An Hour with Leon Botstein

A long-delayed afternoon at Bard, and a conversation that became something larger than the film it was meant to complete.

The interview that should have crowned the film came late, and on his terms. Leon Botstein had agreed to sit before our camera earlier in the year, but a sequence of inconveniences — chief among them the press cycle that followed the appearance of his name in articles connected to the Epstein files — pushed our meeting past the date we had set for the avant-première at the Century Association. I had no choice but to premiere the film as it stood, with the firm intention of incorporating his interview later. Which is what we did.

Leon Botstein by Montes-Bradley

The drive up to Bard from the city, with my son William behind the wheel and the cinematographer's eye that has accompanied this project from the beginning, was uneventful in the best sense. We had been on this same road, in one form or another, for months. William had filmed nearly every interview, every concert hall, every empty rehearsal room of Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow, and something was fitting about the two of us arriving together at the residence of the President of Bard College for the conversation that, in many ways, would close the circle.

Botstein received us with the calm of a man who has made his peace with cameras. We had agreed beforehand on the theme — the place of George Frederick Bristow in the long argument over what American music is, and how it came to be — and from there he did most of the talking. For nearly an hour. I did very little except listen.

What he gave us was not an answer to a question. It was an essay, delivered in real time, sometimes self-edited mid-sentence, occasionally punctuated by his own request to start a thought again. It ranged from the construction of national identity in the nineteenth century to the technological history of the modern piano, from Dvořák's New York classroom to the fate of forgotten composers like Paine, MacDowell, and Chadwick, and finally to the unexpected mirror of contemporary Chinese musical culture. Bristow was the entry point, but Botstein, characteristically, used Bristow as a door into a far larger room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8K0Mvvc9Ng

The first thing that struck him, he told us, was that America is a very young nation, and one of its great advantages is that it has never been able to define itself through some pseudoscientific notion of race or land. The European myth of arriving in an empty New World, he said, was always a fiction; the people who came — Spanish, French, English — were colonists looking for a better life, and they each managed the encounter with the indigenous and African populations in different ways, none of them admirable. By the late nineteenth century, with the volume of immigration enormous and the question of national identity unresolved by the Civil War, the United States was forced to invent itself, and music became one of the laboratories in which that invention was attempted.

He was clear-eyed about the conditions under which music itself became culturally portable. The modern piano, he reminded us, was a kind of miracle — the first reliable instrument of mechanical reproduction, with a metal frame and a secure pin block that didn't have to be tuned every morning the way Mozart's forte-piano did. Suddenly, a person without natural pitch could sit down and play. Music instruction became broadly possible. Singing societies multiplied; Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and eventually Chicago became orchestral cities. Going to a symphony concert in the 1880s, he said, was like going to the movies in the 1950s — Technicolor, big sound, an hour and a half of complete detachment from reality.

This was the world into which George Frederick Bristow's music was born. Most American composers of the second half of the nineteenth century, Botstein noted, trained in Germany — they came home with the techniques of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms and tried to apply that vocabulary to an American subject. Bristow was unusual in that he did not. He stayed home. He was a member of the New York Philharmonic, and he understood, before most of his contemporaries, that something distinctly American ought to be attempted in music — not as a rejection of European inheritance, but as an inflection of it, the way American English is an inflection of British English.

Listening to Botstein speak about Bristow, what I found most moving was a quiet admission. Until he began rehearsing the work — the Niagara Symphony, the Third — Botstein himself had never heard a single line of Bristow's music. He knew the name from a textbook. That was all. The encounter was a discovery for him as much as it was for any of us. "It was exciting for me and for the players to learn and put on the stage," he said. "A very well-written, very beautiful, very fine piece of music that told something about America's image of itself — kind of triumphant, confident America, which no longer exists."

Then came the pivot to Dvořák, whom Botstein has long championed and whose arrival in New York in the early 1890s, at the invitation of Jeannette Thurber, he described as the most important event in the history of American music. Dvořák's counsel, distilled, was simple: if you want to make music of your own, draw from what is unique to your place. For him, that meant the African American legacy through the spirituals and the indigenous traditions of the land. For Botstein, it must also include the immensity of American landscape — Niagara, the Mississippi, Yellowstone — and the fact, harder to translate into sound, of democracy itself, which favors directness and accessibility over learned complexity. This is the line, he suggested, that runs from Dvořák through to Gershwin and the Broadway tune.

What Bristow's generation could not anticipate was how quickly they would be eclipsed. By the time the Niagara was completed in 1898, Dvořák's example had begun to render the prior generation obsolete. The Boston composers — Paine, Chadwick, MacDowell — would be absorbed, in the European reception, into the category of second-rate European music. Botstein recalled, almost in passing, a concert he had conducted in Germany some twenty-five years ago, an entire program of nineteenth-century American composers, and the verdict of the German critics had been precisely that. He laughed when he told the story, but it was not really a laugh.

Toward the end of the hour, he made an analogy I had not expected. He spoke at length about contemporary China, and about Korea and Japan, about the conservatories in Beijing and Shanghai where students play Western classical instruments at a level beyond reproach, but where a new music is also being written — a synthesis of historic Asian instruments and Western forms, a reinvention. The point was straightforward and, in its way, optimistic. Music, unlike language, is not tethered to a single place. It can be reinvented and remain itself in the hands of new generations elsewhere. The most interesting music being written today, he said, is being written in cultures that have absorbed the Western tradition into their own vocabulary.

I did not interrupt him for a long while.

Toward the very end of the recording, there is a moment William and I caught: a fragment of Botstein beginning to answer a question I had ventured, about the Italian immigration to Brazil and Argentina. "You mentioned the Italians in Brazil. Carlos…" — and there the recording, or the conversation, gives way. I have decided not to reconstruct it. The hour, as we have it, is enough.

The film Life and Music in the Age of George Frederick Bristow now exists with this interview folded into it. But what Botstein gave us at Bard that afternoon was larger than any film. It was a small act of cultural memory — about Bristow, yes, and about Dvořák and the modern piano and the Hudson River School, but ultimately about the long, unfinished business of figuring out what America is, and what it sounds like.