About the USA

Arts & Entertainment

Posted March 28, 2003

Introduction

The 20th century has been one in which artists in the United States have broken free from Old World antecedents, taking the various cultural disciplines in new directions with impressive, innovative results.

Music, film, theater, dance, architecture and other artistic expressions have been enhanced and transformed. A rejuvenation in music, new directions in modern dance, drama drawn from the U.S. heartland, independent filmmaking across the landscape, the globalization of the visual arts -- all of these are part of the contemporary scene in the United States.

While the arts and culture in the United States continue to engage substantial attention, energy and resources of this society, this happens largely outside the direction of government. The United States has no "ministry of culture," thus reflecting the conviction that there are important areas of national life where government should have little or no role.

Architecture

American architecture is exceptionally complex, both in the multiple traditions from which it has drawn and in the variations of style. When the first European settlers arrived, Native Americans had already developed their own architectural traditions, for example the pueblo, hogan, longhouse, and tipi.

18th century architecture was designed along the rule of reason and practical planning. Different styles developed, influenced by the traditions of the immigrants and local conditions. In the mid-19th century, a Romantic spirit was expressed in many competing stylistic revivals, for example the Greek Revival with symmetrical pillared forms and the Gothic Revival with pointed, crocketed and asymmetrical forms.

The nineteenth century witnessed an extraordinary rate of urbanization. Despite the absence of any form of public regulation, distinct districts appeared, including elegant blocks of row houses, multifamily tenements and lodging houses. Business districts were transformed by an architectural innovation: the skyscraper. Beginning in the 1880s, architects and engineers in Chicago and New York began to experiment with new framing systems to achieve greater height. The skyscraper is America's unmistakable contribution to architecture. The first skyscraper went up in Chicago in 1884. The designer of the most graceful early towers, Louis Sullivan was America' s first great modern architect. His most talented student was Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the 1930s, European architects who emigrated to the United States before World War II influenced the development of an austere, functional approach, supposedly anonymous and oblivious to the traditions of place. It came to be called the International Style. Perhaps most influential were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, both former directors of Germany's famous design school, the Bauhaus. Buildings in their geometric style have been both praised and criticized.

In the postwar period, architectural pluralism became more pronounced than ever. As skyscrapers reached new heights, they displayed an extraordinary variety of colors and ornamental motifs. The reuse of historical buildings became a common spectacle. A new generation of architects now feels free to incorporate both old and new elements in their buildings.

Blues and Jazz

Blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. When the two musical tradition began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs telling about their extreme suffering and privation. The blues was mostly sung in the South and only spread northward in the 1930s and 1940s with the migration of many blacks from the South. The twenties saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists.

Jazz originated in New Orleans early in the 20th century, bringing together elements from ragtime, slave songs, and brass bands. One of the distinguishing elements of jazz was its fluidity: in live performances, the musicians would almost never play a song the same way twice but would improvise variations on its notes and words. Jazz was the reigning popular American music from the 1920s through the 1940s. In the 1930s and 1940s, the most popular form of jazz was "big band swing," so called after large ensembles conducted by the likes of Glenn Miller and William "Count" Basie.

In the late 1940s, a new, more cerebral form of mostly instrumental jazz, called be-bop, began to attract audiences. Rhythm & blues was a combination of jazz and other “race” music with the lyrical content, sonic gestures and format of the blues. The epoch of rhythm and blues spans the late 1940s to the early 1960s. The melding of rhythm & blues with country and western music in the mid-1950s gave birth to rock and roll. In the mid-1960s, rhythm and blues would become soul music. In the 1970s, many jazz musicians experimented with electronic instruments and created a blend of rock and jazz called fusion

Classical Music

The development of the arts in America has been marked by a tension between two strong sources of inspiration - European sophistication and domestic originality. Until the end of the 19th century, there really was no distinctive classical music, e.g. symphony, opera, chamber music, sonata etc., in America. As late as 1895, the composer Antonin Dvorak felt the need to urge American composers to look to their native sources for inspiration and material. He offered his “New World” Symphony (stirred by our spirituals and Indian rhythms) as an example of what could be achieved.

With the advent of the 20th century, sparked by the immigrant urge to assimilate, isolationism, the excitement of jazz, and a “can-do” spirit, American composers started to create an astounding variety of distinctively American classical music. Composers such as George Gershwin and Aaron Copland incorporated homegrown melodies and rhythms into forms borrowed from Europe. Music composition of the greater part of the 20th century, especially the period after World War II, is characterized by experimentation and a constant search for new systems of writing music, new forms and new styles.

In 1845, the presentation of Leonora by William Henry Fry was the first known performance of an opera by an American composer. Many early American operas took classical or European stories for their subjects, but by the end of the 19th century, composers increasingly turned to American themes. Nowadays, opera - old and new - is flourishing; because it is so expensive to stage, however, it depends heavily on the generosity of corporate and private donors.

Music produced in the last forty years used extremely new and experimental styles. Some composers, like Edgar Varese, completely rejected traditional melody and harmony while others, like John Cage for example, experimented with electronic music and natural sounds from real life. Both Varese and Cage had enormous influence on contemporary composers, not only of classical music but of other genres as well. Some orchestra directors have found a way to keep mainstream audiences happy while introducing new music. Rather than segregate the new pieces, these directors program them side-by-side with traditional fare.

Dance

American theatrical dance has always been fueled by a mixture of native and imported elements. During the 18th and 19th century, American dancing was, to a great degree, centered in the home and the community, not the theater or music hall. However, dance did figure in public celebrations, entertainment, and spectacles. Early theatrical entertainment included displays of folk dancing. Historians usually date American dance from the end of the nineteenth century, when indigenous institutions and artists of stature began emerging.

Until the 20th century, most dancers could work professionally only on the popular stage - music halls, burlesque, and vaudeville. Vaudeville shows featured tap, and toe dancing, comic and character dance sketches, adagio teams and ballroom dancers, skirt dancing, artistic or interpretive dancing, and specialty numbers in various ethnic styles. Even though the first known "ballet" in America was arranged in 1735 by Henry Holt, an English dancing master, until the 20th century, few permanent organizations were capable of presenting full ballet productions and ballet remained a high-toned addition to spectacle or an appendage of opera.

In the early 20th century, touring troupes of European dancers provided U.S. audiences with their first widespread exposure to classical ballet. The 1930s constituted a pioneering decade. Ballet in the U.S. has been shaped largely by the creative and esthetic influence of the internationally acknowledged choreographers George Balanchine, Antony Tudor and Jerome Robbins. Each was associated with either of the country's two leading ballet organizations, the School of American Ballet, founded 1934, which became the New York City Ballet in 1948, and the American Ballet Theater, founded in 1940. The American ballet scene today is a mix of classics revivals and original works.

The early 20th century also saw the emergence of a new, and distinctively American, art form - modern dance. It includes a huge variety of dancers, choreographers and movement styles. The common element is more an approach than a single style. Modern dance, as a total expressive medium, allows the artist not only to project a personal view of the world, but to embody it through her or his own physical form and presence. Among the early innovators was Isadora Duncan, who stressed pure, unstructured movement in lieu of the positions of classical ballet. Martha Graham's New York-based company was perhaps the best known in modern dance. Later choreographers searched for new methods of expression. Merce Cunningham introduced improvisation and random movement into performances. Alvin Ailey incorporated African dance elements and black music. Recently, such choreographers as Mark Morris and Liz Lerman have defied the convention that dancers must be thin and young. Their belief, put into action in their hiring practices and performances, is that graceful, exciting movement is not restricted by age or body type.

Film

Moving pictures were not an American invention; however, they have nonetheless been the preeminent American contribution to world entertainment. In the early 1900s, when the medium was new, many immigrants, found employment in the U.S. film industry. They were able to make their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner Brothers had switched to the production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind of enterprise - the movie studio. The major studios were located in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles, California.

During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s, the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week. Movie-making was a business and motion picture companies made money by operating under the so-called studio system. The major studios kept thousands of people on salary and they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation - theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. What is remarkable is how much quality entertainment emerged from such a regimented process. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit.

The studio system succumbed to two forces in the late 1940s: (1) a federal antitrust action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and (2) the advent of television. The number of movies being made dropped sharply, even as the average budget soared, because Hollywood wanted to offer audiences the kind of spectacle they couldn't see on television. This blockbuster syndrome has continued to affect Hollywood. Added to the skyrocketing salaries paid actors, studio heads, and deal-making agents, it means that movies released today tend to be either huge successes or huge failures, depending on how well their enormous costs match up with the public taste.

Literature

American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the Indian cultures. The earliest American writings were concerned directly with the dream of a new world, and mostly accounts of pioneering motives and settlements were published.

Regional literature has always been important in the United States. Until the end of the 19th century, American literature was dominated by the works of New Englanders, such as Cotton Mather. Sermons and religious tracts provided the greatest part of the writing. The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced. Puritan style varied enormously -- from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals and religious history.

The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man. Benjamin Franklin, whom the Scottish philosopher David Hume called America's "first great man of letters," embodied the Enlightenment ideal of humane rationality.

The Romantic movement reached America around the year 1820. In America as in Europe, fresh new vision electrified artistic and intellectual circles. Yet there was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured masterpieces by authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

In the second half of the 19th century, the United States was transformed into a modern, industrial nation. As industrialization grew, so did alienation. Characteristic American novels of the period, for example by Stephen Crane and Jack London, depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual. Survivors, like Mark Twain's Huck Finn, endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality.

Although American prose between the two World Wars experimented with viewpoint and form, Americans such as Ernest Hemingway, wrote more realistically, on the whole, than did Europeans. William Faulkner set his powerful southern novels firmly in Mississippi heat and dust. The importance of facing reality became a dominant theme in the 1920s and 1930s: Writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald repeatedly portrayed the tragedy awaiting those who live in flimsy dreams.

Narrative since World War II resists generalization: It is extremely various and multifaceted. It has been vitalized by international currents such as European existentialism and Latin American magical realism.

The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to nine Americans: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Toni Morrison

Music Today

Due to its diversity, popular music in the United States today challenges simple description. The history of popular music in the 1970s and '80s is basically that of rock music which has grown to include hundreds of musical styles. New styles such as folk, salsa, new wave, funk, reggae, heavy metal, acid rock, punk rock, rap, hip hop, acid jazz and world music have developed. Country rock, a fusion of country and western and rock 'n' roll, grew popular in the 1970s. A blend of rhythm and blues and gospel music came to be known as soul. Disco, a repetitive dance music, and rap music are direct descendants. Rap developed in the mid-1970s among African-American and Hispanic performers in New York City. It generally consists of chanted, often improvised, street poetry usually accompanied by disco or funk music. The 1990s saw the birth of alternative music or grunge. Techno, a style of dance music that gained popularity in the 1990s, combines computer-generated, discolike rhythms with digital samples.

In contemporary music, there is a strong crossover phenomenon. Cultural influences are much more readily available. The trend is not towards one big homogeneous style, but rather an interesting meeting of different influences in projects here and there. Whereas in the past jazz, blues and country all came out of the roots of black society and Appalachia, nowadays there are influences from farther away. Musicians have become much more globally aware of other kinds of music. A whole genre called "world music," a sort of mix of ethnic music adapted to modern western styles, has developed. It includes any ethnic music that isn't big enough to have its own category.

Rock, Country, and Folk

By the early 1950s jazz had lost some of its appeal to a mass audience. A new form of pop music, rock and roll, evolved from rhythm and blues: songs with strong beats and provocative lyrics. To make the new music more acceptable to a mainstream audience, white performers and arrangers began to "cover" rhythm and blues songs - singing them with a toned down beat and revised lyrics. At the beginning of his career, Elvis Presley covered black singers. One of his first big hits was Hound Dog, which had been sung by blues artist Big Mama Thornton. Soon, however, Presley was singing original material, supplied by a new breed of rock and roll songwriters.

A challenge to rock appeared in the form of folk music. Folk music was based largely on ballads brought over from Scotland, England, and Ireland; it had been preserved in such enclaves as the mountains of North Carolina and West Virginia. Bob Dylan extended the reach of folk music by writing striking new songs that addressed contemporary social problems, especially the denial of civil rights to black Americans. The division between the two camps - rock enthusiasts and folk purists - came to a head when Dylan was booed for accompanying himself on electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Far from being deterred, Dylan led virtually the entire folk movement into a blend of rock and folk. This merger was a watershed event, setting a pattern that holds true to this day. Rock remains the prevalent pop music of America - and much of the rest of the world - largely because it can assimilate almost any other kind of music, along with new varieties of showmanship, into its strong rhythmical framework.

Like folk, country music descends from the songs brought to the United States from England, Scotland, and Ireland. The original form of country music, called "old-time" and played by string bands, can still be heard at festivals held each year in many southern states. Modern country music developed in the 1920s, roughly coinciding with a mass migration of rural people to big cities in search of work. Like many other forms of American pop music, country lends itself easily to a rock-and-roll beat, and country rock has been yet another successful music merger.

Theater

American theater is traditionally dated from the arrival of Lewis Hallam's English troupe in Williamsburg in 1752. After the end of the Revolutionary War, the Republic witnessed a slow expansion of the dramatic arts. Theaters were built in Charleston, Philadelphia, Newport, New York, and Boston.

Theater became a more pervasive part of American life during the early nineteenth century and the two decades before and after the turn of the century were golden years for theater. In the second half of the nineteenth century, theater became both more diverse and more specialized. Audiences could choose between legitimate theater, ballet, vaudeville, burlesque, and opera. In the second half of the 19th century, vaudeville emerged. From the 1880s through the 1930s, vaudeville's fast-paced collage of music, comedy, dance, novelty numbers, and skits appealed to a large audience.

The development of motion pictures changed the theater scene. By the 1920s, theater had lost its national mass audience. Even though Hollywood deprived live theater of a mass public, it enabled it to play to its unique strengths and the early twentieth century witnessed a turn to serious drama and innovative stagecraft. During the depression, an unprecedented social and political consciousness was displayed on the stage. The oppression of workers and immigrants was publicly castigated. During the 1960s and 1970s, off- and off-off-Broadway groups served up political commentary (e.g., MacBird, 1967).

The musical stage of the twentieth century proved to be the country's most popular theatrical export. Music had accompanied theatricals since colonial days, but no native works appeared until the 1780s. In 1866, the "The Black Crook" was produced and the American musical was born. Song, dance, and spectacle were grafted onto an existing melodrama. By the end of the nineteenth century the American musical stage encompassed a number of genres: Operettas, topical musicals and revues with roots in minstrel shows. After World War I, Broadway entered a golden period. Although dancing had always been a part of the musical, only in the 1930s did it became more closely linked to the story. Ever since the production of "West Side Story" in 1957, dance has been integral to the story. Performers now had to sing, dance, and act - the triple-threat talent required for most subsequent shows. Rock 'n' roll pushed Broadway out of its place as the trendsetter of American popular music.

Today's American theater might be divided into three categories. First, Broadway productions persist and many new plays, usually about 50 productions a season, are presented first in the theater district of New York City. Over the years, New York theater has developed new avenues known as "off-Broadway" and "off-off Broadway" where plays are staged in small playhouses, but some rank with the best Broadway performances in professional skill. Second, many fine regional theaters produce some of the best new drama. Subsidized by corporations, foundations and the government, regional theater for some critics represents the best hope of American drama. Finally, colleges and universities support active theater programs.

Visual Arts

The museums and monuments that line the National Mall in Washington D.C. house an enormous collection of art and artifacts that document both the past and present of American art and society. The National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden , the newest attraction on the National Mall, is a place to rest among shady trees, water, and modern artworks.

America's first well-known school of painting, the Hudson River school, appeared in 1820. As with music and literature, this development was delayed until artists perceived that the New World offered subjects unique to itself. The Hudson River painters' directness and simplicity of vision influenced such later artists as Winslow Homer , who depicted rural America. Middle-class city life found its painter in Thomas Eakins , an uncompromising realist whose unflinching honesty undercut the genteel preference for romantic sentimentalism. Much of American painting and sculpture since 1900 has been a series of revolts against tradition. "To hell with the artistic values," announced Robert Henri. He was the leader of what critics called the "ash-can" school of painting, after the group's portrayals of the squalid aspects of city life.

After World War II, a group of young New York artists formed the first native American movement to exert major influence on foreign artists: abstract expressionism. Among the movement's leaders were Jackson Pollock , Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko . Members of the next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in their compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, and Roy Lichtenstein, reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture - Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips. Today artists in America tend not to restrict themselves to schools, styles, or a single medium. Perhaps the most influential 20th-century American contribution to world art has been a mocking playfulness, a sense that a central purpose of a new work is to join the ongoing debate over the definition of art itself.

Abridged from U.S. State Department IIP publications and other U.S. government materials.

For more information please visit http://www.usembassy.de/usa/arts.htm