay is the concept
of aura, which is the quality of a work of art which is lost when it is reproduced– mainly its
displacement from its original context and tradition.
471
Benjamin explains the aura of an art
object by likening it to the aura of a natural object:
A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it
may be. To follow with the eye– while resting on a summer afternoon– a mountain range
on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of
those mountains, of that branch.
472

Thus, aura is not a finite characteristic of the art object itself but something intangible and only
witnessed through personal experience. Benjamin says that the aura of works of art have
diminished in modern society because of “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to
things, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by
assimilating it as a reproduction.”
473
Critical Theory scholar Michael Rosen observes that
Benjamin’s early writings including this essay exhibit a “predilection for mystical theories of
language and unblushingly antiscientific metaphysics.”
474

Although Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) was critical of Benjamin’s conception of aura,
he too argued in favor of the transcendent beauty of art. This is articulated comprehensively in

470
Szefel, 37.
471
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” in The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, 19–
55 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2008), 22–23.
472
Ibid., 23.
473
Ibid.
474
Michael Rosen, “Benjamin, Adorno, and the Decline of the Aura,” in The Cambridge
Companion to Critical Theory, edited by Fred Rush, 40–56, Cambridge Companions to
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 40.
155

his Aesthetic Theory, published in 1970 after his death.
475
For Adorno, Benjamin’s concept of
culture did not leave any way to differentiate between art and propaganda. He writes:
The failure of Benjamin’s grandly conceived theory of reproduction remains that its
bipolar categories make it impossible to distinguish between a conception of art that is
free of ideology to its core and the misuse of aesthetic rationality for mass exploitation
and mass domination, a possibility he hardly touches upon.
476

Adorno’s concept for the transcendent quality of art objects is embodied in the idea of spirit
(Geist) drawn from the German Idealists such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831).
He explains, “That through which artworks, by becoming appearance, are more than they are:
This is their spirit.”
477
Benjamin’s and Adorno’s ideas came to influence anti-Communist
intellectuals in the United States who also desired greater complexity and abstraction in works of
art.
Mass Culture, Complexity, and Modernism in the Cold War
Critiques of mass culture and debates about the role of art in society as they related to
communism and totalitarianism reached a turning point in the United States in the years after
World War II, when combined with the U.S. government’s anti-Soviet posture of containment
and the resulting domestic fears of communist infiltration. This combination joined together
concomitant fears about calculated manipulation of the masses and their inabilities to resist such
calculations. Even though these fears had already been voiced by emigres in relationship to
conditions in Europe, as Philip Gentry rightly points out, the Cold War was largely viewed as a
domestic issue in the United States.
478
In the aftermath of the war, Szefel also contends that

475
Aesthetic Theory includes materials authored between 1956 and 1969.
476
Theodor W. Adorno, Greta Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, eds., Robert Hullot-Kenter, trans.,
Aesthetic Theory (New York: Continuum, 2002), 56.
477
Ibid., 86
478
Philip M. Gentry, What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2018), 12.
156

“central assumptions about rationalism, progress, science, and communications had eroded, all to
be replaced by a general sense of fear and anxiety.”
479
This uncertainty manifested itself in
questions about what would lead the United States down the road to communism and
totalitarianism. The lack of a clear answer left open the possibility that virtually anything could
be coopted in the name of freedom or its supposed antithesis, communism. Indeed, the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was essentially established to settle the matter. In
the panic and rush to establish what constituted democracy and freedom on one hand, and
communism on the other, there was little room for nuance or any in-between position. This was
nowhere more evident in the blacklisting of artists and writers and the purging of suspected
communists from governmental jobs.
Although the HUAC began its activities in 1938, the more significant accusations, mostly
focusing on Hollywood creatives and other writers, artists, and musicians, did not begin until
1946 when The Hollywood Reporter began featuring a regular column naming supposed
communist sympathizers. This blacklisting continued in 1947 when ten figures from the film
industry appeared before the HUAC but refused to testify. In spite of their refusal and subsequent
convictions for contempt of Congress, the fact they were subpoenaed to begin with was
suspicious enough that film studio executives refused to hire them. Blacklisting continued, most
notably in the 1950 publication Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and
Television, an extensive report on 151 individuals and their political activities. In the bipolar
national environment, anyone left-leaning was assumed to be a “fellow traveler,” one who held

479
Szefel, 34.
157

similar views to Communists, or a “dupe,” one who had been fooled or tricked into supporting
the communist agenda.
480
An article in Life from April 4, 1949 explained the rationale for this:
Their [the Communists] weapons are the fellow traveler and the so-called “innocent
dupe.” These are the prominent people who, wittingly or not, associate themselves with a
Communist-front organization and thereby lend it glamor, prestige, and the respectability
of American liberalism. They [those pictured in the graphic] are not the most notorious
50 but a representative selection ranging from hard-working fellow travelers to soft-
headed do-gooders who have persistently lent their names to organizations labeled by the
U.S. Attorney General or other government agencies as subversives.
In the beginning such people were prominent liberals who were lured into
sponsoring or joining organizations that seemed American enough at the time. When the
Moscow-directed line emerged, numerous liberals quit. But others like those below stuck
it out. Some of them were receptive to shrewd Communistic persuasiveness. Some in
high position stubbornly ignored their critics in the honest belief that there would
eventually be a meeting of minds. Still others cynically pursued a personal ambition,
thinking that the Communists could help them along their careers. Not a few became so
notorious that they were accused of being actual members of the party. Some of those
pictured here publicly and sincerely repudiate Communism, but this does not alter the
fact that they are of great use for the Communist cause.
481

The susceptibility to Communist persuasion described in the article is the type of belief that
created a greater sense of panic and anxiety. The lack of tolerance for even those who were
duped highlights the severity of the division between patriotic Americans and all others. Those in
music, television, film, and radio were especially scrutinized because of their access to forms of
mass media and ability to influence large segments of the population.
Rhetoric from the Life article contains echoes of mass culture critiques, aligning it with
Communism and merging together the anxieties related to both. This is not surprising since a few
decades earlier mass culture was presumed to be an expression of the people, the proletariat.
Now, the methods by which Communists supposedly lured fellow travelers into subjugation
shared similarities with the deliberate mechanisms by which mass culture was thought to

480
These terms were used, for example, in a Life article from April 4, 1949 covering the Cultural
and Scientific Conference for World Peace.
481
“Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” Life 26, no. 14 (April 4, 1949), 42–43.
158

anesthetize the public, in both cases, creating pliable minds open to manipulation. The Life
article, much like the masses in Greenberg’s “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” allows for the possibility
that some have the ability to maintain their wits– the fellow travelers. The dupes described above
have presumably lost their wits and are more like the masses in Macdonald’s conception who
“lose their human identity and quality.”
482
Thus, the Life article accounts for the eventualities
described by both Greenberg and Macdonald. At the same time, like Macdonald’s masses, those
who “sincerely repudiate Communism” still bear some of the blame and are not completely
innocent. The confluence of mass media and Communism, established in the minds of
Americans, provided the backdrop for the supposed need for critical thinking and complexity.
A culture of complexity and critical thinking was evident among several groups besides
the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School, including other public intellectuals, writers,
artists, academics, and national security leaders.
483
For example, several government programs
recognized that the Cold War was, as Truman called it, a “battle for men’s minds.”
484
In order to
remedy the perceived lack of young scientific minds needed to wage the Cold War, Congress
created the National Science Foundation in 1950 and poured even more funding into math and
the sciences with the 1958 National Defense Education Act.
485
The drive for critical thinking and
complexity extended to the arts as well with the creation of the National Foundation for the Arts
and Humanities in 1965. The language of the act specifically associates the arts and humanities
with the sciences as being part of the same overall project of critical thinking. The stated
purposes of the act as codified into law include:

482
Macdonald, 69.
483
Szefel, 34.
484
Szefel, 38.
485
These developments have personal meaning for me as my parents, both math educators, met
while receiving advanced education funded by the NSF.
159

that a high civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone but must
give full value and support to the other great branches of man’s scholarly and cultural
activity; that democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens and that it must
therefore foster and support a form of education designed to make men masters of their
technology and not its unthinking servant.
486

This type of language, which pervades the entire text, makes it abundantly clear the value of
“wisdom” and critical thinking: to resist the kind of intellectual manipulation and trickery
attributed to mass culture and Communism. Complexity was also valued in the realm of literary
criticism and scholarship. A group of academics known as the “New Critics,” led by John Crowe
Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren, believed that the focus of literary criticism
should be on the author’s words rather than his or her biography, psychological interpretation,
and historical context.
487
They promoted what became known as the “close reading” of poetry, a
focus on words and short phrases similar in nature to the tradition of studying religious texts.
This formalist approach to literature coincided with an emphasis on formalism across the arts,
creating a new wave of modernism after World War II.
Supported by the New York Intellectuals, the Frankfurt School, and the New Critics,
among others, Cold War modernism was partly a revival of 1920s modernism but with a
particular emphasis on the autonomy of aesthetic objects. Furthermore, because of its alignment
with Cold War political objectives, this revived modernism received significant monetary and
institutional support. Intellectual historian Robert Genter, who calls it “late modernism,” writes
that intellectuals and critics “officially institutionalized their brand of modernism in the 1950s,
promoting a particular canon of writers and artists through established academic journals,

486
“Public Law 89-209-Sept. 29, 1965,” available from https://www.govinfo.gov/
content/pkg/STATUTE-79/pdf/STATUTE-79-Pg845.pdf#page=1; Internet; accessed 17 May
2022.
487
Szefel, 39.
160

publishing houses, university classrooms, popular magazines, and art galleries.”
488
This can be
seen, for example, in the way Greenburg promoted the work of painter Jackson Pollock who then
became a national icon after being featured in a 1949 issue of Life. The drip action paintings of
Pollock epitomized the autonomous work of art, focusing on color, shape, and design without
being representational of anything beyond the canvas itself.
No other American composer exemplified the ideology of late modernism than Milton
Babbitt. In fact, he was closely tied to New York Intellectuals like Sidney Hook, Clement
Greenberg, and Dwight Macdonald as well as the conservative philosopher James Burnham.
489

As Martin Brody notes, “Babbitt’s writing retains a largely unacknowledged trace of the specific
terms and concerns that informed anti-Stalinist positions on culture (especially as they came to
be recast before and during World War II in terms of “mass” rather than “class” culture).”
490

This is evident, for example, in Babbitt’s famous essay “The Composer as Specialist,” (1958)
which was retitled “Who Cares if You Listen?” by the editors of High Fidelity. For example, like
Greenberg Babbitt believes there is an extra step to comprehending a work of art that requires
greater intellectual faculties, except that for him, it requires additional education rather than just
deeper reflection.
The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation
could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and
physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of
the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these

488
Robert Genter, Robert, Late Modernism: Art, Culture, and Politics in Cold War America
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 7.
489
Martin Brody, “‘Music for the Masses’: Milton Babbitt’s Cold War Music Theory,” The
Musical Quarterly 77, no. 2 (1993): 161–192.
490
Ibid., 173; in spite of his writing, Alison Maggart has demonstrated that some of Babbitt’s
compositions do not strictly adhere to the ideal of aesthetic autonomy; see Alison Maggart,
“Referential Play in ‘Serious’ Music: Allusions to the Past in Several of Milton Babbitt’s Works
from the Late 1980s,” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 2017.
161

arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less
extensive than his background in other fields.
491

Babbitt, then, advocates for a stronger connection between music and other academic and
scientific pursuits.
492

According to Martin Brody, Babbitt’s pursuit of science in music was part of a more
complex meta-theoretical project to free music from the constraints of subjective music theories
and conceptualizations.
493
The unlimited musical possibilities created by this freedom would
need a discourse of its own that had no outside associations, and Babbitt’s solution was through
the use of a strict and value-neutral scientific language.
494
This line of thought is very similar to
the way Greenberg conceptualizes abstract art. Greenberg says that artists had moved to
abstraction as a way of “narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute,” thereby
freeing it from subjectivities and conventions.
495
In essence by “creating something valid only on
its own terms,” abstract artists had arrived at a meta-art.
496
For example, Greenberg explains that
artists are preoccupied “with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors”
instead of painting identifiable objects, and poets’ attention is centered on “the ‘moments’
themselves of poetic conversion rather than on experience to be converted into poetry.”
497
Both
cases show a similar type of autonomy and objectivity.

491
Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares If You Listen?” High Fidelity (Feb 1958), 40.
492
I would like to note that Macdonald and Babbitt mean different things when they discuss
specialization; For Macdonald, a specialist was someone with only enough knowledge to
perform one task, much like a worker on an assembly line; Babbitt used specialization to mean
expertise that a limited number of individuals possessed due to their intellect and education.
493
Brody, 165; following Babbitt’s thinking then, tonal theory is subjective because it is based
upon an arbitrary construct of relations between certain notes and chords, and language used to
describe it, such as “strong” or “weak” is also subjective and value-laden.
494
Ibid., 166.
495
Greenberg, 100.
496
Ibid.
497
Ibid., 101.
162

Of course, the concept of absolute art or art “on its own terms” was viewed as a way of
resisting mass culture and, implicitly, the threat of Communism. Brody writes that a “defense
against mass art lay in the promotion and production of a different kind of artistic work, work
that was doggedly individualistic, unafraid of complexity, irreducible, resistant to
appropriation.”
498
Babbitt shared Greenberg’s concerns about both preserving serious art and
reserving it for only those with the intellect to understand it. His solution was to preserve serious
music in the university. Babbitt calls the university “the mightiest of fortresses against the
overwhelming, out numbering forces, both within and without the university, of anti-
intellectualism, cultural populism, and passing fashion.”
499
In “Who Cares if You Listen?”
Babbitt goes even further.
And so, I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate
and eventual service by total, resolute, and voluntary withdrawal from the public world to
one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of
complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition.
500

Although Greenberg describes a similar isolation and removal from public life of the avant-garde
artist and poet, he maintains that its purpose “was not to ’experiment,’ but to find a path along
which it would be possible to keep culture moving in the midst of ideological confusion and
violence,” unlike Babbitt, who hoped it would provide greater experimentation as well.
While it is clear from Martin Brody’s article that Babbitt’s thinking was influenced by
politics, Richard Taruskin, in his article “Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?” notes the absurdity of
Babbitt later claiming that the Cold War did not have an effect on his music in order to criticize

498
Brody, 175.
499
Milton Babbitt, Milton Babbitt: Words about Music, edited by Stephen Dembski and Joseph
N. Straus (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 163.
500
“Who Cares if You Listen?” 126.
163

the idea of the aesthetic autonomy of music during that time period. Taruskin argues that
dodecaphony was political even before Babbitt:
The status of twelve-tone music as a no-spin zone, a haven of political nonalignment and
implicit resistance in the postwar world was widely touted and accepted from the start,
both in Europe, where it could be seen to embody the “neither/nor” option within the
territories formerly held or occupied by the fascists (now being wheedled by the two
formerly allied, now opposing Cold War powers), and in America, where Aaron Copland,
for one, sought refuge in it when called to account for his erstwhile political
engagements. These were among the factors determining serialism’s seeming natural
selection– in a development no one had predicted before the war– as a musical lingua
franca, or even as the basis for a new era of common practice, with a prestige that even
Stravinsky found irresistible.
501

Here Taruskin echoes two important arguments made by the cultural historians I have already
cited and brings them into the sphere of music: first, that the general push towards modernist
complexity and aesthetic autonomy was political even if the art itself was thought to be neutral
because of its non-referentiality and second, that late modernism did not come about through
entirely “natural” circumstances but was instead coaxed into existence by influential cultural
critics. These arguments are instructive for my further discussion of music during the Cold War.

Musical Modernism and Complexity in the Cold War
Despite contrary arguments by Joseph Straus, many other scholars have shown that Cold
War politics played a significant role in American music and that, in particular, serialism was
privileged at the expense of nationalistic music, thus creating a dividing line between complex
and more populist music.
502
These conditions provide important context to Willson’s experiences

501
Richard Taruskin, “Afterword: Nicht blutbefleckt?” The Journal of Musicology 26, no. 2 (2009), 276.
502
See Joseph N. Straus, “The Myth of Serial Tyranny in the 1950s and 1960s,” The Musical
Quarterly 83, no. 3 (1999): 301–343 and “A Response to Anne C. Shreffler,” The Musical
Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2000): 40; Although I recognize his argument referred specifically to
serialism I use dodecaphony to encompass both serial compositions and those who wrote using
other twelve-tone methods.
164

during this time. Several scholars, most notably Anne C. Shreffler, have argued that serialism
gained prestige due to political circumstances. In a slightly different interpretation than Taruskin,
she concludes that serialism’s prestige was due to its association with political and personal
freedom rather than its supposed neutrality. On the other side of the dividing line, established
nationalist composers found that their work had fallen out of favor because the values they
promoted became associated with mass culture, communism, and totalitarianism. While these
ideological battles were in large part waged by critics and intellectuals, Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett
and Elizabeth Bergman, demonstrate that the battles had real effects, especially on Aaron
Copland. They had similar effects on Meredith Willson, who was equally, if not more embroiled
in the ideologies of music during the Cold War.
Although Willson did not experience the same kind of scrutiny as Copland did, the
latter’s case is instructive for highlighting the real conditions of working composers and
musicians. For example, Copland’s Americanist musical style became suspect because of his
left-leaning politics and activities, as well as his homosexuality.
503
Suspicions about Copland
were publicized in a 1949 Life article covering the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World
Peace, which was viewed as a Communist ruse. For his participation in the conference, the
article named him a “dupe and fellow traveler.” A year later, his name and accompanying
political activities appeared in Red Channels. Even though Willson was never blacklisted,
several of his associates appeared in Red Channels as well, most notably Morton Gould, Burl
Ives, and Pert Kelton.
504
Willson’s film collaborators, Charlie Chaplin and Lillian Hellman, were

503
Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett, “Aaron Copland and the Politics of Twelve-Tone Composition in
the Early Cold War United States,” Journal of Musicological Research 27 (2008): 31–62.
504
Willson knew Gould and Ives through various radio endeavors; Pert Kelton originated the
role of Mrs. Paroo in The Music Man.
165

also blacklisted. Hollywood in general received far greater scrutiny than classical music, a
chilling effect Willson must have felt.
Cold War conditions also had an impact on how Copland’s music was received. For
example, Elizabeth Bergman argues that, beginning in 1947, the tone of his Third Symphony
(1946) came under attack for being too populist and nationalistic at a time when sociopolitical
tensions of the Cold War were on the rise.
505
DeLapp-Birkett contends that greater scrutiny of
Copland caused a shift in his views about serialism, explaining that, in 1945 “he considered
twelve-tone composition to be foreign, bound up in a dying Germanic tradition, of limited
expressive use, and ultimately un-American,” but that in 1950 he “demonstrated that his cultural
definition of ‘twelve-tone composition’ had shifted from an anti-American, tradition-drenched,
Second Viennese, and doctrinaire technique, to something more flexible, adaptable, and anti-
Soviet but not un-American.”
506

Americanist music in general, including Willson’s, fell out of favor with the rise of the
Cold War. Older Americanist composers, whose values of accessibility, nationalism, and social
engagement were broadly aligned with American values before and during World War II, found
that those values after the war became increasingly associated with totalitarianism as a result of
thinkers such as Adorno and Hannah Arendt.
507
In her book The Sound of a Superpower:
Musical Americanism and the Cold War, Emily Abrams Ansari explains that “Americanist
composers were thus obliged quite suddenly to respond to changing attitudes within the
international compositional community and changing attitudes within their broader national

505
Elizabeth Bergman Crist, “Critical Politics: The Reception History of Aaron Copland’s Third
Symphony.” The Musical Quarterly 85, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 242; the author now publishes under
the name Elizabeth Bergman.
506
DeLapp-Birkett, 48 and 58.
507
Emily Abrams Ansari “Musical Americanism, Cold War Consensus Culture, and the US-
USSR Composers’ Exchange, 1958–1960,” Musical Quarterly 97, no. 3 (2014): 382.
166

community.”
508
It became important for them to emphasize what Ansari calls, “consensus
values,” such as freedom, liberty, democracy, and individualism to promote their own
agendas.
509
This was especially true for composers who whose work would be compared to
Soviet music. Those who participated in the Composers’ Exchange between 1958 and 1960 had
a sense that “consensus values should consistently be emphasized in defining American music,”
and that their “construction of American composition” be in “deliberate opposition to the Soviet
alternative.”
510
As I will argue in greater detail later, Willson also felt these pressures, so much
so that he largely abandoned classical music composition in the late 1940s.
The prestige of modernism, and serialism in particular, was the underlying instigator of
these Cold War concerns. Anne Shreffler demonstrates how the rhetoric surrounding serialism
was bound up with the general rhetoric of the Cold War, particularly with two values: the belief
in the supremacy of hard science and in the importance of personal and political freedom.
511
The
aesthetic autonomy promoted by cultural critics, in the realm of music, was synonymous with
freedom, exemplified by the fact that each serial composition is based upon its own parameters.
But serialism was also used to demonstrate the freedom and autonomy of the American
composer in contrast to those in the Soviet Union.
512
In her article, Shreffler demonstrates how
the concept of freedom in music was promoted in Europe by the Congress for Cultural Freedom
(CCF), a U. S. backed cultural organization. Of that effort she writes, “Because this notion of
freedom, whether for notes or for people, was denied elsewhere, it was not enough to conceive of

508
Emily Abrams Ansari, The Sound of a Superpower: Musical Americanism and the Cold War
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018), 205.
509
Ibid., 363.
510
“Musical Americanism,” 381.
511
Anne C. Shreffler, “Ideologies of Serialism: Stravinsky’s Threni and the Congress for
Cultural Freedom,” in Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity: Essays, ed. Karol Berger and
Anthony Newcomb, 217–45 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 217.
512
Shreffler, 223.
167

it as mere autonomy; it had to be flaunted by those that possessed it.”
513
In contrast to the many
governmental programs that promoted complexity and critical thinking domestically, the CCF
may be thought of as propagandistic; it was authorized under the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, an
act intended to disseminate a positive image of the United States abroad.
An important underlying narrative to much of the existing scholarship is the recognition
that the Cold War emphasis on difficulty and complexity, exemplified by serialism in music, was
a revival and intensification of past aesthetic ideologies. Ann Shreffler writes that the massive
shift in music as well as the other arts and society after 1945 “can be characterized by the revival
(and later institutionalization) of pre-war modernism and the rising acceptance of scientific
language, methods, and metaphors for thinking about and creating art, accompanied by a
corresponding loss of prestige for neoclassicism (in music) and realism (in art and literature).”
514

This shift was observed first-hand by Aaron Copland and Meredith Willson. As I noted earlier,
Paul R. Gorman argues that modernism was “almost single-handedly revitalized” by the New
York Intellectuals and thus was coaxed into being.
515
Although he does not necessarily refer to it
as a revival, the literary scholar Andreas Huyssen, who writes extensively on the “Great Divide”
between high and low culture, likewise notes two intense periods of cultural stratification: the
late nineteenth century through the first few years of the twentieth century and the two decades
following World War II.
516

As high culture grew to be more exclusive during the Cold War, it became convenient to
label much of the populist and Americanist culture as middlebrow. Though the term had been in

513
Shreffler, 224
514
Ann C. Shreffler, “The Myth of Empirical Historiography: A response to Joseph N. Straus,”
The Musical Quarterly 84, no. 1 (2000): 31.
515
Gorman, 137–138.
516
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), vii.
168

use since the mid-1920s, mainly in literary criticism, it became more popularized– and
generalized– in a 1949 Harper’s Magazine article by Russell Lynes titled “Highbrow, Lowbrow,
Middlebrow.” In this widely-read article, a tongue-in-cheek explanation of the brows, Lynes
departs somewhat from past ideas of this cultural hierarchy. He divides middlebrows into two
groups, “upper” and “lower,” and dissociates all the brows from their traditional economic and
cultural classes. He writes, for example, “It isn’t wealth or family that makes prestige these days.
It’s high thinking.”
517
Most importantly, he divorces the entire hierarchy from any particular
espoused value and instead classifies them by their behaviors and tastes. As a result, this is
perhaps the first known example in which cultural hierarchy is applied to music. Here Lynes is
not labelling any music highbrow, lowbrow, or middlebrow but rather describing the musical
tastes of the various brows. Of the musical tastes of the highbrow, he writes “his collection of
phonograph records is likely to bulk large at the ends and sag in the middle– a predominance of
Bach-and-before at one and Stravinsky, Schöenberg, Bartok, and New Orleans jazz at the
other.”
518
Lynes does not say much more about musical tastes except that lowbrows like jazz and
upper middlebrows listen “to the Saturday afternoon opera broadcast.”
519

Although Dwight Macdonald eventually came to recognize middlebrow in his 1960 essay
“Masscult and Midcult,” others picked up on Lynes’s specific conceptualization too.
520
Most
notably, Life published a graphic of Lynes’s four categories along with their corresponding tastes
in various forms of culture.
521
As Lynes notes years after in a follow-up article, the graphic in

517
Russell Lynes, “Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow,” Harper’s Magazine, 1 February 1949,
19.
518
Ibid., 22.
519
Ibid., 26.
520
See Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult” Part I, Partisan Review 27 (Spring 1960):
203–33 and “Masscult and Midcult” Part II, Partisan Review 27 (Fall 1960): 589–631.
521
“High-Brow, Low-Brow, Middle-Brow,” Life, 11 April 1949, 100. The issue also included an
essay by the music critic Winthrop Sargeant called “In Defense of High-Brow.”
169

Life made it so the issue of cultural hierarchy and tastes “became something of a parlor game.”
522

Thus, cultural hierarchy was both a serious topic considered by highbrow cultural critics and a
formulation known to the broader American population.
The revival of modernism that began with fears about mass culture and the promotion of
aesthetic autonomy gained energy and political urgency after World War II when modernist
values of complexity came to be associated with resistance to communism and totalitarianism.
This benefited modernists and came as somewhat of a surprise to those continuing on as they had
before the war. Persistence, as I use it in my title, refers to this continuation of pre-war aesthetic
values, particularly the idea of democratic pluralism. This conception roughly aligns with
Ansari’s term Americanism. Persistence is an important concept because it describes a situation
in which pre-war aesthetic values did not gradually evolve into a new conception of modernism.
Rather, they continued while a new set of values based on modernist autonomy and complexity
superseded them in prestige and favorability without any real evolutionary connection. The stark
contrast between the two sets of aesthetic values can also be characterized by their level of
inclusivity. On one hand, democratic pluralism is inclusive because it values the contributions of
everyone. On the other, modernist complexity and autonomy implies a certain exclusivity. While
at least some cultural critics allowed that anyone had the capacity to understand modernist art,
they still defined art narrowly. The inclusive-exclusive dichotomy plays an important role in
defining Willson’s views about cultural hierarchy.
Willson’s Encounter with Cultural Hierarchy

Although Willson’s personal encounters with the increased exclusivity of classical music– due to
the privileging of complexity and difficulty– is somewhat opaque, much can be surmised from

522
Russell Lynes, “After Hours- Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow Reconsidered,” Harper's
Magazine, 1 August 1967, 16.
170

his public rhetoric, known personal encounters, and archival documents. The evidence indicates
that he was always suspicious of highbrow attitudes and had numerous encounters with them
even before the war. As I outlined in Chapter 2, Willson was brought up and trained at a time
when fewer barriers existed between classical and popular music. Also, because he worked
freely in both musical realms, his attitudes about music were optimistic. Highbrow attitudes of
music still existed and, as I mentioned earlier, can be traced to the Progressive view that culture,
including classical music, had an edifying effect on its listeners. Nevertheless, Cold War
conditions played a crucial role in intensifying Willson’s views of highbrowism. Complicating
matters, Willson’s manner of speaking, recollections and anecdotes from his memoirs sometimes
make him seem too naïve and unaware to grapple with the cultural and political issues before
him, even though that was not the case. In fact, Willson was quite sophisticated and intelligent
and possessed a keen awareness of the cultural debates happening after World War II. A
noticeable shift for Willson can be seen in the late 1940s, the same time other musicians like
Copland were navigating changes in American musical culture. Piecing together the available
evidence shows a man increasingly frustrated with the attitudes of highbrow culture, in large
part, because of his own personal experiences.
After serving in the military during World War II as the music director of the Armed
Forces Radio Service, Willson seemed optimistic about the possibilities open to him. In his
memoir, And There I Stood with my Piccolo, he indicates that, although he was offered music
director jobs both at NBC radio and MGM, he turned them down “because of the desire to be my
own boss…and dream up my own radio program.”
523
He felt that “a certain amount of radio time
was being wasted on some pretty dull stuff, particularly on musical programs,” and he proposed

523
Robert Meredith Willson, And There I Stood With My Piccolo (New York: Doubleday and
Co., 1949), 228.
171

a show that would feature a 38-piece orchestra, the electric organist Ethel Smith, Les Paul, and
Burl Ives.
524
Unfortunately, no one bought the idea because it was deemed too expensive.
525
Just
prior to his enlistment in November 1942, Willson had reached a career peak that brought him
success. His diverse array of work, which he had continued to do without reproach since the 20s
was coming to fruition. In the previous few years, he had composed his Symphony No. 2 in E
Minor, “Missions of California” (1940), the score for The Great Dictator (1940), the symphonic
work with narrator, Jervis Bay (1941), and the score for The Little Foxes (1941). He also
continued with his work in radio and wrote his first hit song “You and I” (1941). As early as
1942, he was said to be working on his third symphony.
526
It would seem he could have chosen a
number of paths, but he decided on radio because it offered the most creative opportunities.
Nevertheless, Willson had already had negative experiences with the highbrow musical
world and was slowly moving away from it. In a 1953 article from The American Magazine, he
explains how, as early as his days playing with the New York Philharmonic, he had questioned
classical music’s cultural conventions. Quoting Willson, the author, Jack Long writes,
“I began to wonder,” he told me, “why a conductor who could get excellent results from
an orchestra at rehearsal without lifting his hands above his shoulders, suddenly went into
a mad ballet at the performance. They think the stick-waving and mane-tossing is part of
the show, and this encourages the natural ham in most conductors.”
527

524
Ibid., 225; he must have felt this way for a while because another radio show idea appears in
the middle of his manuscript of Jervis Bay (1941). See Manuscript of Jervis Bay, Box 1, Folder
7, Meredith Willson Papers, The Library and Archives of Great American Songbook Foundation,
Carmel, IN.
525
Ibid., 226.
526
John Nesbitt and Meredith Willson, Johnson Wax Program, National Broadcasting Company,
Chicago: WMAQ, 14 July 1942; Willson’s third symphony is not known to exist, but a concert
he conducted on August 11, 1942 at the Hollywood Bowl included a “Nocturne in D Major”
from Symphony No. 3; See “Hollywood Bowl Magazine,” Box 2, File 3, Meredith Willson
Papers, The Library and Archives of Great American Songbook Foundation, Carmel, IN.
527
Jack Long, “Long-Hair Music Gets a Haircut,” The American Magazine, July 1953, 105.
172

These conductorly displays may have informed his own radio antics. He had been warned about
them on several occasions. In an article from 1938 titled “The Young Master: Of Meredith
Willson, Symbol of the New Hollywood,” Tom Moriarty cautions Willson about playing the
stooge on radio programs. He writes, “Hokey comedy parts on the radio are OK, I guess, and
make the orchestra leader who can handle them twice as valuable to the sponsor, but the hell of it
is that they are not exactly in the idiom of Symphony No. 1 in F-Minor.”
528
Instead he
encourages Willson to continue on the path of his first symphony and his book What Every
Young Musician Should Know. Willson did continue on that path to a certain extent.
An incident regarding his second symphony demonstrates another early negative
experience with classical music culture. Around 1938, Willson was invited to a lunch hosted by
Albert Coates (1882–1953), who was then conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
529

According to his memoir, Willson asked Coates if he would like to play his first symphony with
the orchestra:
…he [Coates] said, “I'd rather play your second symphony,” and I said, “I haven't written
any second symphony,” and he said, “Exactly.” However, I preferred to take the kindlier
interpretation of his remark, so I immediately started to write a second symphony.
530

Willson implies the remark was intended to be condescending. Coates, however, did eventually
premiere the work two years later with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Nevertheless, the
pushback against Willson continued. After the premiere, he invited Coates to attend a broadcast
of his show. Willson writes, “He stayed just long enough to see me put down the baton, walk to
the microphone with a piece of celery in each hand and an old light bulb in between my teeth,

528
Quoted in John C. Skipper, Meredith Willson: The Unsinkable Music Man (El Dorado, CA:
Savas Publishing Company, 2003), 65.
529
The date is approximated by Valerie Austin in “The Orchestral Works of Meredith Willson.”
530
And There I Stood, 165.
173

and engage in a bit of stooge dialogue with Frank Morgan.”
531
This incident has been described
by several others who witnessed it. John Skipper summarizes those, writing, “he [Coates] was
mortified as he watched Willson engage in what he considered stupid jokes and mindless prattle
with Morgan, the co-host. Coates simply got up and walked out.”
532
The two never spoke to each
other again.
Willson was unabashedly patriotic and nearly all of his symphonic compositions are
programmatic and Americanist, an aesthetic that Emily Abrams Ansari and others have shown to
have fallen out of favor during the Cold War– in classical music at least. Though no known score
exists for it, Willson’s Symphonic Variations on an American Theme (1948?)
533
is his most
obviously Americanist composition. Program notes show that each of the five movements bears
its own title referring to some aspect of Americana: Chamade (a musical military signal),
Dulcimer, “Cabadaster” (Willson’s childhood slang for a guitar capo d’astro), “Cadance” [sic],
and “Cead Mille [sic] Failte” (a traditional Irish greeting).
534
Of course, Cold War ideology also
placed greater emphasis on objectivity and abstraction, and Willson’s symphonies were
programmatic. This may partly explain why Willson had difficulty having them performed with
other orchestras once the Cold War began. His first, Symphony No. 1 in F Minor (1936) is
subtitled “A Symphony of San Francisco,” which he wrote “is not an attempt at specific or
program writing but rather a delineation of the spiritual personality that is San Francisco.”
535

Though his Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, “Missions of California” (1940) is structured like a

531
And There I Stood, 165–166.
532
Skipper, 68.
533
This is the date of copyright; see the following paragraph.
534
The Great American Songbook Foundation, “Program Notes for Symphonic Variations on an
American Theme, available from https://songbook.historyit.com/detail-page.php?id=2306;
Internet; accessed 8 August 2020,.
535
San Francisco Symphony Scrapbook, R10 A.4, Meredith Willson Papers
174

traditional four-movement symphony, each movement has a programmatic title, one referring to
the missionary Junipero Serra and the other three to specific Spanish missions. This symphony
appears to be more overtly programmatic than his first. For example, as Valerie Austen has
demonstrated, the first movement has a “Serra theme” and a contrasting “pagan theme.”
536
The
Americanist aesthetics of his orchestral works may not have affected Willson much at the time
they were premiered because he continued to pursue a similar compositional style, but his
attempts to have his symphonies performed elsewhere after World War II were mostly fruitless.
We at least know he was turned down by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony, but
there were likely additional rejections.
537

At some point, in the mid to late 1940s he completely abandoned symphonic
composition. This coincides with Copland’s initial encounters with Cold War politics. Archival
evidence shows that Willson began a third symphony. A movement from it, “Nocturne in D
Major,” was performed in August 1942 as part of a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert he
conducted at the Hollywood Bowl.
538
He reportedly was still working on it 1953, and it seems to
have never been completed.
539
Only one other symphonic work from the 1940s is known, his
Symphonic Variations on an American Theme, which bears a copyright date of 1948.
540

According to an undated biographical sketch, the work was first performed by the San Francisco
Symphony, but no premiere date has yet been determined.
541
Beginning in the 1950s, Willson’s

536
Austin, “The Orchestral Works of Meredith Willson,” 197–199.
537
See Meredith Willson to Serge Koussevitzky and William B. Murray to Serge Koussevitzky,
Box 64, Folder 6, Serge Koussevitzky Archive, Music Division, Library of Congress. Murray
was Willson’s agent at William Morris. There is no evidence the Boston Symphony performed
Willson’s symphony, and in all likelihood, Willson petitioned other conductors as well.
538
“Hollywood Bowl Magazine,” Box 2, File 3, Meredith Willson Papers.
539
Long, 106.
540
“Record of the Works of Willson, Meredith,” Box 3, File 10, Meredith Willson Papers.
541
Meredith Willson Biography, Box 2, File 27, Meredith Willson Papers.
175

output predominantly consisted of patriotic works and popular songs, and by 1953 his
songwriting had become prolific. There is no definitive evidence that suggests why Willson
seemed to take a sharp turn in writing music, but there are clues that may offer evidence.
Over the next two decades Willson appears to have become much more concerned with
the cultural divide that increasingly privileged classical music at the expense of popular music.
In the 1950s as the dominance of radio was waning, he began making more appearances both as
a conductor and as a lecturer. Between 1953 and 1956, he was signed with W. Colston Leigh,
who operated one of the most prominent speakers’ agencies in the United States and abroad.
542

One of his lectures was titled “The Long and Short of It.” Although there is no extant copy, it is
most certainly a reference to “long-hair,” his preferred term for highbrow classical music.
543
In
these engagements, he was likely continuing the work he had started in his radio programs from
the late 1940s. With the Leigh company he also made conducting appearances around the
country. An appearance in 1953 with the Buffalo Philharmonic was documented in the article
from The American Magazine quoted above.
The article “Long-Hair Music Gets a Haircut” focuses on Willson’s unique approach to
music and the motivations behind it. The author, magazine columnist Jack Long, describes his
own feelings about the stuffiness of long-hair music and writes that “just the other evening I met
a musical haircutter from Iowa, who’s doing the shearing I’ve been waiting for.”
544
He describes
one of Willson’s tactics, conducting a piece and then having the orchestra play the piece again

542
Lecture engagements, Box 4, File 10, Meredith Willson Papers. After a break, he resumed
these types engagements in 1962, sometimes alone and sometimes with his wife Rini, who was
an opera singer.
543
This term, seemingly referencing the long hair worn by nineteenth-century composers like
Beethoven and Liszt, was in common parlance in the mid-twentieth century. The term appears in
everything from Sinclair Lewis’s popular 1922 novel Babbitt to the 1949 episode of Looney
Tunes, “Long-haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny parodies Leopold Stokowski.
544
Long, 26.
176

without a conductor– to demonstrate that a great deal of conducting is showmanship and that
most of the conductor’s duties occur during rehearsals.
545
Long continues, “I couldn’t even
pronounce all their names [the composers] and yet the big guy who threw away the stick that
night made me understand and jump to their music.”
546
Interviewing Willson later, Long calls his
approach “fresh” and his ideas about music “original.”
547
Although Long is not specifically a
music critic, he has enough knowledge to understand that, in an era of cultural stratification,
Willson is doing something different. Long also reveals Willson’s motivations. Willson tells
Long “I thought I could show people that fellows like Beethoven and Tschaikowsky wrote tunes
for the same reason Cole Porter and Hoagy Carmichael do– to give us an emotional kick– and
that all the solemnity, serious faces, and theatrics are needless, old-fashioned traditions that can
be done away with.”
548
Long explains that Willson began on this path by going to the NBC
program department and telling them “I wanna get in front of the mike [sic] and talk to the
people. I think I’ve got a few things to say.”
549
Willson’s career as a radio host began in 1948,
around the same time he gave up symphonic composition in favor of songwriting.
550
At this
point, Willson must have been aware of the way Cold War politics was creating a sharper
cultural divide in music. Furthermore, some of his professional associates like Lillian Hellman,
Burl Ives, and Morton Gould were being scrutinized as Communist sympathizers. In about 1953,
Willson turned his attention to writing what would become The Music Man, and his work in

545
Long. 26.
546
Ibid., 26, 104.
547
Ibid., 105–106.
548
Ibid., 105.
549
Ibid., 108.
550
Although it is arguable that, due to his work in radio, he simply no longer had time for
symphonic composition, I note that he was also working in radio when he wrote his other
symphonic compositions.
177

musical theatre occupied most of his time through the mid-1960s. This will be addressed in
Chapter 4.
Although much had changed in the intervening years, the Cold War continued and
intensified, especially as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Government sponsored
projects related to science and culture continued, and one of them, the National Foundation on
the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, led to the most dramatic incident in Willson’s life
regarding cultural hierarchy. In 1966 he was appointed to the National Council on the
Humanities. The controversy created by a group of college professors who opposed his
appointment is indicative of the sharp divide within American culture. The public debate about
Willson’s appointment provides an opportunity to examine the rhetoric employed by figures on
both sides of the controversy and the ideologies behind it.
Willson was appointed to the newly formed Nation Council on the Humanities by
Lyndon Johnson in January 1966 upon recommendation by Eugene L. Wyman. The attorney
Wyman, whose wife Rosalind Weiner was a member of the Los Angeles city council, had been a
prominent California fundraiser for the Democratic party since 1960. The controversy arose
when, at the end of March, seventy college music professors led by musicologist Arthur Mendel
signed an open letter calling for Willson’s resignation charging that he was unqualified and that
his appointment was inappropriate.
551
Soon after, it was reported in newspapers around the
country and several figures, most of whom Willson knew personally, came out in his support.
Echoing rhetoric common during the Cold War, the open letter to the President contrasts
the “high” purposes of the National Endowment on the Humanities with Willson’s work in
“commercial entertainment.” In fact, the creation of the endowment may be seen as reinforcing

551
Arthur Mendel to Lyndon B. Johnson, 30 March 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
178

Cold War ideas about art and education. This is seen in the first section of the act referenced in
Mendel’s letter that focuses both on American superiority and the country’s role as a global
leader.
The Congress hereby finds and declares...that the world leadership which has come to the
United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must
be solidly founded upon worldwide respect and admiration for the Nation's high qualities
as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit.
552

By referencing “ideas” and “spirit,” the language of the act emphasizes things that the Soviet
Union were thought to lack, in other words, the free exchange of ideas and foundational religious
and moral beliefs. Mendel, therefore, immediately ties these concepts to his own plight and that
of the other professors. This is reinforced in the references that follow. Mendel contrasts these
high ideals by focusing on words with negative connotations: “commercial,” “entertainment,”
and “money.”
We see no connection between the high purposes of the Act and the membership of Mr.
Meredith Willson on the Council. However prominent a part he has played in show
business, and however prominent a part commercial TV programs and Broadway
musicals play in the American scene, these things are enterprises designed to make
money, do not need government support, and are unrelated to the purposes of the Act.
Mr. Willson's extensive experience in the world of commercial entertainment in no way
qualifies him to advise the Chairman of the Humanities Council...
553

Of course, the letter goes further, comparing Willson’s musical credentials to that of Bob Hope’s
literary credentials and urging Willson to realize the “inappropriateness of his appointment” and
“resign immediately.”
554
As Willson was the only musician on the council, it is certainly
understandable that musicologists and exclusively classical composers would want to be
represented. Nevertheless, the first council consisted of members from a variety of backgrounds,
not just academics. In addition, their role was simply advisory; the chair of the council was and

552
United States Congress quoted in Arthur Mendel to Lyndon B. Johnson, 30 March 1966.
553
Mendel to Johnson.
554
Ibid.
179

still is the only person who can approve or reject proposals.
555
Given those circumstances,
Mendel’s letter seems to be alarmist, but as I have already demonstrated, the genuine Cold War
fear and anxiety of anything popular or for the masses was pervasive, especially in intellectual
circles.
Most newspaper articles simply reported on the controversy, but Leonard Lyons’s article
on the matter supports the view of the professors. He writes,
No one disputed his gifts as a songwriter, but this Whitehouse [sic] appointment involves
more than the performing arts. The appointee’s qualifications, in the field of the
humanities, would have to include some academic experience... The fact is: Willson’s
appointment came through error. They really meant to appoint O. Meredith Wilson,
president of the University of Minnesota.
556

Clearly Willson took these kinds of statements as personal attacks. On May 27, he wrote a one
sentence letter to Lyons, who may have been a personal friend: “Et tu Brute?”
557
Willson
received a reply (in Latin) from Lyons dated June 3 apologizing. In the letter he writes, “I had
written the truth, not intending to be displeasing.”
558
Willson was not satisfied with the apology
and returned Lyons’s letter with a handwritten comment: “Sorry, but you have written a lie, not
‘the truth.’”
559
In addition, Willson wrote to Gustave Arlt, the president of the Council of
Graduate Schools who had helped establish the NEH. Accompanying a copy of the Lyons article,

555
Although his book is specifically focused on the National Endowment for the Arts, Michael
Sy Uy’s Ask the Experts: How Ford, Rockefeller, and the NEA Changed American Music (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2020) provides some background information that is relevant to
both the NEA and the NEH.
556
Leonard Lyons, “Lyon’s Den,” New York Post, 12 May 1966.
557
Meredith Willson to Leonard Lyons, 27 May 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
558
Typed copy of letter from Leonard Lyons to Meredith Willson, 3 June 1966 Box 33, Meredith
Willson Papers. The copy also includes an English translation by Ed Ainsworth, a Willson
collaborator who worked for the Los Angeles Times.
559
Ibid. The copy of the letter with translation also includes a note that Willson returned the
original letter upon which he wrote those words; I represent it as it appears (typed) on that
document.
180

Willson’s letter reads, “I really think this guy should be answered. Please?”
560
This exchange
underscores Willson’s frustration with the controversy. His response to Lyons’s article is unlike
any other known personal correspondence or verbal exchange in its aggressiveness and tone.
The most interesting aspect of this controversy is perhaps the variety of people who came
out to support Willson, some publicly and some privately. Barnaby Keeney, the chairman of the
NEH and former president of Brown University, was the first to write Willson, with a copy going
to President Johnson.
561
A letter also came from Howard Bowen, an economist and president of
the University of Iowa. Some of Willson’s friends and former associates supported him as well
including the violinist, composer, and pedagogue Samuel Gardner; Alan Hewitt, an actor who
had worked with Willson in the Armed Forces Radio Service; the composer, arranger, and music
editor Ross Hastings; the book and magazine publisher Matthew Huttner; and Herbert Hobler, a
friend from Willson’s days in radio who later went on to be a television producer and owner of
radio stations and cable companies. Most importantly, Willson received support from Howard
Hanson in an essay he penned titled “This Too is Bias.”
While the letters are partially devoted to outlining Willson’s qualifications and
experience, rhetoric contained within them tends to focus on anti-elitism and the meanings of
American music and culture, offering a snapshot of the more inclusive ideas present in American
society in 1966. The rhetoric of ant-elitism tends to be the most forceful. Samuel Gardner, who
he must have met in New York at the Institute of Musical Art (Juilliard), writes,
I near had a fit yesterday when I read the objections from the group of dried-out, jealous
and frustrated musicians. These book-worm, and book-learned so called musicians who

560
Meredith Willson to Gustave Arlt, 27 May 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers. It is
unclear why Willson wrote specifically to Arlt.
561
Even though Keeney was appointed in 1965, he remained at Brown until 1966, during which
time Henry Allen Moe served as the interim chair.
181

know so little of what it really means to “work in music,” are so wrong in their objection
to your choice. Besides, you really know what the “Humanities” mean.
562

Gardner, a concert soloist who had played in the Kneisel quartet and also taught at Juilliard for
many years, was certainly in a position to make this kind of observation. He invokes the age-old
idea that teachers are failed practitioners and also emphasizes the disconnect of academia from
everyday workers. Whether or not he is aware, Gardner also conjures up Van Wyck Brooks’s
formulation regarding the division between theory and practice. A similar charge to Gardner’s
about academia is made in a letter Ross Hastings sent to Albin Krebs of the New York Herald
Tribune, who had written an article about the controversy titled “Sour Notes in the Music
World.” Hastings writes, “It seems to me that humorless men are forever descending the creaky
staircase from ivory towers, shouting at the top of their lungs that Meredith Willson isn’t really a
composer in the B-B-B Class at all, as though their studies had led them to a discovery of
gigantic importance.”
563

Hastings and others also address anti-elitism as it applies to Willson’s background and
education. He writes,
If scholarship was one of the requirements, how come there wasn’t large scale hueing-
and-crying from legal authorities over Willson’s appointment instead of just sour notes
from college music professors? And isn’t it a little dangerous to assume that the only way
to learn anything is to go to college?
564

In a letter to Mendel, Herbert Hobler, after presenting some of Willson’s qualifications,
including “his understanding, interest and assistance to young people over the years,” also
mentions Willson’s educational background, this time defending his financial success:

562
Samuel Gardner to Meredith Willson, 8 April 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
Gardner also sent this letter to President Johnson; a copy of a response letter from the White
House, dated 13 April, is also included in the box.
563
Copy of Ross Hastings to Albin Krebs, 9 April 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
564
Ibid.
182

While Mr. Willson’s academic credentials may have been limited to a high school
diploma, I would like to compliment those persons who may have suggested Mr. Willson
to serve on this Committee, for he is a well-rounded, sensitive musician and composer,
who should not be criticized merely because his talent has permitted him to make a
comfortable living through music.
565

Alan Hewitt’s letter to Mendel gives an extensive explanation of Willson’s background as well
as his support for the arts in Los Angeles and makes a similar point about his commercial
success. He writes that “these facts [about his qualifications] should not be held against him, nor
that he shifted to radio as a conductor, then to television, and then to composing musical
comedies for the theater.”
566
He continues, charging “the letter send to the President by you and
your colleagues of the academic community is a horror of poor judgement and poor taste.”
567

For Mendel, the fact that Willson had had experience in “commercial entertainment”
seems to go beyond “in no way” qualifying him for the position; it seems to disqualify him
completely, as if money had ruined his judgement. The point that his supporters make refuting
this was also made by Willson. An April eighth article from the Boston Globe reports that
“Meredith Willson…has apologized for making money in his profession.”
568
The article quotes
Willson saying, “I can think of some pretty good musicians who don’t scoff at money. Richard
Wagner didn’t write a note unless he got a little side money from the king of Bavaria. And how
about Caruso, Heifetz and Rubinstein?”
569
Although Willson and his supporters may have
slightly misunderstood Mendel’s argument, that he was not familiar with the process of securing
academic grants, the disagreement was about more than that.

565
Herbert Hobler to Arthur Mendel, 12 April 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers. Copies
were also sent to Willson, President Johnson, and, since Hobler was a Princeton alumnus, to the
university itself.
566
Alan Hewitt to Arthur Mendel, 13 April 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
567
Ibid.
568
“Music Man in High Key Scoffs Back at Savants,” Boston Globe, 8 April 1966, 15.
569
Ibid; Willson sometimes stretched the truth to make a point.
183

Howard Hanson, by then the emeritus director of the Eastman School of Music, is most
eloquent and reasoned in his approach to the controversy. He addresses the situation by focusing
on stereotypes. After referencing the contemporary issues of stereotypes based on race and
nationality, Hanson writes, “We sometimes forget, however, that they also exist at higher
cultural levels.”
570
He turns to the bias toward intellectuals that they “could not be effective in
practical affairs or politics” and how the Kennedy administration proved that to be untrue as well
as the bias against actors becoming politicians. He writes,
I am not campaigning for either Mr. [Ronald] Reagan or Senator [George] Murphy, but
the thing which disturbs me is the apparent generalization of both commentators [who he
had recently heard] to the effect that Mr. Reagan and Senator Murphy could not be
competent because they were “Hollywood actors.” There was no effort, so far as I could
detect, to offer any evidence that the gentlemen under discussion were lacking in the
necessary requirements for public office.
571

These examples allow Hanson to transition into the stereotype of Willson found in Mendel’s
letter.
The generalization, of course, was that no composer of “popular” music could possibly
be capable of understanding the cultural needs of our country. In the words of George
Gershwin’s famous song, “It ain't necessarily so,” in spite of the music professors. I know
Meredith Willson. I have great respect for him. I am sure he will be a valuable member of
the President's Council on the Arts. I would prefer him to many of the music professors
who signed the petition!
572

Instead of arguing on the grounds of Willson’s qualifications or on the professors’ lack of
awareness beyond the ivory tower, Hanson gently directs the reader to understand the explicit
bias in the reasoning of Mendel and his associates.
Hanson’s essay also raises another important question of who is best suited to understand
the cultural needs of the country, something upon which other Willson supporters touch. In his

570
Howard Hanson, “This Too is Bias,” Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
571
Ibid.
572
Ibid.
184

letter to Mendel, Hobler writes, “The fact that Mr. Willson…has made major contributions in the
spirit of Rodgers and Hammerstein with such down-to-Earth American shows as ‘The Music
Man’ merely emphasizes his musical talent in the true American sense.”
573
Here Hobler seems to
suggest that Willson’s ability to capture a piece of Americana in his musical indicates his level of
understanding of the U. S. and its cultural needs. Ross Hastings is even more explicit about
Willson’s understanding and advocacy for musical culture. He says,
I personally am not nearly as concerned about this Council as I am about the Cause of
Good Music and the men who make friends for it. Meredith Willson is one of these, and
anyone who doubts this has lost touch with millions of Americans, scholarly or
otherwise, whom to ignore is to betray a great deal of what goes into the meaning of THE
HUMANITIES.
574

Matthew Huttner’s letter to Willson is best at explaining the nature of the American culture the
others reference when he writes that “musical America has a great eclectic tradition to which
your contribution is memorable and manifold.”
575
Thus the American tradition is not limited to
elite arts and culture, making Willson an ideal candidate to serve on the council.
The anti-elitism and conceptions of American culture expressed in this collection of
letters position Willson as a mediator between average Americans and cultural elites. For his
supporters, this trait made him ideally suited to a position on the NCH. Taken as a whole, this
controversy demonstrates the pervasive nature of cultural hierarchy– how a seemingly innocuous
decision made by President Johnson and his advisors could stir such passionate responses on
both sides. Willson had been mediating from the very beginning of his career in music. The
difference this time was that his mediation efforts, his attempt to merge theory and practice, high
and low, classical and jazz, was met with sharp disapproval. As cultural hierarchy played a

573
Hobler to Mendel.
574
Hastings to Krebs.
575
Matthew Huttner to Meredith Willson, 8 April 1966, Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
185

greater role in Willson’s life, the reconciliation between high and low became a central theme in
his works.
“Selling Long-Hair”
In the 1950s, however, Willson most concerned about the implications of cultural hierarchy in
the concert hall. Sometime in the early to mid-1950s, Willson penned an unpublished article
expressing his true frustration with the attitudes found in classical musical circles.
576
This is
probably the most forceful rhetoric employed by Willson to denounce cultural stratification in
music. The article, “Selling Long-Hair,” discusses the issue of making classical music accessible
to a wider audience. He asks rhetorically, “wouldn't you think that some patriotic soul would turn
around and go to work and begin to start to disperse a little long-hair propaganda here in our
beloved land?”
577
He answers, “Well sir, it's not that easy. Right off-hand you'd probably think
the symphony orchestras managers would be delighted to help.”
578
Then he explains the heart of
his argument forcefully:
Well, let me point out to you that the tight little groups who run the managers prefer
things the way they are– the half-empty halls make the tight little group feel more
discriminating and artistic and all like that…

Classical music is not inherently exclusive then; it is made to be that way by the guardians and
benefactors who wish to remain comfortably protected. Here Willson demonstrates his
awareness of the kinds of arguments made by Clement Greenberg and Milton Babbitt about the

576
His essay was most likely intended to be a magazine article because the first page bears an
inscription “for Abel Green,” who was the long-time editor of Variety and because the essay
itself refers to a maximum word count. Willson and Abel must have known each other for
several years by this time because Willson mentions bumping into Green in Paris after
completing the first season of the Good News program in 1938. See Robert Meredith Willson,
And There I Stood With My Piccolo (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1949), 158.
577
Meredith Willson, “Selling Long-Hair,” Box 33, Meredith Willson Papers.
578
“Selling Long-Hair.”
186

preservation and specialization of culture. He continues by describing how this group is able to
keep others away.
Woe unto the poor undeserving slob of a non-indoctrinate doctor, lawyer, merchant or
advertising executive who might accidentally wander into a the concert hall…Why, the
tight little groups will make him think he’s stumbled into a deep-freeze before he gets his
program open to the right page and if he should happen to applaud between movements
of a symphony just once, the horrified looks from even the empty seats will complete the
Treatment and when a person feels inferior like that he feels like a great jerk and this is
not a good feeling. At least it’s nothing you'd go out and buy a ticket for.
579

Instead, orchestras offer pops concerts both to “pay the freight” and to permit the “poor
undeserving slob to have ‘ordinary music’ instead of the kind that’s ‘too good for him.’” That
way the “tight little groups who go to the expressly long-hair concerts can remain relatively cozy
year after year.” In other words, pops concerts pay the bills but also allow the more exclusive
patrons to remain at a distance from those who attend them. It follows, then, that the purported
goal of symphony orchestras to expand the performance of classical music is false; the true goal
is to preserve classical music for a select group of patrons. As Willson explains at the conclusion,
“The tight little groups running symphony orchestras around the country can improve the
musical tastes of our citizenry any time they really want to.” In a roundabout way, Willson
strikes at the heart of the matter, recognizing the ideas of the Frankfurt School and the New York
Intellectuals put into practice. For Willson, then, the idea that high culture can only be fully
grasped by a select group of people is simply a ruse for cultural elites to keep undesirable classes
of people away from them, in other words, as means of social control. Willson’s resistance to
this echoes the way the Young Americans, particularly Brooks and Bourne rejected the

579
The article is typewritten, but there are corrections made by hand. In these circumstances, my
quotations reflect the corrected version. For example, the typewritten word “chief” was replaced
with “advertising executive.”
187

“Arnoldian ideal of elite culture as a means of social control and moral uplift.”
580
There is no
way of knowing for sure without further evidence, but Willson writes as if from personal
experience. Perhaps this is what happened to him in the late 1940s.
Always the optimist, Willson does recognize the goal of expanding accessibility is
possible. A few orchestras and conductors are already doing it. He contends that most people are
simply unaccustomed to the length of classical music works, and it is the job of symphony
orchestras “to show that serious music is not so dang complicated that it requires a special kind
of soul or something in order to enjoy it.”
581
Although his rhetoric is folksy, Willson offers
another rebuttal to the Frankfurt School and New York Intellectuals, particularly the idea that
comprehending high art requires a special kind of reflection and intellectual process that only
some can achieve. He continues,
In addition to stirring up some grudging admiration for long-hair you may well provoke a
few new customers into gingerly showing up during more formal concerts of the season,
some of whom might become regulars and eventually fill in the gaps between the
arrogant score readers in the second balcony and the “don't-you-just-love-his-allegretto”
girls on the main floor.
582

Despite the clear frustration expressed in his article, the optimism Willson articulates is notable
for it would inform his works in musical theatre.

580
Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van
Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill and London: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1990), 116.
581
“Selling Long-Hair.”
582
“Selling Long-Hair.”
188

Chapter 4: Willson’s Musicals
Willson likely wrote his article around the same time he began working on his first musical The
Music Man (1957), and it is not difficult to see the connections between his beliefs about the
long-hair musical establishment and the ways in which hierarchies play out in the musical. As
the town’s librarian and only music teacher, Marian Paroo is Willson’s long-hair (or highbrow)
equivalent in River City. She is, in effect, the custodian of culture in the same way orchestra
boards and managers were custodians of classical music for Willson. Although for Marian
culture is not as exclusive, she still controls the manner by which the townspeople ought to learn
it, and because of that control, her efforts to improve River City’s cultural level fail. Thus,
Willson draws a parallel with classical music’s equally failed efforts to enlighten listeners. By
contrast, the con-man Harold Hill, the musical’s protagonist, represents lowbrow. Not only does
he swindle the citizens of River City out of money, as a travelling salesman, he glorifies
consumerism. He is essentially “selling long-hair,” albeit in a deceitful manner. The fact that he
teaches the young boys Ludwig van Beethoven’s Minuet in G Major, WoO 10, No. 2 strengthens
this connection. Nevertheless, Hill possesses likable lowbrow traits too; he has practical
experience and knowledge and the kind of intelligence and shrewdness that goes along with it.
Thus, he may be thought of as lowbrow for his behavior and his lack of formal education, not his
lack of intelligence. The difference between Willson’s cultural environment and the fictional one
he creates is that in The Music Man, the forces of high and low can be reconciled. This occurs
when Marian effectively embraces Harold’s lowbrow approach by concealing his identity from
the townspeople. Although it does not occur within the musical, Harold presumably embraces
Marian’s expertise in music and literature.
189

Willson also uses song styles in The Music Man to reinforce Harold and Marian’s cultural
alignments. Though their styles are both well within the Broadway tradition, their differences
represent a contrast between high or classical and low or popular. The sweeping melodies of
“My White Knight” and “Goodnight My Someone” contrast quite clearly with the half-
spoken/half-sung songs of Harold Hill. This contrast is most obvious in “Goodnight, My
Someone”/ “Seventy-Six Trombones,” which have the same melody but different meters and
stylistic traits. Marian’s rendition is in the more dignified style of a minuet while Harold gives
his as a popular-style march. The pair (of songs, characters, and cultures) are reconciled at the
climax of the show when they each take up the other’s stylistic traits. This type of melody usage
was also an anchor to Willson’s personal beliefs about music. He believed that a good melody
was the most important component of music, in part because it could serve as a gateway to
introduce classical music to audiences. Thus, melody is both a way to reconcile Harold and
Marian’s cultural alignments in The Music Man and a means for Willson to reconcile classical
and popular music in his own endeavors. The kind of optimism implicit in both cases recalls pre-
war optimism found in the ideas of the Young Americans, Gilbert Seldes, and Paul Whiteman.
This interpretation supposes that Willson imbued his musical with greater cultural
commentary than previously thought, and further evidence can be found in the models from Mid-
western literature that may have inspired Willson. In particular, The Music Man has topical,
stylistic, and thematic parallels with the novels of Sinclair Lewis, especially Main Street (1920),
Babbitt (1922) and The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928). Main Street’s Carol Kennicott, by far
the most cultured women in Gopher Prairie, has many affinities with Marian Paroo, including the
same occupation. Babbitt’s emphasis on conformity, boosterism, and consumerism in the
fictional city of Zenith would not be out of place in The Music Man’s River City. Lowell
190

Schmaltz, a travelling peddler and the narrator of The Man Who Knew Coolidge delivers
monologues much like those given by Harold Hill, and Schmaltz’s first monologue takes place
on a train, the same setting of the opening scene of the musical.
Furthermore, despite some stagings of The Music Man that emphasize the comedic
elements of the characters, Willson was very clear that the show should not be a caricature of
small-town Iowa:
THE MUSIC MAN was intended to be a Valentine and not a caricature. Please do not let
the actors– particularly Zaneeta, Mayor Shinn and Mrs. Shinn, who takes herself quite
seriously– mug or reach for comedy effect. The Delsarte ladies also should be natural and
sincere, never raucous, shrewish or comic per se. The humor of this piece depends upon
its technical faithfulness to the real small-town Iowans of 1912 who certainly did not
think they were funny at all.
583

In fact, As Cara Leanne Wood has shown, Willson was cautious at first in his early public
comments on the show because he knew that some of his character portrayals of Iowans could
have been considered condescending.
584
He only called the musical a “valentine” to his home
state after the characters were embraced by the public. Instead, Wood calls Willson’s attitude
about Iowans in The Music Man “detached and critical.”
585
Wallen Allan Smith, a fellow native
Iowan, was one of the few reviewers who picked up on the more critical side of the musical. In
an article written for the Waterloo (IA) Daily Courier, he asks, “Is Willson making fun of his
neighbors?” and determines that “the Iowan may come to the uncomfortable conclusion that
Willson is truly describing his neighbors, just as Lewis has described the Carol Kennicotts and

583
Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey, The Music Man (New York: Rinimer Corporation,
1958), no page number.
584
Cara Leanne Wood, “Representing the Midwest in American Stage and Film Musical 1948–
1962” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2010), 214.
585
Wood, 213.
191

George Babbitts.”
586
Although other reviewers mention possible literary inspirations like Mark
Twain and Vachel Lindsay, he is also the only reviewer who makes a connection to Lewis.

The Music Man

Much has been made of the biographical elements in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man,
but other sources and models exist. According to Dominic McHugh in his book The Big Parade:
Meredith Willson’s Musicals from “The Music Man” to “1491,” Willson acknowledged the
influence of the Pied Piper, Johnny Appleseed, and O. Henry’s short story “A Retrieved
Reformation.”
587
While these influences give some insight into the musical’s plot and character
archetypes, models of Midwestern literature are more instructive. The novels of Sinclair Lewis
loom largest; his writing has been called “the outstanding representative of the tradition… as it
developed in the Northern states west of Ohio.”
588
Parallels between them and The Music Man
suggest that, like his novels, Willson’s musicals also contain satire and cultural commentary. The
parallels between Lewis’s and Willson’s respective works are most evident in their topics,
settings, and characters, but they also have affinities in their cultural commentary, style, and
themes.
To begin with, Willson had a certain predilection for fellow Midwesterners like Lewis.
As I already discussed in Chapter 1, Willson also knew and admired the syndicated columnist O.
O. McIntyre who was from Gallipolis Ohio. It is also seen in the many references found in The
Music Man. In “Iowa Stubborn” a farmer and his daughter create a brief tableau of Grant

586
Wallen Allen Smith, “Is Music Man Picture of Iowa Neighbors: New Yorker Says Play
Shows ‘Folksy’ Touch,” Waterloo Daily Courier, 3 February 1958, p. 15.
587
Dominic McHugh, The Big Parade: Meredith Willson’s Musicals from “The Music Man” to
“1491” (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 64.
588
James C. Austin, “Sinclair Lewis and Western Humor” in Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis,
edited by Martin Bucco, 158–167 (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1986), 158.
192

Wood’s American Gothic (1930). Wood was a fellow Iowan. During “Ya Got Trouble” Harold
Hill mentions Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, a humor magazine in the 1920s published by the
Minnesotan Wilford Fawcett.
589
Among all of the cultural references, these were two of the very
few that are anachronistic. Willson would have known that, and this suggests that their inclusion
was done deliberately to pay tribute to these figures of Midwestern culture. Sinclair Lewis was
famously a Midwesterner, fictitiously referencing his hometown of Sauk Centre Minnesota in
several of his novels. Furthermore, his novels were widely read and culturally significant.
Richard Lingeman calls Main Street “a literary sensation that rivaled Uncle Tom's Cabin, though
it did not deal with such a profound issue as slavery.”
590
Lewis, Wood, and McIntyre were
particularly interested in depicting their Midwestern roots, and it is easy to see that Willson also
viewed himself in that light.
There are several striking parallels between Harold Hill and Marian Paroo and characters
in Lewis’s novels, the most obvious being Carol Kennicott from Main Street. Both Marian and
Carol are librarians– even though Carol has given up her job to move to Gopher Prairie with her
husband Will. River City and Gopher Prairie are similarly uncultured– though River City seems
to have better public buildings– and both librarians institute a program of cultural education. The
Music Man does not directly depict Marian’s efforts, but the piano lesson scene alludes to the
low mentality of River Citizens and the fact that the ladies do not take Marian’s literary
advice.
591
Carol’s cultural endeavors could easily stand in for what Marian might have tried. In
particular, she joins ladies’ civic groups such as the Thanatopsis literary study group and the

589
Fawcett and Lewis were Minnesota acquaintances. See James C. Austin, “Sinclair Lewis and
Western Humor” in Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis, edited by Martin Bucco, 158–167
(Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1986), 161.
590
Richard Lingeman, “Lewis, Sinclair,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.)
591
I have adopted the term “River Citizens” from its use by Mayor Shinn in the libretto.
193

Pythian Sisters, a ritualistic sororal society.
592
The Thanatopsis ladies, for example, study the
biographies of English poets but reject Carol’s suggestion that they actually read and study their
poetry. One of the ladies reads a paper questioning the morals of the poets Lord Byron and
Robert Burns. After the meeting, Carol muses that “they’re sure that they have culture salted and
hung up,” a sentiment that Marian could easily express about Mrs. Shinn and her clique,
especially their belief that Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac wrote dirty books.
593
In fact, one of the
residents of Gopher Prairie, Mr. Wutherspoon the shoe salesman, has a curiously similar view of
Honoré de Balzac as the ladies of River City. He confides to Carol:
One trouble with books is that they’re not so thoroughly safeguarded by intelligent
censors as the movies are, and when you drop into the library and take out a book you
never know what you’re wasting your time on. What I like in books is a wholesome,
really improving story, and sometimes– Why, once I started a novel by this fellow Balzac
that you read about, and it told how a lady wasn’t living with her husband, I mean she
wasn’t his wife. It went into details, disgustingly! And the English was real poor. I spoke
to the library about it, and they took it off the shelves.
594

Culture is equally salted and hung up in The Music Man through the ladies’ Delsarte exhibition
in the opening scene of Act II. Marian Wilson Kimber explains that the practice of replicating
ancient Greek statuary “made women’s bodies respectable by associating them with high
culture.”
595
Nevertheless, commercialization of the practice in the United States largely diverged
from François Delsarte’s high aims, and this is reflected in its satirical portrayal in the show.
596

In Main Street, Carol’s endeavors also include advocating to build a new library, a new town

592
Thanatopsis is Greek word meaning “contemplation of death;” this could be Lewis’s
commentary on the activities of the group, but it also may refer to the synonymous poem by
William Cullen Bryant; The so-called fireside poets, of which Bryant was a member, were
among the most popular and widely studied American poets of the late nineteenth century partly
because their poems usually included moral messages and themes.
593
Sinclair Lewis, Main Street (New York: New American Library, 2008), 144.
594
Main Street, 75.
595
Marian Wilson Kimber, The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word (University
of Illinois Press, 2017), 92.
596
Ibid.
194

hall, and a new school. Since Gopher Prairie cannot afford it, she approaches the wealthiest
resident, Luke Dawson, who is said to be a millionaire. He, of course, parallels the deceased
Miser Madison of River City, except that unlike Madison, Dawson refuses to finance Carol’s
plans for improving the architecture of the town; Carol also organizes a drama club and sits on
the library board. Like Marian, she is also accused of carrying on affairs with other men in town.
By contrast, Harold Hill shares affinities with Lewis’s Lowell Schmaltz, the main
character in his far less popular novel The Man Who Knew Coolidge (1928).
597
Schmaltz is also
a travelling salesman; in fact, Coolidge also features an opening train scene. The story is
delivered through a series of six monologues and much like Hill, Schmaltz proves to be an
unreliable and less-than-true narrator. For example, Schmaltz claims that he had to drop out of
Amherst College in December of his freshman year because his father died.
598
In a later
monologue, he admits that he flunked out of Amherst, that his father died after he left school,
and that he often got Coolidge mixed up with another classmate.
599
Thus, the entire premise of
the novel is in question much like Hill’s claim that he is a music man. Although Hill’s story
never changes until he is unmasked, like Schmaltz his anecdotes are questionable, for example,
when he claims that Patrick Gilmore (1829–92), Alessandro Liberati (1847–1927), Pat Conway
(1865–1929), Giuseppe Creatore (1871–1952), W.C. Handy (1873–1958), and John Philip Sousa
(1854–1932) came to town in the same day. “Seventy-Six Trombones” is a description of this
supposed “historic day” that never could have actually occurred.
600
They are both con men but in

597
The first of six monologues of which the book is comprised appeared in the American
Mercury in 1927.
598
Sinclair Lewis, The Man Who Knew Coolidge: Being the Soul of Lowell Schmaltz,
Constructive and Nordic Citizen (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1928), 22.
599
The Man Who Knew Coolidge, 164–165.
600
These are all well-known band leaders. Creatore, who was Italian, did not come to the United
States until 1899, seven years after the death of Gilmore.
195

different ways. Hill also delivers several monologues, but they are primarily in the form of
songs, “Ya Got Trouble,” “Seventy-Six Trombones,” and “The Sadder but Wiser Girl.” “Marian
the Librarian” is his only song in which he truly interacts with other characters. Curiously, a
perpetual motion machine makes appearances in both stories. Schmaltz claims that his father lost
his savings from investing in a perpetual motion machine company that failed. In The Music
Man, Hill asks Tommy Djilas, “You're mechanically minded, aren’t you? Ever do anything with
perpetual motion?” to which Tommy replies, “Nearly had it a couple times.”
601

Most importantly, Hill’s rhetorical style is similar to Schmaltz’s, which Lewis scholar
James C. Austin claims is characteristic of Midwestern humor. Austin says that this style, partly
inherited from Yankee or Northern humor, may consist of loosely connected anecdotes, word
play, use of highbrow style to mock highbrow pretensions, satire, and mild ridicule of politics
and society.
602
In the case of Lowell Schmaltz, Austin identifies two qualities that characterize
Lowell Schmaltz’s speaking style, wandering from subject to subject without any seeming
connection and making the most of the incongruous juxtaposition of words.
603
In many ways,
this is Harold Hill’s modus operendi. The clearest examples of juxtaposing incongruous words
are found in the song “Ya Got Trouble.” Hill uses word play, to draw a connection between the
city’s new pool table and the word trouble simply by rhyming the words’ first letters: trouble
“with a capital t and that rhymes with p and that stands for pool.” Since seven other letters of the
alphabet have the same rhyme, the connection he makes is dubious. The list of vices he
associates with pool, as opposed to billiards, is equally impressive, everything from gambling to

601
The Music Man, 1-5-34; the joke is that a perpetual motion cannot exist because it defies the
laws of physics.
602
James C. Austin, “Sinclair Lewis and Western Humor” in Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis,
edited by Martin Bucco, 158–167 (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall, 1986), 159.
603
Austin, 160.
196

sloth. In the process, he juxtaposes words like dandelions, screen door, beefsteak, cistern, and
knickerbockers. If that were not enough, Hill also manages to insert a list of completely
unrelated positive concepts with no congruity among them, “remember the Maine,” Plymouth
Rock, and the Golden Rule.
604

Harold Hill also employs highbrow rhetorical style in “Ya Got Trouble,” when he makes
pronouncements. Most often they come in the form of prefaces such as “friends,” “I say,” and
“let me tell you,” before he makes statements. Often times the statements themselves offer some
kind of moral advice as if being delivered by a priest or minister, for example: “But just as I say,
it takes judgement, brains and maturity to score in a balkline game” and “Friends, the idle brain
is the devil’s playground.”
605
Although the people of River City take his pronouncements
seriously, in the context of the song, he is mocking highbrow pretensions and, at the same time,
gently mocking the overly conservative morality of the River Citizens. Likewise, Schmaltz
frequently begins paragraphs with “let me tell you” and “I always say.”
606
His pronouncements
more often are related to politics and patriotism, for example when he states, “it’s the duty of all
the better-educated citizens to take an interest in the affairs of State.”
607
Both examples are
especially effective since the characters imply that they possess those qualities themselves, even
though it is actually questionable.
Although Hill wandering from topic to topic is evident in his songs as described above, it
is more pronounced in the dialogue between Hill and other townspeople. On several occasions he
quickly changes the topic, either to get out of a situation or to sell an instrument. Hill turns the

604
“Remember the Maine” was a slogan from the Spanish-American War related to the
explosion of the U.S.S Maine in Havana harbor that was attributed to the Spanish.
605
A balkline is one of four lines present on a billiards table, which would distinguish it from a
pool table.
606
See The Man Who Knew Coolidge, 11 and 28, for example.
607
The Man Who Knew Coolidge, 11.
197

school board’s efforts to obtain his credentials into an opportunity to teach them to sing. Later
when they once again ask for his credentials, he “accidentally” pulls out a testimonial from his
pocket instead of his hotel room key:
Yes– well, let’s see if I have my key. What’s this? Oh a testimonial from Madame Rini,
the only female bassoon player ever to appear on the Redpath Circuit. Her stage name, of
course. Actually, she was from Moline. Lida Rose Quackenbush… Oh you’ll never
forget the name. Lida Rose. Same as the old song.
608

This prompts the school board to sing “Lida Rose.” Because Schmaltz delivers monologues
rather than songs, his wanderings tend to be longer and more convoluted, but the change in
topics is just as abrupt:
And me– why say, I read the political editorials in the Advocate– that’s the leading paper
in my town– Zenith– I read ‘em like most folks read the sporting page. And as a result of
all this and certain personal information that I can’t disclose the source of, I’ve come to the
firm conclusion–
Here’s something maybe you gentlemen never thought of:
They can say all they want to about how President Coolidge– good old silent Cal
Coolidge! –isn’t maybe as flashy as some of these statesmen. Maybe he isn’t much given
to shooting off his mouth as certain other public figures that I could name. Maybe he isn’t
what my daughter would call so “Ritzy”–
And say, by golly it’s beyond me where the young generation of today, taking them
by the large, get all this slang that they pull. Why just the other day my daughter was talking
to her brother Robby– That’s the boy’s name; only fifteen; three years younger than his
sister, but smart’s a whip.
609

Austin concludes that Lewis uses this ramble to dryly expose “the complacency of the middle-
class supporters of Calvin Coolidge.
610
While Hill might only be using his ramble to avoid the
school board and lead them to singing, Willson is making fun of the long lists of accolades and
associations musicians use to cultivate prestige.
Austin’s description of Lewis’s satire in the context of Midwestern humor is instructive
for the way Willson satirizes both salesmen and boosterism. While The Man Who Knew

608
The Music Man, 2-2-10.
609
The Man Who Knew Coolidge, 12–13; the paragraphs and punctuation are that of Lewis.
610
Austin, 160.
198

Coolidge features a train scene, the train scene in Babbitt is more detailed and demonstrates a
similar sort of satire as “Rock Island.” In this scene, Babbitt is travelling to Maine for a vacation
with his friend Paul, and the chapter section focuses on the conversation in the smoking
compartment of their Pullman train car. The first topic in the smoking compartment among six
travelers is business conditions:
“Just been making a trip through the South. Business conditions not very good
down there,” said one of the council.
“Is that a fact! Not very good, eh?”
“No, didn’t strike me they were up to normal.”
“Not up to normal, eh?”
“No, I wouldn’t hardly say they were.”
The whole business council nodded sagely and decided, “Yump, not hardly up to snuff.”
“Well business conditions ain’t what they ought to be out West, neither, not by a
long shot.”
611

The conversation continues among the travelers as they discuss the hotel business and the price
of collars. Lewis laces the dialogue with vernacular expressions such as “speakinbout” and
“frinstance,” suggesting their lack of formal education, and emphasizes their reverence for
consumerism.
They went profoundly into the science of business, and indicated that the purpose of
manufacturing a plow or a brick was so that it might be sold. To them, the Romantic
Hero was no longer the knight, the wandering poet, the cowpuncher, the aviator, nor the
brave young district attorney, but the great sales-manager, who had an Analysis of
Merchandizing Problems on his glass-topped desk, whose title of nobility was “Go-
getter,” and who devoted himself and all his young samurai to the cosmic purpose of
Selling– not of selling anything in particular, for or to anybody in particular, but pure
Selling.
612

The first scene in The Music Man similarly begins on a train, with salesmen discussing
business.
Salesman #1: You’re crazy with the heat. Credit is no good for a notion salesman.
Salesman #2: Why not? What’s the matter with credit?

611
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York: Dover Publications, 2003), 106.
612
Babbitt, 108.
199

Salesman #1: It’s old-fashioned. Charlie you’re an anvil salesman – your firm give
credit?
Charlie: No sir.
Salesman #1: Nor anybody else.

As the scene continues, the salesmen begin speaking in rhythm to mimic the movement and
sounds of the train and steam engine, with purely rhythmic vernacular interjections such as
“whadayatalk” and “wheredayagetit.” Like Lewis, Willson emphasizes the mundaneness and
mechanicalness of the seemingly important conversation. The seamlessness between the speak-
song, as Willson called it, and the sounds of the train make it so the rhythms of the words matter
more than their meanings. Willson confirms this understanding of language in his memoir, But
He Doesn’t Know the Territory (1959). In the second forward, he writes, “Words holler at me. I
mean they are more sound than symbol.”
613
As with the conversation in Babbitt, “Rock Island”
continues on, debating whether or not innovations such as the Model T Ford, the “modern
departmentalized groc’ry store,” or the “U-needa Biscuit in an air-tight sanitary package” have
made it more difficult for travelling salesmen.
Both Willson and Lewis mock the self-importance of the salesmen, which speaks to a
feature of Midwestern humor that Austen calls “tough egalitarianism,” a disdain for class
distinction and superior airs.
614
Lewis employs a highbrow declamatory style as a means of satire
and contrasts the seriousness of the topic by using vernacular expressions. Nevertheless, he can
still emphasize the loftiness of the salesmen’s conversation through authorial commentary. As
Willson’s medium is different, he cannot comment in the same way, and instead, he juxtaposes
the rhythm of the train with the conversation to mock its triviality. The seriousness with which

613
Robert Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (New York: G.P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1959), 5.
614
Austin, 162.

200

the characters understand themselves in both novel and musical emerges as a key component of
the two authors satirical approach throughout.
Because of this approach, “Rock Island,” like Lewis’s train scene, also romanticizes and
glorifies travelling salesmen. Harold Hill is the embodiment of Lewis’s “pure Selling.” Although
his customers buy and receive band instruments and uniforms, he is primarily selling a vision,
that is, not “anything in particular,” and since his primary goal is to make money, it does not
matter which instrument is sold to “anybody in particular.” Furthermore, the speak-song concept
used in “Rock Island” originated in an advertising gimmick. In the mid-1940s, while working on
the Sparkle Time radio program Willson had the idea to have the small group of singers under his
direction speak the commercials for Canada Dry in unison, like a Greek chorus.
615
In order to
keep the speakers together, Willson resorted to setting the dialogue in rhythm while the chorus
maintained a casual speaking style.
616
The “Talking People,” as he called them became quite
popular, and he continued the gimmick throughout the run of the program.
Midwestern satire can also be found in the musical’s mocking of politicians. The
members of the schoolboard cannot agree on anything, yet they are easily persuadable when
Harold Hill teaches them how to sing together. Although they are now in agreement, or in
harmony at least, they are completely ineffective. Mayor Shinn is equally gullible and
ineffective. He nearly buys a flugelhorn for his son before realizing that he does not have one.
Although he recognizes Hill as a swindler, his efforts are weak because Shinn is easily distracted
and delegates responsibility to the useless schoolboard.

615
Robert Meredith Willson, And There I Stood With My Piccolo (New York: Doubleday and
Co., 1949), 246.
616
Ibid., 247.
201

The satire, though, comes from their self-importance. Much like the examples from
Babbitt and “Rock Island,” the focus is on mocking pretentiousness. Shinn tries to speak in a
high style but nearly always fails. When speaking to the townspeople in one instance he says,
“Rest assured this snake in our bosom would have been misapprehended by this time. Yes! And
always remember– fellow River Citizens, I can only remind you that I did everything in my
power to prevent this dire happening from– ah– happening.” Also, he often tries but fails to
recite the Gettysburg Address. His failures aside, the choice of text is questionable given that
Lincoln’s address is not really suitable for an Independence Day celebration.
617
Other
malapropisms and awkward expressions can be found in his conversations. Shinn invents words
or confuses expressions, saying, “Don’t counterdict me,” and “I’ll tell you something, my fine
young feathered– my feathered young– never mind!” Willson mocks the self-importance of the
ladies of River City too. As in “Rock Island,” he uses song lyrics but, in this instance, relies on
repetition and onomatopoeic effects: “pick a little, talk a little, pick a little, talk a little, cheap,
cheap, cheap, talk a lot, pick a little more.”
The ladies also exhibit another subtle but fundamental feature of Midwestern humor,
which Austen describes as “an ambivalence, a reaction against itself, even in the end a kind of
self-torture,” in other words, two contradictory sides.
618
He gives further divisions of this feature,
including a “jarring note of skepticism in some of its most cocksure assertions.”
619
In The Music
Man, this can be seen in the following exchange between Hill and the ladies:
Eulalie: She [Marian] made brazen overtures to a man who never has a friend in this town
till she came here– old Miser Madison.
Harold: (puzzled) Miser Madison. Madison Gymnasium, Madison Picnic Park, Madison
Hospital– that Miser Madison?

617
The only plausible reason for doing so is that the battle of Gettysburg took place on July 1
through July 3 1863.
618
Austin, 161.
619
Ibid.
202

Maud: Exactly. Who’d he think he was anyway?
620

Another division, described by Austin as “a deviousness in its prudery,” is evident in the same
scene.
621
The ladies’ prudishness is apparent in their outrage toward the literature Marian has
advised them to read, Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac, calling them “dirty books.” At the same
time, they reject the books, they accept and perpetuate an equally dirty (but false) rumor that
Marian was Miser Madison’s mistress. This deviousness is punctuated by the double entendre
spoken by Eulalie Shinn, “Bal-zac,” which Willson emphasizes in the score through rhythmic
augmentation. Austin notes that this kind of moral ambivalence or contradiction is most evident
in the “dirty story,” a type of humor advanced in Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang.
622
The fact that
Willson references the magazine in “Ya Got Trouble” as a sign of moral degradation and then
includes his own “dirty story” later, adds to the ambivalence already present in this later scene.
Perhaps the most notable division of Austin’s fundamental observation is the “kind of
self-torture,” which is derived from local boosterism and pride.
623
In other words, it is
boosterism taken to such an extreme that it is counterproductive. Austin calls it an obverse side
to local pride in which “the humor often turns upon itself.”
624
For example, during a speech to
the Zenith Real Estate Board, George Babbitt boasts, “I tell you, Zenith and her sister-cities are
producing a new type of civilization…The extraordinary, growing, and same standardization of
stores, offices, streets, hotels, clothes, and newspapers throughout the United States shows how
strong and enduring a type is ours.”
625
While Babbitt is attempting to tout the exceptionalism of
Zenith, he ends up showing that the city is not really unique at all. In The Music Man, it comes

620
The Music Man, 1-6-44; Emphasis is the author’s.
621
Austin, 161.
622
Ibid.
623
Ibid., 162.
624
Ibid..
625
Babbitt, 141.
203

through most clearly in the song “Iowa Stubborn.” The song presents itself as a welcome song
expressing local pride, but many of the lines quickly turn upon themselves. For example, the
beginning of the first line, “Oh, there’s nothing halfway about the Iowa way to treat you,” sets up
a positive expectation that then takes an ironic turn: “when we treat you, which we may not do at
all.” The same thing happens in the following lines:
Join us at the picnic, you can eat your fill of all the food you bring yourself…
Glad to have you with us, even though we may not ever mention it again…
We can be cold as our falling thermometers in December… but we'll give you our shirt
and a back to go with it if your crops should happen to die.

These lyrics also have an element of the self-torture Austin describes in that they acknowledge
the unfriendly behavior of Iowans, the cold winter weather, and the possibility of crop failure.
The lyrics, then, present a contrast to the jaunty melody so that it becomes a sort of anti-welcome
song.
The warm reception the musical received from Midwesterners combined with Willson’s
folksy public persona may be seen as another layer of self-torture. Main Street was received in
much the same way. Lewis’s publisher suggested that the novel was popular in New York City
because the city contained the greatest aggregate of people who had come from “Main Street.”
626

But it was also popular in the Midwest when those New Yorkers sent copies of the book back
home. Lewis was amused by its popularity among Midwesterners since it did not always portray
them in a good light. He joked that, “Some hundreds of thousands read the book with the same
masochistic pleasure that one has sucking an aching tooth.”
627
It may be that the Midwesterners’

626
Richard Lingeman, “Sinclair Lewis Arrives,” New England Review 23, no. 1 (Winter 2002):
22–42.
627
Sinclair Lewis, The Man from Main Street: A Sinclair Lewis Reader: Selected Essays and
Other Writings, 1904-1950 (New York: Random House, 1953), 54.
204

sort of masochism and ability to laugh at themselves was also why The Music Man was warmly
received in Willson’s home state– that they could understand it in a way that others could not.
The Music Man also shares similar themes to Lewis’s novels. Many of his novels are
centered around characters who in some way disrupt the status quo. Thus, individuals come into
conflict with the conformity of society. In 1920, Carl van Doren, the literary critic of the Nation,
dubbed this literary trope, the “revolt from the village.” Lewis scholar Richard Lingemen
explains that this trope in Main Street was a “veiled protest against the postwar repression known
as the Red Scare” and that the repression “represented a heavy-handed attempt by the political
and business establishments, in league with the forces of cultural reaction…to impose a political
and artistic orthodoxy on the country.”
628
He goes on to say that “Main Street was a literary cry
against this conservative backlash.”
629
The conformity, however, is just as important as the
revolt. The lawyer Guy Pollock directly discusses with Carol the strong pull to conform despite
his initial independence. He calls it the Village Virus and explains, “The Village Virus is the
germ which– it’s extraordinarily like hook-worm– infects ambitious people who stay too long in
the provinces.”
630
Pollock goes on to explain that he has succumbed to comfort and complacency
and questions whether it will happen to Carol. This question constitutes the primary conflict in
Main Street.
Marian represents a similar revolt, but Willson uses conformity differently than Lewis, to
demonstrate its dangers. Marian’s assumed higher level of education and predilection for
literature and music aside, the Paroo’s are outsiders because they are later arrivals to River City.
Also, their neighbors are presumably WASP while they are Irish Catholic, and Marian, according

628
Richard Lingeman, “Lewis, Sinclair,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
629
Ibid.
630
Main Street, 173.
205

to her mother, is almost old enough to be ineligible for marriage. The Music Man complicates
Marian’s revolt through the addition of Harold Hill, who, in this context, recalls common Cold
War anxieties. He uses the conformity of River Citizens to create panic and lull the townspeople
into a state of compliance the same way mass culture was said to affect average Americans.
While Hill’s “think system,” whereby children learn to play their instruments simply by thinking
about it, is a nod to the numerous correspondence courses of the era that promised quick mastery
of skills, it also ironically points to anti-intellectualism in general. Therefore, Main Street and
The Music Man have similar themes, but they are used for different purposes representative of
their different cultural and political contexts.
There are too many striking parallels and curiously similar elements in The Music Man
and Lewis’s novels to be a mere coincidence. No mention of Lewis exists in documentation of
Willson’s life and works, but none is needed. Main Street, for example, was so ubiquitous that it
even appeared on “household shelves that bore only a handful of volumes besides the Bible.”
631

Several other novels were serialized in popular magazines. At the time Willson wrote The Music
Man, Lewis’s novels were the quintessential literary representation of the Midwest.
Even without the supporting evidence uncovering his cultural ideology and the parallels
between his work and Lewis’s novels, early drafts of The Music Man show just how much social
and cultural issues were intertwined with the story. For example, several drafts feature a severely
disabled boy in a wheelchair and his mother, who has been hiding him away to avoid ridicule
from the townspeople and to avoid him being sent to an asylum by the school board.
632
A few
drafts also feature greater foregrounding of Tommy Djilas and the immigrant community in

631
George Killough, introduction to Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (New York: New American
Library, 2008.), 5.
632
McHugh, 44.
206

River City.
633
The undertones of these elements are retained in the Broadway version but much
more subtly. The boy in the wheelchair became the lisping Winthrop Paroo, still disabled but not
shunned by his community in the same way. His lisp is exaggerated and played comedically in
most productions, but there is nothing preventing a director from choosing to treat his disability
more seriously. The only remnant of Tommy being from an immigrant family is his last name,
which was inspired by Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslavian dissident.
634
Mayor Shinn’s comments
about him, for example, “His father is one a’them day laborers south a’town,” does not have the
impact it could.
635
The need to present a clear and concise narrative that fit within established
Broadway conventions ultimately forced the removal of many of the show’s more serious
elements. Still, their initial inclusion further supports the need for alternate interpretations of the
musical.
As I discussed in the previous section, the political and cultural context in which The
Music Man was written and composed was fraught with concerns about cultural hierarchy, so it
is no surprise that the conflict between high and low is a major theme in the musical. The theme
may be elusive on the surface for two reasons. First, as the entire vehicle for Willson’s message
is a Broadway musical, there are displays of neither high or low culture or class. In other words,
Marian does not sing classical music, go to the symphony, or collect cultural objects like art any
more than Harold sings folk music, does manual labor, or lives in a slum. The characters must
exist within the limits of the genre and merely represent or are symbolic of high and low.
Second, the primary concern of the musical is to represent highbrow and lowbrow attitudes about
culture rather than cultural products or social classes, which requires more subtlety. This is an

633
McHugh, 62.
634
Territory, 135.
635
The Music Man, 1-5-33.
207

important distinction because it reflects the conception of highbrow and lowbrow as set out by
Van Wyck Brooks, which I discussed in chapter one. Therefore, in this case it is better to think
of highbrow and lowbrow attitudes as different approaches to life that favor intellectualism or
practicality, respectively. For example, classical music may be thought of as highbrow because it
is intended for intellectual enjoyment or enlightenment whereas popular music may be thought
of as lowbrow because it is intended to serve a practical purpose, for dancing, story-telling,
community-building, or making money.
636
Additionally, my interpretation places emphasis on
the meaning of Willson’s musicals in their contemporary contexts– the way highbrow and
lowbrow was understood at the time. While it is perfectly legitimate to interpret Willson and his
work using highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow as a modern analytical framework (which is
different from the historical understanding), it is not my purpose, nor is it particularly useful for
understanding Willson and his music.
More importantly, cultural figures like Brooks, Gilbert Seldes, and Paul Whiteman were
seeking ways to reconcile and reconnect these disparate attitudes or approaches to culture rather
than delineate their differences. They all believed in some way that highbrow and lowbrow
approaches (and the culture that was produced by them) had once existed together as two sides of
the same coin– or as Brooks noted, in the character type of the Puritan. Brooks conceived of a
cultural renewal that bridged the gap between intellectuals and workers, much like the
collaborations between designers and artisans that William Morris and the Arts and Crafts
movement had advanced in England. Gilbert Seldes sought to dismantle the conception of
cultural hierarchy and replace it with a new framework that only distinguished culture by its
quality of execution. The task was much more difficult with music. Paul Whiteman made several

636
Of course, this does not always mean music is used as it was originally intended.
208

attempts, first using classical melodies to compose popular songs, then creating a hybrid
ensemble and commissioning works for it to perform. Willson also cycled through similar
attempts, finally focusing on the quality of melodies as the means of reconciling classical and
popular music.
Keeping Brook’s concept of highbrow and lowbrow in mind, The Music Man contains
several examples that directly contrast the two approaches but also show how they may be
brought together or reconciled. Marian’s position as River City’s librarian and only music
teacher immediately positions her as a highbrow. Willson reinforces this by making Marian not
only the librarian but also the owner of all of the books. Likewise, as a traveling salesman,
Harold represents lowbrow practicality. The fact that he is actually a con-man and only
concerned with making money makes him more so. The Music Man contrasts them further
through their musical styles, approaches to learning, and what kind of mate they prefer.
The clearest contrast between Harold and Marian exists in their musical styles. Marian
sings the classical-style minuet “Goodnight My Someone” to the same tune as Harold’s popular
style “Seventy-Six Trombones.” The forms of the two songs are slightly different as well. In
keeping with standard American march form, which calls for a repeat of each strain,
“Trombones” takes the form AABBAA.
637
It also has a typical four measure introductory phrase
commonly found in American marches.
638
The song begins in C major, but the B section
modulates to F major, which is also consistent with march form. The subsequent A sections
modulate to E-flat major instead of returning to C major. The first recapitulation of A is

637
In the version from the original Broadway cast recording there is an additional instrumental A
section that closes out the track, but it does not exist in the Broadway score; instead, the song
segues to a dance.
638
See, for example, Star and Stripes Forever and the Liberty Bell March by John Philip Sousa
and Americans We by Henry Fillmore.
209

instrumental only and takes on the character of big band swing; the second returns to march style
and features the chorus. There is no indication why Willson did not return to C major in the
recapitulation of the A sections, but it might have been a better key for the full chorus.
“Goodnight” was pared down to a conventional AABA form, but the sections are still 16
measures each, making the entire form 64 measures rather than the typical 32. The B section
modulates from C major to F major as in “Trombones,” but the last A section returns to the
original key. For “Goodnight,” it may be that Willson was simply revising the song to a more
conventional Broadway form, but by keeping the modulation from C to F major and not the one
from F to E-flat major, he also created a form loosely resembling rounded binary (|A :|: BA:||),
the same form as many classical minuets found in minuet-trio movements, even though a minuet
usually moves to the dominant rather than the subdominant. Willson may have been thinking of
the only real piece of classical music in the show, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Minuet in G Major
WoO 10, No. 2, whose initial minuet has the form I have given above. Also notice the similar
arpeggiated figures in the accompaniment of the two pieces (Example 25). These resemblances
help reinforce the association between “Goodnight” and classical style.
Example 25. Accompaniment Comparison of the First Eight Measures of Beethoven's
Minuet in G Major and “Goodnight, My Someone”

Willson wrote “Trombones” first, then realized the melody worked equally as well as a
minuet, and he decided that retaining both versions worked because it shows Marian and
210

Harold’s connection to each other early in the first act.
639
As I discussed in chapter two, using
the same melody for compositions of different styles was not an entirely new idea. In part, it
stemmed from the practice of “jazzing the classics,” something found in American vernacular
music even in the previous century but more recently advanced by Paul Whiteman. At the same
time, Willson’s creative approach to this situation demonstrates his commitment to the belief that
good melodies could be found in a variety of music styles. Willson expounded on this belief in
concrete terms in his radio shows shortly before and during the writing of The Music Man in
earnest.
640

Willson approached this topic by focusing on short melodic motives that could be found
in several different musical compositions. In a 1952 example from Meredith Willson’s Music
Room, he introduces the motive sol-la-sol-me, by playing the song “Down by the O-Hi-O”
(1920) as sung by the Andrews Sisters (Example 26).
641
He points out that the same motive
begins two other songs, “In the Gloaming,” (1877) (Example 27) by the British composer Annie
Fortescue Harrison (1848–1944) and “Silent Night” (1818) by Franz Gruber (1787–1863). Then
he introduces the long hair example, “Votre toast, je peaux vous le render” from Carmen (1875)
by Georges Bizet (1828-1875), commonly known as the “Toreador Song,” which also begins
with the same motive (Example 28).

639
Meredith Willson, But He Doesn’t Know the Territory (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,
1959), 37–38; for the order in which they were composed see McHugh, 87.
640
Dominic McHugh surmises that Willson began working on The Music Man between 1953 and
1954; see The Big Parade, 39.
641
Great American Songbook Digital Archives, “Meredith Willson’s Music Room, 6 October
1952,” available from https://songbook.historyit.com/; Internet; accessed 20 September 2020.
211

Example 26. Opening Measures of "Down by the O-Hi-O

Example 27. Opening Measures of “In the Gloaming”

Example 28. Opening Measures of “Votre toast, je peaux vous le render”

He comments that “when the little short tunes that go to make up long hair pieces are pointed
out, the listener can’t help but enjoy hearing how many different ways a master composer can
present such a short little tune in the creation of great music.”
642
Willson’s main objective in this
episode is to make classical music less intimidating to listeners. He says that after giving long
introductions to pieces with dates and catalog numbers, as is common in classical music radio,
“we don’t blame you for tuning out on such a frightening announcement.”
643
Nevertheless, by
association, he is implying that if popular songs contain some of the same melodic materials as
classical pieces, perhaps they also have merit. More importantly, like Gilbert Seldes, he creates a
means by which classical and popular music may be seen as two sides of the same coin,

642
“Music Room, 6 October 1952,” p. 5.
643
Ibid.
212

evaluated on the same terms, and brought into conversation with one another. With “Seventy-Six
Trombones”/Goodnight My Someone,” Willson illustrates the same idea but through music
rather than through speaking.
Willson uses counterpoint songs, songs whose melodies, rhythms, and harmonies match
up so they can be sung together, for dramatic effect as well.
644
“Pick-a-little, Talk-a-little,” sung
by the ladies of River City, and “Goodnight Ladies,” sung by the school board are performed in
counterpoint. The coincidence of the two songs emphasizes both groups susceptibility to
manipulation. Earlier in scene, Harold convinces Eulalie Shinn, the mayor’s wife, to chair a
ladies committee on dance despite the mayor’s suspicion of him and, once again, distracts the
school board members from obtaining his credentials. In short, the songs reinforce the gullibility
of River Citizens as well as the charms of Harold Hill. The second pair of songs, “Lida Rose,”
sung by Marian and “Will I Ever Tell You?” sung by the school board, have an indirect
connection with the action in the musical even though the songs’ lyrics are more related to each
other.
645
Once again, Harold prompts the school board members to sing to distract them from
obtaining his credentials. Harold introduces it as an “old song,” suggesting that they already
know it– even though it was written by Willson for the musical. Its status as a diegetic old love
song adds greater meaning to “Will I Ever Tell You?” an exegetic song, because Marian
imagines a love song in her lyrics:
Dream of now.
Dream of then.
Dream of a love song
That might have been.

Do I love you?
Oh yes, I love you,

644
Dominic McHugh contends that Willson is the first Broadway composer to use counterpoint
songs to heighten the dramatics of a show.

213

And I’ll bravely tell you,
But only when we dream again.

Sweet and low;
Sweet and low;
How sweet the mem’ry;
How long ago.

In this regard “Lida Rose” has a dual purpose, serving as a song in its own right and as the
imaginary song in Marian’s dreams.
The most significant pair of counterpoint songs for the purpose of my argument, “My
White Knight” and “The Sadder but Wiser Girl,” (example 29) represent another way that
contrasting approaches may be reconciled. Of course, they do not appear in counterpoint in the
Broadway version of the musical, only as songs individually sung by Marian and Harold,
respectively. The duet version, as part of a footbridge scene in Act I, was cut and there is little
trace of the two songs’ affinities in their accompaniments and styles.
646

Example 29. “My White Knight” and “The Sadder but Wiser Girl” in Counterpoint

Once again, Marian is given a ballad with sweeping melodies which, in an earlier version, would
have been more operatic. As Dominic McHugh has discussed, after the initial duet setting
Willson experimented with expanding “My White Knight” into a longer piece in the manner of
“Soliloquy” from Carousel (1945).
647
The idea was to capitalize on Barbara Cook’s vocal talents
and balance out Harold’s first-act numbers. This version was also cut in favor of the simpler

646
McHugh, 84.
647
Ibid., 92.
214

ballad that exists in the Broadway score. By contrast, Harold is given a popular-style song.
McHugh suggests that “The Sadder but Wiser Girl” has a vaudevillian quality, especially
because the repeated lyrical and cadential pattern preceding the refrain, “The sadder but wiser
girl for me,” alludes to the vaudevillian practice of repeating dance steps.
648
The contrast of style
and melodic contour set to the same harmonic structure in these two songs place highbrow and
lowbrow styles on the same plane and imply that both have merit. This is not unlike the way
Gilbert Seldes discussed the merits of both the great and minor (popular) arts.
Taken as a whole, Marian and Harold’s songs exhibit broader stylistic contrasts. The
sweeping melodies of “My White Knight” and “Til There Was You” contrast quite clearly with
the half-spoken, half-sung songs of Harold Hill. In her article “Iowa Stubborn: Meredith
Willson's Musical Characterization of his Fellow Iowans,” Roberta Schwartz analyzes and
classifies these differences. According to her classification, most of Harold’s songs are speak-
songs, ones that contain spoken words written out rhythmically. This occurs in song
introductions, for example, in “Seventy-Six Trombones” and in songs that frequently vacillate
between singing and speaking such as “Ya Got Trouble” and “The Sadder but Wiser Girl.”
649
As
I mentioned in my discussion of “Rock Island,” the term speak-song was Willson’s own,
describing how he wanted the music to grow organically from the dialogue. Rather than use
recitative-like introductions as is common in musical theatre, his idea was to write out
transitional dialogue in rhythm. Harold’s other song, “Marian the Librarian” is conventional, but
the rhetorical style is not. Schwartz classifies this song as dialogic because Harold sings with
musical gestures that mimic the patterns and intonation of speech. The melody consists mostly of

648
McHugh, 88.
649
Roberta Schwartz, “Iowa Stubborn: Meredith Willson’s Musical Characterization
of his Fellow Iowans,” Studies in Musical Theatre 3, no.1 (August 2009), 40; Schwartz considers
“Trombones” a specialty number also because it takes the form of a march.
215

two types of gestures: short phrases that move by step or small leap and longer phrases that move
only stepwise. The rests in between the short phrases simulate natural pauses that would occur if
the lyric was spoken. While this is Harold’s only dialogic song, Schwartz observes that this
rhetorical style is found chiefly in the songs sung by the local Iowans. On the other hand,
Marian’s songs, “Goodnight My Someone,” “My White Knight,” “Will I Ever Tell You?” and
“Til There Was You,” are purely conventional. This makes sense to Schwartz as “education,
inheritance and marital status isolate her from the rest of the community.”
650
These are some of
the same qualities that cement her position as a highbrow as well. Marian’s classical style is
further differentiated by the actor who originated the role on Broadway, Barbara Cook. Although
Cook was a versatile actor and singer, she became noted as a coloratura soprano for her
performance of “Glitter and Be Gay” in the 1956 premiere of Candide. By contrast, Robert
Preston, who played Harold Hill, was primarily a stage and screen actor, not a singer. Willson
and his team casted the two leads perfectly for what they were intended to represent.
Song lyrics and scenes also play a considerable role in displaying the contrasting
approaches of Harold and Marian. The lyrics to their counterpoint songs I discussed stylistically
above are a good example. Both Marian and Harold’s romantic preferences seem reasonable, but
there are hints that Marian’s standards might be too high. Marian says she would like a man
“who is not ashamed of a few nice things,” presumably including cultural objects like books,
music, a painting or sculpture. While this is rather modest and might be interpreted as
middlebrow, in its historical context, the accumulation of cultural objects is something the
Young Americans associated with highbrows. Marian also hopes that he would “occasionally
ponder what makes Shakespeare and Beethoven great,” the implication being that he would

650
Schwartz, 38.
216

already be indoctrinated to this viewpoint through cultural education. Nevertheless, a white
knight conjures up unrealistic fictional visions of a masculine savior, even if she does use the
term ironically. Furthermore, in the piano lesson, Mrs. Paroo claims “there’s not a man alive who
could hope to measure up to that blend a’ Paul Bunyan, Saint Pat and Noah Webster you’ve
concocted for yourself outa your Irish imagination, your Iowa stubbornness and your liberry fulla
books.”
651
Harold, on the other hand, is much more practical and single-minded. He is quite clear
that he wants a woman with experience– sexual experience, someone like Hester Prynne from
The Scarlet Letter, but he is also looking for a woman with the kind of wisdom that is derived
from life experience rather than formal education. These lyric examples perfectly illustrate the
fundamental difference between highbrow and lowbrow: the contrast between an intellectual
mindset and a practical one.
Harold and Marian’s approaches to music education fall along the same lines. As I have
already mentioned, Harold’s method is the “Think System” whereby if the boys think the Minuet
in G, they “won’t have to bother with the notes” or even pick up their instruments.
652
Of course,
in spite of its name, Harold’s system ironically requires very little intellectual effort. Harold’s
method is ineffective for learning music, but he does succeed in creating enthusiasm among the
boys and the townspeople. Marian has stricter and more rigid expectations in her piano lesson
with Amaryllis. While playing her exercises, Marian constantly corrects Amaryllis on her
technique and tempo: “Little slower and please keep the fingers curved as nice and high as you
possibly can.”
653
Amaryllis apparently speeds up so much that Marian must wind up the
metronome and beat time along with it. Her method is so strict and inflexible that Amaryllis

651
The Music Man, 1-4-22.
652
Ibid., 2-1-8.
653
Ibid., 1-4-20.
217

either meets her standards or not. Marian never stops to explain or demonstrate how she might
meet them. With this misguided approach to teaching piano, it is no wonder River Citizens are
not enthusiastic about music. It is the same kind of highbrow, take-it-or-leave-it approach to
classical music that Willson so strongly disliked. He refuted the idea that classical music and
high culture in general was reserved for only a select few who have the intellectual ability to
understand it. Willson realized that listeners simply needed a way to relate to classical music so
he broke it down into melodies and movements rather than demand they listen to an entire piece
without any preparation.
The library scene is perhaps the best representation of Marian’s misguided, highbrow
approach as well as Harold’s attempts to undermine it. She demands absolute control over the
space by requiring strict silence. Harold disrupts the silence and provokes her with the threat of
emptying a bag of marbles onto the floor, causing Marian to shout, “No!” and break her own
rule. Even the “Marian the Librarian” ballet is danced “terribly quietly, practically on tip-toe.”
654

Here the library and its rules serve as a metaphor for the concert hall as described in Willson’s
“Selling Long-Hair” manuscript I discussed earlier. He writes that a person entering a concert
hall might think “he’s stumbled into a deep-freeze before he gets his program open to the right
page and if he should happen to applaud between movements of a symphony just once, the
horrified looks from even the empty seats will complete the Treatment…it’s nothing you'd go
out and buy a ticket for.
655
” Marian’s reaction to Harold is just as cold. Like Willson, Harold
challenges the usefulness of such rules and conventions– though his main objective is to provoke
Marian. Harold continues his challenge in his song “Marian the Librarian” by describing

654
The Music Man, 1-7-48.
655
The article is typewritten, but there are corrections made by hand. In these circumstances, my
quotations reflect the corrected version. For example, the typewritten word “chief” was replaced
with “advertising executive.”
218

circumstances where Marian’s rule is unreasonable, for example “if the library caught on fire and
the volunteer hose brigademen had to whisper the news.”
656
Later in the song, Harold mocks the
strictness and sacredness of the rule of silence: “For the civilized world accepts as unforgivable
sin any talking out loud with any librarian.”
657
In the previous scene Harold learns that the ladies
of River City have not heeded Marian’s literary advice, and the library scene shows that it is a
result of Marian’s strict and controlled approach to “improving River City’s cultural level” with
which she was entrusted.
658
In short, Marian’s methods are a failure.
Dramatically speaking, Marian and Harold are reconciled at the conclusion when they
realize they are in love, but the show also demonstrates that practical, lowbrow methods are
more effective in achieving the characters’ goals. Through trickery and showmanship, Harold
creates enthusiasm for both music and literature, something Marian could never do with her own
methods, but by withholding evidence that could expose Harold as a fraud, Marian engages in
trickery of her own. They are musically reconciled in the reprise of “Seventy-Six Trombones”/
“Goodnight My Someone”– the songs they sing individually in the first act– when they
eventually take up each other’s versions of the same melody (Examples 30 and 31). Here
Willson shows that, though practical lowbrow methods may work better, the goal is to bring
classical and popular music into conversation with one another and that highbrow and lowbrow
mindsets can give way to more universal attitudes.

656
The Music Man, 1-7-48.
657
Ibid.
658
Ibid., 1-4-21.
219

Example 30. Beginning of “Goodnight, My Someone” Reprise with Marian and Harold
Singing their Own Songs

Example 31. “Goodnight, My Someone” Reprise with Marian and Harold Singing Each
Other’s Songs

If there is any doubt about Willson’s mindset regarding The Music Man, synopses for a
follow up musical dating from 1958 confirm it. Variously titled The Son of the Music Man, The
Son of the Son of the Music Man, and Harold Hill III, these synopses feature lead characters who
hail from different musical traditions.
659
Harold Hill is a concert pianist who falls in love with
Bill Gaynor, the daughter of a popular music publisher in New York City. Bill’s father Emanuel,
who hates classical music, is in search of a hit. Wanting to help Emanuel find a hit and also
convert him to classical music, Harold writes three songs together with Bill. In the final scene,
Harold reveals to Emanuel that those three songs feature themes derived from Johannes
Brahms’s Fourth Symphony.
660
While Willson might have been suggesting that classical themes
should be used for popular songs, it is more likely that he wanted to show that both popular and
classical music could have good melodies. As McHugh notes, “The mixture of high and low

659
McHugh 128.
660
Ibid., 129.
220

culture was a subject dear to his heart and was something he had advocated throughout his
career.”
661
Whether or not it was his explicit intention to use The Music Man as an outlet for this
subject, it pervades the musical as well as other works of Willson’s creativity.
Willson’s Other Musicals
None of Willson’s other three musicals present such a clear message about cultural
hierarchy for good reason. Willson had considerably less control over The Unsinkable Molly
Brown (1960) because he did not write the book. Although he did write the book for Here’s Love
(1963), it is an adaptation of the 1947 movie Miracle on 34
th
Street, and therefore Willson had
less control over the musical’s plot and characters. 1491 (1969) never made it to Broadway and
was in a constant state of change, which makes it difficult to assess Willson’s intentions and the
musical’s themes. Nevertheless, some of the music from these shows demonstrate Willson’s
continued commitment to certain themes. All three musicals contain elements of class distinction
and related plot tension which requires some kind of resolution.
Molly Brown contains much more overt issues regarding classism both between the two
leading characters, Molly Brown and her husband Johnny, and between the couple and their
social environments. Both Molly and Johnny are rural, poor, and uneducated, but Molly’s
ambition is to be wealthy enough to provide for her father and to learn to read and write. While
Johnny is less ambitious, he is in love with Molly and goes along with whatever she wants. The
main tension of the musical arises when they become rich from striking gold in Colorado and
attempt to fit in with Denver’s elite and, eventually, the elite social circles of Europe.
Willson uses many of the same musical strategies to draw the various class distinctions.
As in The Music Man, the two leading characters have different musical styles. Molly, who was

661
McHugh, 129.
221

played by Broadway actress Tammy Grimes, has a more limited vocal range, employs speak-
song, and sings fewer of the musical’s ballads. On the other hand, the role of Johnny is written
for someone with considerably greater vocal talents. Johnny sings most of the ballads and even
has his own soliloquy. There is some discontinuity, though, because Johnny’s lyrics tend to be
simpler and rely more on cliches. “Leadville Johnny Brown,” subtitled soliloquy, is highly
unconventional for a Broadway song. This through-composed number is loosely organized and
sung freely, with dialogue interspersed between sung sections. Ordinarily, this would be a place
where Willson would write out the dialogue in speak-song since there is underscoring, but in this
instance, the effect is closer to melodrama, thereby allowing for greater emotional expression.
Willson also uses unsettling chromatic alterations and striking harmonic progressions, a
significant departure from the musical language of The Music Man. Harve Presnell, who
previously sang mostly opera, was hand-picked by Willson for the part. Like The Music Man,
Willson wrote a song for each of the two leads, “My Brass Bed” for Molly and “I’ll Never Say
No” for Johnny, which could be sung in counterpoint. Also like The Music Man, the counterpoint
version intended for the first act finale was eventually cut. Still, counterpoint melodies– three in
this case– do appear in “I Ain’t Down Yet” when Molly sings with her two brothers.
Willson also uses classical style as a marker of class, this time indicating Molly’s level of
social and intellectual refinement. Chopin’s “Minute Waltz” is first featured in the musical as a
marker of high class and the Brown’s exclusion from it. Molly and Johnny show up uninvited to
a party given by the McGlone’s, one of the leading families in Denver. The waltz– played by
Maestro Gardella from Milan, who is there to christen the McGlone’s new piano– begins just as
Molly and Johnny are told there is no room at the table for them to stay for dinner. When Molly
and Johnny decide to go to Europe to become learned and cultured, Molly learns to play the
222

piano and, in the first scene of Act II, she can be heard learning the “Minute Waltz.” Molly’s
ability to play it flawlessly, when they eventually return to Denver and host a party, signals that
she has finally become cultured in a way the Denver elite find acceptable. Unfortunately, a fight
soon breaks out between the Denver elite and Johnny’s friends that he invites from his home
town of Leadville.
When the Browns are still in Europe, they befriend royalty from across the continent, and
Willson illustrates this meeting of cultures musically. This scene, which opens Act II, illustrates
the many different approaches to melody discussed in Chapter 2, and it is also notable for the
way in which Willson pushed the limits of scene structure, creating an expanded sequence more
akin to an opera scene. In an unusual move, the scene opens with Molly playing the piano rather
than singing. She is practicing the “Minute Waltz” and conquering it successfully. She is then
interrupted by the phone, which ends up being a ruse to get her to go into another room where
her friends are waiting to surprise her for her birthday. It is not surprising that Willson used a
borrowed melody here; this was a common practice for him. After a few lines of dialogue, the
only that occur during this expanded number, her friends launch into a stately gavotte singing
“Happy Birthday, Mrs. J. J. Brown” (Example 32). Adopting a particular “classical” style was
characteristic of Willson, as evidenced by his work in radio I discussed in Chapter 2.
Example 32. “Happy Birthday, Mrs. J. J. Brown” Gavotte

223

The gavotte gradually accelerates into a more typical musical theatre dance tempo, like a
cakewalk or beguine. The number is capped off when the slow tempo returns and her guests sing
a more dignified-sounding version of “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys,” the song that Molly plays
earlier in the show when she is working at the Saddle Rock Saloon in Colorado. But here
Willson returns to the tempo of the gavotte and retains the upbeats of the faster tempo, mixing
elements taken from both high and low styles (Example 33). This number is also notable for the
way it demonstrates musically Molly’s royal friends’ acceptance of her.
Example 33. “Belly Up to the Bar, Boys” as Sung by Molly's Friends

Although the musical number ends, the scene continues, featuring two additional songs
interspersed with dialogue. Molly sings “Bonjour,” an up-tempo number in which she shows off
her mastery of languages by giving each language’s typical greeting. Johnny, who as entered as
Molly’s friends leave, finishes the scene with the operatic ballad “If I Knew.” This song is most
notable for its harmonic excursions and tonal ambiguity. Clear harmonic motion is frustrated
through the use of chromatic chords and passing tones. For example, though the piece is in E
b

major, none of the four-measure phrases that make up the form begin on the tonic chord,
beginning on V
7
, C# diminished seven, C# diminished, and G major respectively. The first three
phrases do end on the tonic chord, but they are set up very weakly by an F# diminished-seventh
chord in third inversion. Thus, there is a repetitive bass motion from B-flat to E-flat that pervades
224

most of the piece, matching the rhetorical pattern of the text in which each line begins with “If I
knew” or, the second time through the form, “Then I’d know.” The fourth and last phrase of the
form cadences on G major the first time and E-flat major the second time. Still, the final E-flat
major cadence is weakened by chromatic motion, frustrating a sense of final resolution. Taken as
a whole, this scene, more than any other, captures the musical and lyrical breadth of Willson. It
also shows Willson stretching the bounds of musical theatre conventions: there are no such
scenes in The Music Man, nor are there very many extended musical scenes like this even today.
The musical class tensions in Molly Brown have a number of implications. They show
that Molly and Johnny’s lack of refinement are more acceptable in Europe than in Denver. While
Molly finds that she is genuinely interested in learning and becoming more refined, she also
realizes that she loses herself in the process. Johnny, on the other hand, is unhappy with the
pretensions of Denver high society. A crisis arises when Molly returns to Europe but Johnny
decides to stay and move back to Leadville. Willson’s choice to give Johnny the highbrow
musical style becomes apparent in this moment; he is suggesting that Johnny’s desire to live
more simply and be with his friends is preferable to Molly’s obsession with social status. When
Molly realizes that her quest to be more high class has gone too far, she returns to Colorado and
the couple is reconciled.
Here’s Love, Willson’s adaptation of Miracle on 34
th
Street has no clear allusions to
class. In fact, the need to retain elements of the movie combined with Willson’s desire to inject
his own creativity results in a show with less direction and coherence than his previous works.
Nevertheless, his effort to imbue the musical with themes of kindness and love creates a spirit of
reconciliation in the show’s title song. In fact, Willson’s lyrics cover so many topics they
become a window into his thoughts on race, politics, the Cold War, and religion. In the scene,
225

confusion arises at Macy’s because the store’s Santa Claus, Kris, is sending customers to other
department stores to buy presents. When asked why, Kris explains that “when Christmas time
rolls around we ought to…make it a tradition, so to speak, to treat ev’ryone with love.”
662
Banter
ensues between Kris and the customers:
Man Shopper: With love??
Kris: Of course.
Young Woman Shopper: Ev'ryone?
Kris: Why not?
Young Male Clerk: Even the Yankees?
Kris: At Christmas, certainly.
Clerk: And the Ford family should ride around in a Chevy?
Kris: Oh I wish I'd thought of that.
Woman Shopper 3: He sent me to Altman's for my water glass pattern!
Troubled Type: But you don't mean Macy's should love Gimbel's?
Kris: I do indeed.
663

The song “Here’s Love” begins, and the lyrics follow a similar pattern by setting up pairs of
things that are opposites, both of which deserve love. In this way, Willson suggests that the pairs
of opposites can be reconciled with each other through love.
Reconciliation was an important cause for Willson, and several of the pairs of opposites
are particularly relevant because they reflect issues that were important to him that I have already
discussed. Many of the pairs reflect Willson’s commitment to pluralism:
From the high and mighty to the meek who'll inherit the Earth.
From the chip on the shoulder of the younger to the older.
Neighbor white to neighbor brown.
From Rosh-ha-shon-ah [sic] to Easter and from Lent to Tish-a-bov [sic].
664

The first pair aligns with what Willson has articulated elsewhere, but the next three, while they
are consistent with everything known about Willson, are his most explicit statements on the

662
Here’s Love, 1-7-34.
663
Ibid.; the underlined words appear that way in the libretto to suggest how the lines should be
delivered.
664
Rosh Hashana and Tisha B’Av; Ibid., 1-7-35–1-10-40;
226

matters of age, race, and religion. Other lyrics specifically mention nationalities as well,
including French, Chinese, and Cuban. Willson was certainly not an activist when it came to
these issues, but his many collaborations suggest that he held no prejudices. On the contrary,
there are examples that demonstrate his desire to be inclusive of women and African-Americans
especially.
665
Surprisingly, Willson also references a number of political issues related to the
Cold War, some with great specificity. These references do not necessarily provide insight into
Willson’s political views, but they do demonstrate his engagement with politics. For example, he
mentions Nikita Khrushchev. Another line mentions Cuba: “Cuban to Cuban and the devil to
Fidel.”
666
While the context of the first part of the line is uncertain, one must conclude that he is
referring to the Bay of Pigs. Both that invasion and the Cuban missile crisis had occurred within
two years before the musical opened on Broadway. Willson also refers to another Cold War
incident in the line, “From all of the birchers to Mamie’s darling Ike.” Here he is referring to the
John Birch Society’s campaign to stop Eisenhower from attending the 1960 summit with
Khrushchev. Willson’s awareness of political issues extends to the domestic realm as well. In the
line, “from J. F. K. to U. S. Steel,” Willson alludes to a confrontation Kennedy had with the steel
giant over price increases.
667
As with the earlier lines, these represent Willson’s most overt
statements on politics and the Cold War. While they do not offer much insight into his political

665
Willson, for example, had two women in his radio orchestra at KFRC, and when he hosted his
own programs, he included African-American guests.
666
This lyric can be heard in the original cast album recording, but it does not appear in the
libretto; John F. Kennedy’s assassination occurred in the middle of the show’s run, and some of
the lines were changed as a result.
667
In an attempt to avoid a price increase on steel that Kennedy feared would lead to inflation, he
tried but failed to gain concessions from both the steel workers union and the company to avoid
the increase; after Kennedy’s death the line was changed to “C. I. O. to U. S. Steel,” meaning the
Congress of Industrialized Organizations.
227

views, they do reinforce my contention that Willson contemplated the Cold War and its effect on
his career.
Of 1491 Dominic McHugh says, “the score changed regularly– so much so that it is
unclear from the sources what the exact song list was at any point.”
668
The changing nature of
the musical makes it difficult to discern any consistent themes or messages. Still, Willson does
address issues of class simply through the characters he creates. There is a natural contrast
between the royal Isabella and Ferdinand and the rest of the characters. Willson highlights this
through romantic interest between Isabella and Esteban, a cartographer and royal advisor.
669

Musically speaking he gives Isabella and Beatriz, Columbus’s romantic interest, contrasting
musical numbers. In “What Does a Queen Have?” Beatriz questions the true differences between
her and Isabella, singing in a stately 6/8 style. Isabella sings about the woman behind her regal
attire in song called, “Women.”
670

Regardless of the coherence of Willson’s latter two musicals, it is clear that he
maintained an interest in exploring issues regarding class and hierarchical attitudes about culture,
even if they were realized in ways that differed from The Music Man and Molly Brown. It is
remarkable how Willson was able to communicate these issues simply through music and words.
Though Willson continued to use some of the same musical devices he established in The Music
Man, for example speak-song, his harmonic and structural experimentation evident in songs such
as “Leadville Johnny Brown” demonstrate his continued desire to innovate. Unfortunately, the
problems with Here’s Love and 1491 prevented his evolving style from having the impact it
otherwise might have had on audiences and on future musical theatre composers.

668
McHugh, 208.
669
Ibid., 195.
670
Ibid., 208.
228

Conclusion

The research and analysis I have presented serve several purposes related to Willson
scholarship and musical theatre scholarship but are also significant beyond these subjects. To
begin, much of the archival material I used has not been examined previously. This includes, the
score for the O. O. McIntyre Suite, Willson’s radio scripts, and the correspondence relating to his
appointment to the National Council of the Humanities, among other materials. I was also able to
verify his relationship with Julius Gold and uncover the influence of Bernhard Ziehn’s methods
of composition on Willson’s work. I have connected disparate sources to uncover more details
about his biography related to his tenure at the New York Philharmonic and his performances
with the New York Chamber Music Society, the International Composers’ Guild, and the League
of Composers. These details reinforce the previous assertion by Cara Wood that Willson was
much more complex and sophisticated than the image of the folksy Midwesterner that he often
projected.
In the realm of musical theatre scholarship, it follows that his musicals and their place in
the narrative of Broadway require reassessment. As I have asserted, The Music Man contains
commentary about the issues of cultural hierarchy, namely the idea that high and low culture can
be reconciled. Furthermore, his use of Midwestern humor demonstrates the show’s literary and
dramatic craftsmanship and also its engagement with satirical commentary as opposed to shallow
comedy. The musical’s comparison to West Side Story (1957), which is often made to
demonstrate the contrasting range of late-1950s musicals, needs to be reassessed.
671
West Side
Story is thought to be the superior work based upon the show’s engagement with major social

671
The two musicals opened months apart, West Side Story in September and The Music Man in
December.
229

issues and upon Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s score. This unfortunately negates
the craft present in The Music Man as well as the innovations of its score. Interestingly, even
though West Side Story’s legacy and influence is more firmly cemented, its content has since
drawn more controversy than Willson’s musical.
672

For twentieth-century American music and culture, Willson’s career and works illustrate
cultural contours and highlight important developments. Willson was a party to the American
band movement and Sousa’s mastery of showmanship, the development of symphony orchestras,
scoring practices in both silent and sound film, the development of both jazz and modernist
music, the uses of music in radio broadcasting, the effect of the second Red Scare on creativity,
cultural stratification brought about by the Cold War, and the end of the Golden Age of
Broadway musicals. Besides the individual importance of these developments, two overarching
points stand out. First, there existed a period of greater openness in the early part of the twentieth
century in which notions of high culture were challenged. That challenge was also tied to a
desire to develop a distinct national culture that reflected American democratic values. As some
historians have pointed out, these ideas were initially compatible with modernism; in fact, the
two cultural movements overlapped. In his book Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the
Arts in Twentieth-Century America, Charles Alexander observes that through the 1930s
nationalists “mingled with and frequently gained reinforcement from American proponents of
avant-garde modernism.”
673
Willson arrived in New York City at a moment when these ideas
and cultural conditions were still strong and present, and through his philosophy and music he

672
The one section in The Music Man that is commonly cut or modified is the We Tan Ye girls, a
representation of Native American dress and dancing– albeit one that is meant to make fun of the
ignorance and insensitivity of the townspeople.
673
Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and the Arts in Twentieth-Century
America (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 1980), xii.
230

carried them into future decades. Second, the period of intense cultural stratification and
privileging of high cultural that arrived especially after World War II has ended, and the current
cultural conditions more closely resemble the early twentieth century than the mid-twentieth
century. As I argued in my introduction, these contours are often overlooked by musicians,
which helps reinforce a stale narrative that exaggerates the differences between classical and
popular music in spite of the current reality.
Some commentators have contended that changes to undergraduate music education are
needed to counteract the effects of this stale narrative. Joseph Horowitz, who sees a lack of
historical awareness as detrimental to young musicians argues that “It is not enough to teach
music history as a history of composers and compositions.”
674
He says:
In no music school or conservatory is much attention paid to the institutional history of
classical music or to the history of music in performance... Young musicians need to
know about the history of the orchestra and of individual orchestras, of opera and opera
houses, of conducting and conductors. These are the topics that lead, early on, to essential
questions otherwise overlooked: What are the purposes of a concert? What are the
performer's obligations to an audience? What is the role of music in society? Too often,
the musicians most indifferent or hostile to undertaking new roles are not the veterans,
but young instrumentalists proud of their ignorance.
675

Presumably, the changes Horowitz suggests would make young musicians more culturally
aware, more in touch with their roles as musicians, and flexible enough to adapt to current
conditions. A similar concern has recently been voiced, from a different perspective, by teachers
of music history. For example, Melanie Lowe, writing in the Journal of Music History
Pedagogy, asks “How do we make the study of music tangibly relevant in the lives of our
students? …And by ‘relevant,’ I do not mean just musically relevant.”
676
She continues:

674
Horowitz, 535.
675
Ibid.
676
Melanie Lowe, “Teaching Music History Today: Making Tangible Connections to Here and
Now,” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 1, no. 1 (Fall 2010), 46.
231

The real challenge for teachers of music history is to put this history in direct dialogue
with our contemporary, every-day lives– to make music history not just musically
relevant, but intellectually relevant…not just in the “there and then” of history but in the
here and now” of today. In other words, our musical-historical teaching needs to reach
our students in ways that profoundly impact their existence as twenty-first-century
citizens of Planet Earth.
677

Thus, my dissertation’s raison d’être, that we musicians need an updated usable past, is not just
hypothetical or a research-exclusive concern but a practical one as well.
Willson’s role in my research, then, is not simply to point out seldomly acknowledged
contours of twentieth-century cultural hierarchy; it is also to contribute to a usable past that can
help musicians move forward more successfully. Willson may not be the kind of musical figure
Horowitz had in mind to illuminate the institutional history of classical music, but he could serve
that purpose well, even if it is sometimes because of his opposition to predominant elitist
attitudes. Moreover, Willson can serve as a model for young musicians who might pursue cross-
over careers. My dissertation also points the way toward other musicians, repertoires, and
performing organizations that deserve more attention: Henry Hadley, Howard Barlow, Dana
Suesse, and Hugo Riesenfeld; Paul Whiteman’s library of hundreds of arrangements and the
CBS radio orchestra, to name just a few.
Unfortunately, while Willson’s sonic legacy continues on in some ways, it is more
notable for its lack of continuousness. Paul McCartney has continued to play “Till There Was
You” long after the Beatles first recorded it in 1963. The Sonny Rollins version from his album
Freedom Suite (1958) inspired other jazz musicians to play it, making it a minor jazz standard.
While Molly Brown is occasionally performed, The Music Man is Willson’s only show that has a
true legacy, making many of its innovations novelties rather than ideas for further usage and
development. One of Willson’s most creative and adaptable innovations is speak-song. The

677
Lowe, 46–47.
232

musical theatre conventions for transitioning from speaking to song are so limited that it is
surprising no other composers have attempted it. Willson’s extended musical scenes and
expanded harmonic language, especially in Molly Brown, were similarly innovative. Coming at
the end of the Golden Age of the Broadway musical, trends, unfortunately, were moving in the
opposite direction– towards rock and pop-influenced songs. But there is certainly enough space
for Broadway composers today to employ the kinds of complex scenes and harmonic language
found in Molly Brown. The legacy of Willson’s later musicals also suffer from problems with
their books, limiting the audience who actually have the opportunity to hear the music of Molly
Brown, Here’s Love, and 1491.
The optimistic belief that classical and popular music could be reconciled seems to have
come to an end once the Cold War began. Willson certainly persisted in this belief through the
Cold War, but the cultural conditions were not conducive for the next generation of musicians to
carry the torch. A survey of dozens of American musicians who were slightly younger than
Willson shows that few pursued a similar path, either in practice or ideology. Morton Gould
(1913–96), whose career was remarkably similar to Willson’s, is a notable exception, yet he also
encountered pushback from the musical community. For example, asked by Margaret Key if
there was prejudice against his music because of its popular orientation, he responded:
Absolutely. My friends were snobs. It gave me a kind of unique experience, but it
established prejudices that were hard to overcome… [In my efforts in popular music] I
was broadcasting to millions of people, versus symphonic works to hundreds. The
disparity created a kind of stigma.
678

If that sense of optimism eventually died out, another related thread carried through.

678
Margaret Susan Key, “‘Sweet Melody Over Silent Wave’: Depression-Era
Radio and the American Composer,” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 1995), 67.
233

This thread begins with John Dewey and his considerable influence on many spheres of
American life. As I already mentioned, Willson’s beliefs echo Dewey’s emphasis on democratic
participation and cultural pluralism. Dewey’s impact on music and art is also evident in his
involvement with Black Mountain College. In fact, the college’s founders, especially John
Andrew Rice, Jr., set out to create a school grounded in Dewey’s pragmatist philosophy. At the
most basic level, Dewey’s influence was evident in the democratic structure and operation of the
school. Faculty and students were considered to be on equal footing, and all were required to
contribute to the college’s intellectual life. Similarly, faculty and students were responsible for
the tasks required to keep the school operating: administration, cooking, cleaning, maintenance
and the like. Dewey’s influence extended to the arts as well, perhaps most notably through his
insistence that art is connected to everyday life. Following this, art is not simply the end product
but the entire process, including the experience of those who interact with it.
679
At Black
Mountain College, students were required to take an introductory art course taught by former
Bauhaus faculty member Josef Albers (1888–1976). Rice believed it was important no matter the
student’s course of study because it encouraged intellectual inquiry and emphasized process over
results, two habits that were essential to education.
680
If Dewey’s ideas sound familiar, it is
because of his widespread influence. Marcel Duchamp, Josef Albers, Robert Motherwell, and
Allan Kaprow are all known to have read and been influenced by his Art as Experience (1934).
John Cage often echoed Deweyan ideas as well.
681

679
Thomas Edward Frank, Book Review: Dewey for Artists by Mary Jane Jacob, Journal of
Black Mountain College Studies 11(Fall 2020), available from
http://www.blackmountainstudiesjournal.org/dewey-for-artists.
680
Catherine C. Reynolds, “Progressive Ideals and Experimental Higher Education: The
Example of John Dewey and Black Mountain College,” Education and Culture 14, no. 1 (1997),
5.
681
See, for example, Mary Jane Jacob, Dewey for Artists (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 2018), 122–23.
234

Moreover, scholars like Cornel West have observed a turn back to pragmatism in the last
years of the twentieth century, even suggesting that pragmatism is part of the fabric of the
country. He writes, “American pragmatism is less a philosophical tradition putting forward
solutions to perennial problems in the Western philosophical conversation initiated by Plato and
more a continuous cultural commentary or set of interpretations that attempt to explain America
to itself at a particular historical moment.”
682
In this sense, Willson was tapped into something
more fundamental to the United States than the specifics of his philosophy of music. In spite of
the very real cultural changes that occurred over the course of the twentieth century, there were
continuities as well, many of which are not readily apparent. Even if Willson’s beliefs faded,
their roots remained. Furthermore, even though the United States exists more and more in a
globalized culture, the pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey and other American intellectuals
who followed still resonate in the present.

682
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (London:
McMillan Press, 1989), 5.

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———. Harmonie und modulationslehre. Berlin: Verlag Chrs. Friedrich, 1887.

3. Discography

Willson, Meredith. Chiffon Swing. Meredith Willson and his Orchestra. Decca DL 5074, 1949.
Phonorecord. The eight selections on this long-play album were originally released in
1942 on ten-inch shellac records. “Thoughts While Strolling,” from the O. O. McIntyre
Suite, is the only Willson composition. Many of the pieces were also featured on
Willson’s 1942 summer replacement show, the Johnson Wax program.

———. Encore! Melodies for the Orchestra. Meredith Willson and his Orchestra. Decca DL
5491, 1953. Phonorecord. This long-play album, which was also released the same year
on 45 rpm, seven-inch records, features Willson’s original instrumental compositions.
They include “Sneezing Violins,” “Boy Meets Girl,” “Piccolo Polka,” “Marguerite
Waltz,” “Centennial,” “Forth and Back,” “Calico Square Dance,” and “A Child’s Letter.”

———. Here’s Love. Original Broadway Cast. Columbia Masterworks KOS 2400, 1963.
Phonorecord. This album features Craig Stevens (Fred Gaily) and Janis Paige (Doris
Walker) in lead roles, supported by Fred Gwynne (Mr. Shellhammer) and Paul Reed (Mr.
Macy). Paul Reed also originated the role of Charlie Cowell in The Music Man.

———. Modern American Music. Meredith Willson and his Orchestra. Decca 8025, 1949.
Phonorecord. This was originally released in 1941 on a five-record set. It includes ten
instrumental pieces commissioned by Willson and composed by well-known songwriters
of the day with the intention of adding to the repertoire of American melodies. Selections
include: “American Waltz” by Peter DeRose, “American Arabesque,” by Vernon Duke,
“American Barcarolle,” by Harry Warren, “American Lullaby” by Duke Ellington,
“American Humoresque” by Sigmund Romberg, “American Caprice” by Morton Gould,
“American Minuet” by Harold Arlen, “American Nocturne” by Dana Suesse, March for
Americans” by Ferde Grofé, and “American Serenade” by Louis Alter.
249

———. The Music Man. Original Broadway Cast. Capitol Records WAO 990, 1958.
Phonorecord. This definitive version features Robert Preston and Barbara Cook in the
lead roles as well as Iggie Wolfington as Marcellus Washburn and the Buffalo Bills
barbershop quartet as the school board. It was recorded in December 1957 after the
Broadway premiere and released in January of the following year. The recording features
all of the original songs from the Broadway musical but not the borrowed songs such as
“Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean.” A few of the songs, for example “Seventy-Six
Trombones,” are slightly altered to provide defined beginnings or endings that were not
present in the stage musical. In the case of “Trombones,” the stage version segues into a
dance while the recorded version features a final A section and tag.

———. The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Original Broadway Cast. Capitol Records SWAO 1509,
1960. Phonorecord. This album features Tammy Grimes and Herve Presnell in the
leading roles. Presnell’s interpretation of Johnny Brown’s music is unmatched and
definitive. Like the Music Man album, this recording also omits borrowed pieces that are
part of the stage version. Johnny’s song, “Colorado, My Home,” which was cut from the
show and, therefore, not included on this recording, appears in the score and has often
been included in subsequent productions. Fortunately, it was included in the Molly Brown
movie musical of 1964 and can be heard on the movie’s soundtrack sung by Presnell.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Delorey, James M. (author)

Core Title Cultural hierarchy and the persistence of optimism in Meredith Willson's America

School Thornton School of Music

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Music (Historical Musicology)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/25/2022

Defense Date 07/25/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bernhard Ziehn,Broadway,Gilbert Seldes,Here's love,highbrow,Julius Gold,long hair,Meredith Willson,Music man,Musical theater,musical theatre,Musicals,National Council on the Humanities,NBC,O. O. McIntyre,OAI-PMH Harvest,old time radio,Paul Whiteman,Seven Arts,Sinclair Lewis,Unsinkable Molly Brown,Van Wyck Brooks,Young Americans

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Demers, Joanna (committee chair), Cooper Vest, Lisa (committee member), Sloan, Nate (committee member)

Creator Email delorey@usc.edu,jmdelorey@msn.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375207

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