Kirsten Yri Noah Greenberg

8/6/2019 Kirsten Yri Noah Greenberg

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Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica: Medievalism and the Cultural FrontAuthor(s): Kirsten YriSource: American Music, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter, 2006), pp. 421-444Published by: University of Illinois PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25046050 .Accessed: 28/03/2011 00:01

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KIRSTEN YRI

NoahGreenberg

and the

New York Pro M?sica:

Medievalism and the

Cultural Front

The New York Pro Musica's first performances of the medieval liturgicaldrama the Play of Daniel during the 1957-58 Christmas season took New

York concertgoers by storm. With audiences pleading for extensions of

the run, the Play of Daniel was destined to become an annual concert

event,no small feat for music that had

previouslybeen unknown outside

the university collegium. Praised in the New York Times as superb, and

pronounced a "rare conspiracy of imagination, scholarship, and show

manship," the production was described in awe as the first complete

performance of the play since medieval times. Thereafter, the New York

Pro M?sica and itsmusical director, Noah Greenberg, were credited with

putting "early music" on the map.1 In 1963, under Greenberg's tutelage,the New York Pro M?sica reconstructed, performed, and made famous

thePlay ofHerod?staging

it, too, with colorfulpageantry

and enchant

ing music.2 These medieval liturgical dramas became institutions inNew

York City, with a performance of one of the works every season until the

group disbanded in 1974.

At any given performance of the plays, musicians and audiences no

doubt believed they were privy to the sounds of medieval music as it

might originally have been heard. Yet, as Richard Taruskin and Daniel

Leech-Wilkinson have illustrated, early music performances are not nec

essarily "authentic," but respond to and embody values of their time.3

Such performances necessarily implicate the creators and musicians in

Kirsten Yri received a Ph.D. in musicology from Stony Brook University witha dissertation titled "Medieval Uncloistered: Uses of Medieval Music in Twen

tieth-Century Culture." Her research centerson medievalism and orientalism

inpopular music, contemporary music,

and early music performance. She is

Assistant Professor of Music History atWilfrid Laurier University.

American Music Winter 2006? 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois


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422 Yri

decision-making processes that shed light on the complex relationshipsamong music-making, ideology, and the cultural values that producethem. The values of the Popular Front in New York City provide a sig

nificant backdrop for the values constructed in and by Noah Greenbergand the New York Pro Musica's performances of the Play of Daniel and

the Play of Herod. I argue that the activities and ideals of Greenberg wedhim to what Michael Denning identifies as "the cultural front," "a radical

historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independentsocialists, community activities, and ?migr? anti-fascists around laborist

social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching."4 Greenberg's early

Trotskyist activities and the Utopian position the Middle Ages held forhim and his contemporaries, combined with the ideals of Gebrauchs

musik, led him to construct the plays as accessible works rooted in folk

and community traditions.5 Ultimately, Greenberg's privileging of "the

people" over "the establishment" constructed fresh associations of me

dieval music with "roots," "folk," and "popular" musics that resonated

with the trends toward socialism and Marxism that informed so much

of the cultural front.

The usual approach to the performances of these plays is to portraythem as isolated events that began the early music revival in New York.

But reconstructing the values embodied in the plays' productions and

examining them within the context of the cultural front establishes a

world of connections to other creative and musical endeavors from the

period and immediately prior. Greenberg's activities with the New York

Pro M?sica emerge as embedded in the cultural politics of the Old Left's

Popular Front, redefined for a postwar McCarthyite climate. The fact that

the playswere

performed after the period of the Popular Front does notpreclude its values and ideals from entering the cultural equation. As

Denning argues, the cultural ideals of the Popular Front lived on into

the 1950s, well past its demise in the late 1940s.6

The subject matter and performance modes of the two plays havemore in common with the other musical products of the cultural front

than one might initially think. The texts of the plays, which can be inter

preted as critiques of fascism and capitalism, resonate with the numerous

communist, socialist,and

left-leaning critiques popularin intellectual

circles at the time, and thus resemble Marc Blitzstein's successful 1937

theater piece, The Cradle Will Rock, with its story of a corrupt industri

alist, humble and hardworking laborers in an overtly anticapitalistic

critique.7 As Elizabeth Crist has recently argued, cultural front critiquesof industrial capitalism and left-wing populism feature prominently in

Aaron Copland's music written between 1932 and 1946. Copland hadeven taken up the workers' cause, writing an article for the communist

publicationThe New Masses, and

settingAlfred

Hayes's poem"Into the

Street May First."8 Not unlike Copland, who wished to reach a mass


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Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro M?sica 423

audience through the borrowing of folk tunes, cowboy songs, and other

vernacular musics in his compositions of this period, Greenberg wished

tomake the two plays accessible, and did so by making particular editorial and performance decisions. Greenberg and his advisers linked the

plays' music to medieval folksong and other popular music in much

the same way as Popular Front composers borrowed folk tunes or art

songs with proletarian texts to instill their audiences with the ideals of

"community" and social conscience. The "community" ideals inherent in

the Marxist and socialist thought that informed so much of the aesthetic

ideology of the period were also reproduced by Greenberg and the New

York Pro M?sica in the choice and descriptions of repertoire. To be sure,the climate that produced Blitzstein's and Copland's work is changedin the postwar period, such that the cultural values of the Popular Front

lived on in a covert form.

Approaching the New York Pro Musica's performances as engagedwith the ideologies of the cultural front also explains the attraction these

two liturgical dramas and, indeed, the Middle Ages in general had fora spectrum of listeners whose musical passions were outside the realm

of medieval music. Early music appealed to the various subcultures offolk and new music from the period as journalist Mike Collins' anecdotal

remark reveals: "When Iwas in college, there was a hardcore under

ground of real folk music enthusiasts. Among their other enthusiasms

were things...

equally obscure: serious music composed prior to Bachor after Schoenberg."9 An illustration of these shared interests is that the

New York Pro M?sica was featured in a 1963 article published in SingOut! that recommended the LP Play of Daniel (along with The Holly and

theIvy by

AlfredD?lier);

thePlay of

Daniel was described as anexampleof "a flourishing musical culture which combined church liturgy, the

rustic vigor of peasant dances, the courtly art of the troubadours, and the

wandering scholars' frank comments on love and wine."10 Wfhile there is

no evidence Greenberg attended any folk-music gatherings, Folkways,a center in New York for folk music that sold both sheet music and re

cordings, carried several Greenberg recordings and his edition of An

Elizabethan Song Book}1 The record label Folkways also demonstrated

thisintriguing

crossover,producing

albums such as German FolkSongs,German Student Songs, and English Folk Songs alongside medieval topics

such as Robin Hood Ballads, collections of Renaissance songs performed

by Alfred D?lier, and LPs that taught Latin.12

Indeed, a position for medieval music as "people's culture"?to bor

row a term current from the Popular Front?can be seen in the unusu

ally high number of articles focusing on medieval culture and repertoirein Sing Out!, especially in the journal's first ten years, 1950 to 1960. In

his discussion of a song called "The Cutty Wren," A. L. Lloyd suggeststhat the wren symbolizes "baronial property," expressing the peasants'


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424 Yri

dissatisfaction with the system that enslaved them and thus highlight

ing the struggle of the common people against social abuses and the

church.13 As inmany left-wing venues of the time, the opposition was onebetween elite, "high art," and the popular, "low art" of those typically

marginalized by the church, state or factory. Sing Out! also publishedPaul Henry Lang's article on the pagan elements of Christmas (suchas people dancing in animal skins) censured by the medieval Church

in favor of Christian ones. The influence of the "popular" or "pagan"on learned traditions is also a feature of his discussion. In describing

medieval music in France, Germany, and England, he avers, "The line

of development was the same everywhere: a popular folk genre wasgradually changed into a highly sophisticated art form, into musician's

music."14 This influence of the popular or secular on "official" art forms

emerges as a problematizing feature of the categories "high" and "low,"and is a significant theme in Greenberg's revival of early music.

Descriptions of medieval music performed by the New York Pro M?

sica sometimes drew comparisons to another "people's music"?jazz.15For instance, reviews sometimes made references to jazz. A1964 New York

Times review of the New York Pro Musica's tour inMoscow notes, "Theshawm, forerunner of the oboe; the sackbut, an early trombone, and the

krummhorn, a reed instrument that buzzes like a bee, were joined with

the more familiar clavichord, the recorder, and the viola da gamba in a

simulated jazz session of about 1600 that was one of the highlights of

the evening."16 Other performers who overlapped both worlds included

jazz trumpeter LaNoue Davenport, said to "carry his improvisatory skills

over to his recorder playing, ornamenting Renaissance music in a lan

guage uniquely his own."17 Moreover,one

of the New York Pro Musica'slong-term members, Bernard Krainis, had been a professional jazz trom

bonist who doubled on recorders and led a small instrumental groupthat Greenberg introduced into his first choral ensemble in 1952.

Reviews of medieval music recordings entered the pages of jazz'sforemost musical magazine, Down Beat.18 From 1955 to 1959, the "Clas

sics" column included almost no classical or baroque music reviews, buta range of early music recordings, including Alfred Deller 's Elizabethan

andJacobean Music;

a Decca release of music from theyear

700 to the

preclassical era, called The Living Archives; a review of the Archive series'

recording Gregorian Chant, Minnesingers and Early Polyphony before 1300,and Troubadours, Trouv?res; and an album praised for its "vocal roots"

called Notre Dame Organa: Leoninus and Perotinus Magister, which featured

among its performers two New York Pro M?sica singers, Russell Ober

lin and Charles Bressler. The Chicago Daily News' jazz readership must

have found something of interest in reviews of early music as the editor

mentions that writer Donald Henahan "will continue to review those

classical records that we think should be of interest to a primarily jazz


6/25


oriented readership."19 The next ten years of reviews in these columns

reveal a penchant for early music, modern music (such as Copland's

Appalachian Spring), and Eastern bloc or Soviet music. In 1960 the first

explicit crossover of jazz and liturgy was released: Liturgical Jazz, Ed

Summerlin's jazz recording of Rev. Roger Ortmayer's service. Henahan

praised the record for its musical accompaniment and jazz arrangementof hymns.20

Such intriguing crossovers among early music, folk music, and jazz

point to the ways in which medieval music resonated with the culture of

the left. Early music, like jazz, folk, and modern music composed with

the vernacular in mind, was thought to have democratizing potentialand to offer an alternative to elite or mass-produced music. InMusical

America, a review of the Play of Herod notes that the "mainstream" was not

missed: "I began to understand the Latin after awhile, and never missed

Mozart's woodwinds, Verdi's strings, or Wagner's brasses."21 That earlymusic did not subscribe to the cult of the performer, surfaced in other

reviews: "Glory be?the age of the virtuoso singer had not yet dawned.

In this lay the strength and unity of the ensemble?not one performer

had occasion to turn himself into a shining star, casting the others intoexterior darkness."22

Socialist Politics

The early political activities of Noah Greenberg (1919-66) shed light on

his later attraction to medieval music and the ideological values and

populist attitudes that informed his approach to the Middle Ages. A Jew

growing upin New

York City during the Depressionand

Popular Frontera, Greenberg held political beliefs that were shaped by social and eco

nomic issues and the rights and conditions of workers. With confidence

in capitalism eroded, many, especially immigrant Jews in New York,

adopted the ideals of socialism and communism, which they viewed as

enlightened, liberal, and modern.23 Such ideals were considered the onlysolution to the collapsing capitalist economy of the Depression. Many

immigrant New York Jews were committed to equality and freedom

fromoppression,

and assuch, brought

this focus to the communist ac

tivism in which they participated. As James Gollin argues, Greenberg'spolitical views shared much with the left leanings of the New York Jews.

According to Gollin, in 1934 Greenberg "joined the most radical of the

period's student political organizations, the American Student Union,dominated on most campuses by Stalinists rather than socialists." Some

time around 1937 he joined the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), an organization founded by Max Shachtman that followed Trotsky's anti-Stalinist

assessment of communism in Russia.24Greenberg

and Edith Schor, his

soon-to-be wife, then followed Shachtman in his later break away from


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426 Yri

Trotsky to form the Worker's Party, which existed until 1948 with Schor

and Greenberg as devoted members.

Greenberg's socialist interests are recounted by his friend Jesse Simons,who says that after he and Greenberg became devoted members of the

Worker's Party, they and a number of other cohorts bought a lathe to

acquire the skills to get jobs in the unions, in order, in Simons's words,"to be among workers so we could teach them about socialism." Accord

ing to Simons, he and a half dozen other members of the Worker's Partysecured positions in the International Union of Marine Shipbuilding

Workers of America in 1942. Simons maintains, "We were Marxists and

Leninists, and convinced that capitalist society needed to be radically

changed. We also thought that all the social forms and cultural aspectsof our society had been corrupted by private ownership of the means

of production and we were in favor of its socialization?ownership and

control by the state." As Simons recalls of Greenberg and his friends, "We

would sing all these songs of the radical movement?Spanish, Yiddish,

German, Irish, and Italian songs, in the original languages, everybodyseemed to know them and I came to learn them."25

However, Greenberg's overt political activity was curtailed in 1948,after the commencement of hearings by the House Un-American Activi

ties Committee; according to Gollin, "the Worker's Party voted itself

out of existence ... and reconstituted itself as the Independent Socialist

League."26 Though Greenberg was no longer officially involved in the

Worker's Party, he continued to be an active supporter for progressivecauses. Greenberg supported the civil rights movement, describing him

self in a letter to Raymond Arvio of the Artists Civil Rights Association

Fund as "deeply interested in the Civil Rights Movement and concernedabout its development" and contributed money to the fund.27 Other

progressive organizations Greenberg belonged to included the Hispanic

Society, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored

People, even allowing his name to be used in the NAACP's campaignto eliminate segregated concert audiences.28 In 1955 a New York Pro

M?sica European tour sponsored by the State Department's American

National Theatre and Academy was canceled due to Greenberg's Trotskyist activities. In the

customary background check, Greenbergwas found

by the State Department to be controversial and suspect. Even appeal

ing to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an organizationwhose antitotalitarian mandate included support for those accused of

being communist proved futile.29 Greenberg later conducted the Broad

way musical A Shadow ofMy Enemy, written by Sol Stein with music bycellist Seymour Barab, constructed from the legal record of the trial of

Alger Hiss, who was charged with communist activity by key witness

Whittaker Chambers.30

Through his connections to the labor movement, Greenberg was able


8/25


to land a night job directing choirs for the International Ladies Garment

Workers Union in 1949. This experience is noteworthy for several rea

sons. First, it helped carve out a niche for Greenberg as amusic directorand gave him his first paid conducting experience. Second, it suggeststhat members felt Greenberg had the requisite socialist background to

uphold the organization's reputation for social critique, through the use

of popular accessible musical forms. The union choirs had been so suc

cessful that according to Serge Denisoff, "Most Trotskyist protest songs

actually were modeled on the show tune idiom popularized during the

1930s in labor circles, for example by the International Ladies Garment

Workers Union in their successful musical, Pins and Needles/'31

Medievalism as Utopia

Greenberg's involvement with medieval music must also be viewed

against the larger symbolic meaning of the Middle Ages for his contem

poraries. Indeed the very fact that Greenberg chose to direct his attention

to early music of all historical periods is revealing. For many, the Middle

Ages stood as a Utopian Other distinct from what was considered a corrupted modern world. Medievalist Roger Sherman Loomis stressed the

importance of medieval community as opposed to modern isolation:

"In response to the individualization, fractionalization, and isolation ofmodern life, he evoked the community and solidarity of a courtly gather

ing."32 This kind of image was also apparent in the scholarly and fictional

works of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the latter largely responsiblefor creating the landscape of the Middle Ages for popular culture. As

Norman Cantor hasargued,

Tolkien and Lewis used the MiddleAges

for therapeutic purposes, and claimed its treatment would attenuate the

general malaise for the contemporary world of industrialization, capitalism, and the military.33 Jane Chance has also suggested that Tolkien and

Lewis considered the Middle Ages as an escape from a dehumanized,

technocratic, and industrialized England.34The Middle Ages had long been implicated as a utopia in socialist

and Marxist thought before the works of Loomis, Tolkien, and Lewis. As

TimothyEvans

argues, nineteenth-centurymedievalists and members of

the Arts and Crafts movement, disillusioned with industrialization and

city life, operated under a nostalgia for the pastoral and preindustrial

peasant which they mapped onto medieval society. The medievalists

John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle formulated a social theory to discuss

the production of culture through labor. They, together with William

Morris, "came to view human labor as the source of identity and values,and postulated that the arts and industries of a historical period were

directly connected to its social and moral systems. Resisting the evilstheyperceived in industrial capitalism meant reviving traditional arts and


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428 Yri

crafts."35 Embedded in this socialist approach to medieval society was

also a critique of the elitist division between "fine arts" and "crafts."36 For

Greenberg as for Morris, Ruskin and Carlyle, the words "community"and "tradition," had moral as well as political implications?community

being the antidote to modern alienation and a sign of utopia.37At the same time, Greenberg's interest in early music was caught up in

an ambivalence for what he called "the standard repertoire." Greenbergshared the modernist practice of disdaining common-practice repertoirein favor of new music and old music made new. Greenberg recounted

the growing interest in early music in blatantly oppositional terms: "The

musician and music listener have rebelled against the standard repertoire and they have found 700 years of music of every description."38

Greenberg's outlook would thus place early music into a camp opposite Romanticism in much the same way as those involved with Neo

classicism embraced the "objective" rather than "subjective" modes of

expression.39 Charged with the same rhetoric reserved for antitotalitari

anism, Greenberg's language could be said to be a reaction against the

long reign in New York City of Toscanini, who was conductor first for

the Metropolitan Opera (1908-15), then for the New York Philharmonic(1926-36), and finally for the NBC Symphony (1937-54). By 1947 Tosca

nini's television audience for broadcasts of NBC symphonic concerts was

estimated at ten million. Declared by Life magazine to be a musical Joe

DiMaggio, Toscanini transformed high culture and classical music into

a mass movement.40 Toscanini favorites such as Wagner's Preludes to

Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nuremburg, and Beethoven's

Third and Fifth Symphonies came to be so ubiquitous that they would

increasingly limit the listening opportunities for the New York audience.Even though Toscanini was no longer conducting by the time the Play

of Daniel was premiered, his presence certainly left its mark on Green

berg who defined his task as challenging the "tyranny of the standard

repertoire," a phrase that surely refers to the small and entrenched set

of "masterworks" favored by Toscanini.41

Medieval Music as Gebrauchsmusik

Greenberg's attraction to the two plays and the decisions he made in

directing their performances also reflect the left-wing ideals of the Ge

brauchsmusik aesthetic that sought tomake music for social use. Informed

by midcentury ideals of socialism and Gebrauchsmusik, Greenbergwanted to disseminate medieval music widely and make it socially rel

evant?even the fact that Greenberg named the Pro M?sica after the

Brussels Pro M?sica Antiqua underscores his populist attitude toward

medieval music. SaffordCape,

the American who founded and led the

latter group, established a reputation in Europe for bringing early music


10/25


into the popular and social sphere. Rejecting the idea of early music as

an elite form of music, Cape intended it to be participatory. The New

York Pro M?sica shared Cape's outlook. On many of their tours acrossthe United States, the New York Pro M?sica gave workshops and visited

schools. They also established a community outreach education program,inwhich Greenberg led a choral study group, Martha Blackman directed

viols, and Bernard Krainis taught recorder. This focus also reflects the

cultural front's populist trend, which in the 1930s had witnessed the

widespread dissemination of high art forms such as the paperback edi

tions of classic literature published by Penguin.

To be sure, the Gebrauchsmusik aesthetic shared much with the workof nineteenth-century medievalists, both having been born of the same

malaise for the industrial revolution. l?chard Taruskin asserts that the Ge

brauchsmusik aesthetic "emerged out of an antiquarian milieu," and that

the German musicologist Heinrich Besseler adopted the term Gebrauchs

musik to assert the social relevance of medieval music as intrinsic to "life

as-lived": "Besseler, whose research inmedieval music had relativized his

values, had lost faith in the supremacy of absolute music and its attendant

modes of listening. He dreamed of recapturing Heidegger's 'primordial'immediacy of experience, and the social relevance the music he studied

had possessed as an art still undivorced from life-as-lived."42

Taruskin's discussion of Gebrauchsmusik is in the context of neoclas

sicism, where the "back to" nature mindset marked out not only an in

terest in eighteenth-century and baroque forms, but also the more trans

parent textures and simpler melodic structures of folk music and earlymusic. According to Taruskin, Hindemith's neoclassicism suggested a

"Bach of the Left": a communal and Gebrauchsmusik view of Bach as a"Gemeinschaftsmusiker, turning out well made, socially useful goodsto order" for the masses.43 Greenberg's treatment of medieval music

can be compared to this notion of Gebrauchsmusik, borne out in such

accessible pieces as Lehrst?ck or Wir bauen eine Stadt, which Hindemith

wrote for amateurs and children, and which were tied to the social and

political aims illuminated in their texts.

Unlike the other sacred and secular music the New York Pro M?sica

performed,the

plays,in

fact,had a Gebrauchsmusik aesthetic as their

raison d'etre. Greenberg knew that both Daniel and Herod had been written

as educational tools for an audience of common folk. He also focused on

the two medieval plays' widespread provenance and transmission, em

phasizing they were for everyday people. Greenberg believed the music

of the plays included music of everyday "folk" to be used for didactic

purposes, something that surely resonated with his own ideas about the

social function of art. Moreover, Greenberg was aware that the financial

successnecessary

to continue his endeavorsmight

follow if thepublicfound the plays accessible.


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430 Yri

Greenberg also believed that both plays had been written for the Feast

of Fools, a feast between Christmas and New Year's Eve that gave the

youth and students of the Church, as well as common folk and other

participants, the chance to switch hierarchical roles and become the "rul

ers" for the duration of the event.44 Such a reversal of roles, and the

privileging of the students of the Church and "the people" over "the

establishment" may have been attractive to Greenberg given his earlier

revolutionary persona. But more important, this reversal resulted in a

blurring of boundaries between the sacred and secular, and allowed

Greenberg to consider the plays more as drama rather than liturgy.

Liner notes emphasize these features. Father Rembert Weakland (b.1927), who transcribed Daniel for Greenberg, described the work as a

hit in its time, performed for one hundred years at New Year for the

Feast of Fools and having been written for the Feast by the students of

the Cathedral of Beauvais from the Vulgate. Weakland also emphasizedthe impending independence of drama, stating, "Our interest in Daniel

is heightened by the fact that itwas written at that precise period when

the connection between the liturgy and the drama had become more and

more tenuous and the drama was soon to assert its independence."45 Inhis notes for the Play of Daniel, Paul Henry Lang suggests that Daniel

was intended as a moral tale for an audience of common, illiterate folk,and that elements of myth, fable, and burlesque appear. Lang also drew

attention to the fact that performances of these plays were eventually

stopped during the Middle Ages because their "secularization and ir

reverence" were perceived as threatening to Church authorities.46

As best he could, Greenberg considered the two dramas in terms of

their historical as well as their contemporary social and moral functions,but, as we will see, he downplayed the religious aspects in favor of those

that emphasized "people's" culture. Although the plays had a Christian

didactic function in their historical provenance, the cultural context in

which they were presented in the 1950s andl960s shifted the focus awayfrom the religious to the social. The choice of biblical themes on the Jewish hero Daniel and the slaughter of the innocents would seem to reflecta religious commitment. Greenberg was not, however, a religious man.

As author and criticGeorge

P. Elliott wouldrecall,

"He did not do it in

order to bring the people of New York into a better connection with the

God of Jews and Christians. He had been born and raised a Jew, but in

his youth had accepted the rationalistic Jewish-Christian heresy, social

ism, and especially, Trotsky's faction of the schism."47 The ideologicaldimensions of the cultural front in New York together with the secular

context of contemporary life suggest that the texts may have been read

as metaphor and perhaps even spoke to the threat of totalitarianism

amongother

topicalsocialist concerns.48

A socialist or even Marxist reading of Christian texts would, signifi


12/25


cantly, have precedent in the cultural front.49 A communist reading of

religion, for instance, revolved around the ideals of brotherhood and

emancipation: "In the ideas of goodness, equality, fraternity amonghuman beings which the Christian religion also speaks of and which are

reflected in the religious and sincere conscience of any believer, there are

elements capable of contributing to an emancipating struggle."50 Marxist

readings also stressed the history of oppressed Christians. As Friedrich

Engels stated:

The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance

with themodern working-class

movement.Like

thelatter, Christian

ity was originally amovement of oppressed people: it first appearedas the religion of slaves and emancipated slaves, of poor people

deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome.

Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcomingsalvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this in a life

beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in

a transformation of society.51

Likewise, the texts spoke to issues of universal concern such as tyranny,

corruption, and jealousy versus honor, hope, and reward. They did not

need to have partisan labels to communicate their ideals, nor could theyin the postwar anticommunist period of McCarthyism.

The Play of Daniel recounts the Old Testament tale of a humble, ex

iled, and persecuted Jew who is finally recognized and rewarded for his

faith and wisdom. Daniel is brought in to "read the writing on the wall"

and divines the corrupt king's impending doom for his part in using

religious vessels stolen from the Jews as adornment and riches, and formaking these vessels into idols to be worshipped. The story lends itself

to a number of different interpretations. On one level, it can be read as

a "back-to-basics" statement, suggesting that social and spiritual life be

stripped of its dependence on material items. Given the dominant position of left-wing politics in New York, and the rampant commodifica

tion in 1950s and 1960s cultural life, Daniel's rejection of the gifts that

he receives for his wisdom is striking for its cautionary statement about

capitalism. The focus on Babylon as amorally bankrupt community andBelshazzar as an evil oppressor of Jews was an obvious echo to the Jewish

Holocaust masterminded by Hitler during World War II. (Harold Rome's

1937 "Pins and Needles" treats King Belshazzar as a fascist dictator in

the sketch "Men?, Men?, Tekel.")52 Finally, Darius's manipulation into

using a law he was tricked into making against his esteemed Daniel sug

gests the corrupted practices of modern bureaucracy, easily a reflection

of postwar Trotskyist views of the Soviet Union or anticapitalist views

of the United States.

The Play ofHerod also features themes that likely attracted a left-leaning


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432 Yri

Greenberg. Christ's humble origins and his mission to unite the world

and bring about peace and goodwill may have resonated with revolu

tionary agendas to stand up against a corrupt but powerful government.More important, the king's decision tomurder a generation of baby boysunderscores the existence of totalitarianism and atrocities, a telling state

ment of holocaust experience, and perhaps even Stalinist purges here, as

in the play, brought on by arbitrary political forces. By making critical

statements about their societies and voicing collective hopes to find a

leader worthy of trust, the plays' texts can be understood in relation to

the ideological values of the cultural front.

Medieval Music as Folk Music

Concurrent with the cultural front and Greenberg's activities with the

New York Pro M?sica was the revival of a folk ethic whose commu

nist, Marxist, and other left-wing connections have been thoroughly

explored.53 Greenberg's direction of the plays reflected the ideologicalaesthetic of the folk revival in the way he highlighted the "folk" roots of

the musiceven

when the repertoirewas

sacred. As I shall shortly discuss,Greenberg and his advisers brought out the popular and/or folk originsof the plays in the liner notes and in the use of instruments and meter.

This decision hinged on several elements. First, it involved an equatingof anonymous works, whether sacred or secular, with folksong or folk

music at this time. Particularly in the case o? Herod, there was a common

pool of anonymous melodies also employed in other "Magi" dramas,

suggesting a form of popularity that translated to "people's music."

Linked to this wasGreenberg's

and hiscontemporaries' knowledge

of

the complex interweaving of sacred and secular in much medieval repertoire. For example, musicologist Gustave Reese, a friend and advisor

to Greenberg, believed "there was no sharp line of demarcation between

sacred and secular music" at this time, and explored the influence of folk

elements on church music, as well as the influence of church music on

the music of the troubadours and trouv?res.54 This connection of highart music to folk music or "popular" music was a frequent theme in

monographsand

writingsfrom the

period.55The fourth edition of Grove's

Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1947) contains a substantial entry for

"song," in which Claudie Marcel-Dubois notes the close connection be

tween folksong and liturgical song: "It is necessary to emphasize the

close connection which has ever existed and perhaps in France more

than in any other country?between the folk song and the Church."56

In the fifth edition of Grove's Dictionary (1954), Maud Karpeles defines

"folk music" as "any music as well as song which has entered into the

heritageof the

people,but can be

assignedto no composer, school, or

as a rule, even period."57


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The liner notes for the Play of Daniel recording and edition draw atten

tion to the overlap between the music of the plays and folksong, popular

song, and music of the trouv?res. The majority of the pieces in Danielwere said to draw "on the rhythms and melodies of the trouv?res who

journeyed over France delighting its people with song and story, and

from the art of those folk themselves."58 Paul Henry Lang writes of the

Jewish, Greek, Latin, and traditional folk elements that merge together to

form a Gregorian art, again highlighting the relationship between secular

and sacred: "from its very beginning, Christian ritual music could not be

and would not be sharply distinguished from secular-profane music,"

and further, "this is natural because, as we now realize, Gregorian chantis a repository of all manner of music, from pentatonic melodies of ex

treme antiquity to Western folk song and Byzantine hymn."59 Of the

Play of Daniel, Weakland notes: "[It] is the music itself that ensured the

play's popularity, and in the tunefulness of its melodies and piquancyof its rhythms, we come perhaps as close as we ever shall to medieval

folk song."60 The attraction to the music was surely another factor in

Greenberg's selection of Daniel. Writings about Daniel also emphasized

the strong relationship between secular and sacred traditions in the musicof the play, highlighting the popular, vernacular themes that crept inside

the sanctity of the Catholic Church.

This popular appeal was also mentioned in liner notes for the Play

ofHerod, which included two plays from the Fleury Playbook, The Representation of Herod and The Slaying of the Children, both of which were

said to have been "written to appeal to a popular audience and were

originally performed by the men and boys of the choir school attachedto the monastic church of

Fleury."In another

passage, Greenbergnoted

that "these pieces must have been very well-known in the twelfth cen

tury," again suggesting he felt their widespread appeal made them more

attractive.61

Descriptions of other repertoire performed by the New York Pro M?

sica also played up the music's popular and secular origins. Considerstatements made about Leonin's Viderunt on the album Music of theMe

dieval Court and Countryside. Saul Novak writes:

It is in the compositions of Leonin that we witness for the first time in

liturgical music the organization of time values into patterns clearly

establishing the concept of rhythm. The sources of this concept are,

however, secular, for itwas from the word-born rhythmic modes

of the troubadour and trouv?re, the courtly poet singers that the

rhythmic groupings of the Notre Dame composers evolved.62

It is thus clear in the writings about the plays and concurrent scholarshipthat

"highart" forms of medieval music such as

Gregorianchant and

troubadour and trouv?re music were thought to have their basis in folk


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434 Yri

song and popular song. Medieval songs supplied the universal "roots"

for other forms of medieval music. This common outlook manifested in

Greenberg's plansfor a

compilationof medieval music that would be

called "Medieval Roots," and which would feature what he considered

to be popular songs of the Middle Ages.63

Greenberg also considered medieval "roots music" as something that

could be used to build community. In a 1962 lecture on medieval music,

Greenberg suggested "roots music" could offer comfort and communityat a time when political factions were increasingly hostile.

Today perhaps more than any other time, we crave the comfort that a

great tradition gives us. In this period of rapid changes, phenomenalscientific achievements accompanied by the ever-present threat of

mass destruction, many of us need the support that only "roots" can

give, partly as an escape (who can deny it) but primarily to reinforceour belief inMan and the good he can accomplish.64

The ideology underpinning Greenberg's comments on "tradition" and

"roots" evokes nineteenth-century medievalists' visions of communityas a panacea for alienation. Since such an outlook informs midcentury

American ideals for the performance of folksong and folk music, it is

not surprising to find similar statements about "roots" and "tradition"

in literature about the folk revival. Robert Cantwell contends, "As folk

music and crafts symbolized the grassroots democracy of preindustrialAmerica, they also embodied the values of a rootedness and authenticitycharacteristic of patriarchal aristocracy. The very concept of folk was a

vertical one, of a traditional society pictured from above, where peasantryand nobility live in an interdependence literally grounded in land."65

Medieval Music Performed as "People's Music"

In keeping with his understanding of the plays as exhibiting popular provenance and folk elements, Greenberg constructed their performances to

be accessible and attractive to audiences such that they conveyed the idea

of "people's music." The adoption of instruments, the insertion of instru

mental pieces, and a strong rhythmic emphasis provided the plays with

the characteristics of a medieval town square rather than cathedral.Itmust be remembered that the "scores" for the medieval pieces the

New York Pro M?sica performed were sketchy, to say the least. Though

pitch was in many cases notated in a form that was decipherable, there

remained questions about meter, tempo, and rhythm. Whether to ac

company or not, what?if any?type of instruments might be used, what

vocal style and timbre was authentic, and what tempo or interpretiveframework should be applied, were all left up to Greenberg. As such,

the New York Pro M?sica could practically "invent" both the sound andthe cultural meaning.


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For the Play of Daniel, Greenberg enlisted the help of Weakland and

based his performance and edition on Weakland's transcription.66 Weak

land transcribed thepitches

from the medieval notation into modern no

tation with little difficulty. Many of the melodies themselves, especiallythose in Daniel, had skips and leaps that were typically associated with

secular and dance music, confirming for Weakland and Greenberg the

influence of the art of "the people" on the music of the Church.

Rhythm was another matter. The question of rhythmic interpretationwas controversial since the Beauvais manuscript, like other medieval

manuscripts from this period, gave no rhythmic markings. Weakland

kept the two pieces in the play that were in the style of plainchant in their

original unmeasured settings. However, a large number of the pieceswere given strong triple meter settings dictated by the rhythm of the

Latin poetic texts and based on late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century

rhythmic modes. Other pieces were set in duple meter perhaps because

Weakland and Greenberg were aware of the theory that duple meter

may have been used in medieval secular music and troubadour and

trouv?re music even though itwas not able to be notated until the four

teenth century.67 For listeners in the 1950s and early 1960s, such metered

settings established links to popular music and certainly did not conveythe prayer-like atmosphere of liturgy or religious drama: the triple meter

was associated with secular dance numbers and the duple meter drew

associations with popular forms like the march. In all cases, the music

conveyed strong metric settings that signaled the secular rather than

sacred realm.

Another way Greenberg made the plays accessible "people's music"

and drew on what he posited to be "popular" themes was to add in

struments to the musical settings. At the time Greenberg began to put

together Daniel, medievalists knew the liturgical dramas were performedafter the Office of Matins because of the final Te Deum. Wflrile medieval

ists proscribed the use of instruments during liturgical services, theywere unsure whether instruments were used in liturgical dramas.68 As

he recounted in his edition for Daniel, there were several references to

instruments in the Latin poetry: "Let the drums sound forth, let the

harp players pluck their strings, let the instruments of the musicians

resound in his praise." Greenberg believed that the use of instrumentsin his edition was justified, and chose to feature the unusual timbres of

Renaissance and "Oriental" instruments typically reserved for secular

music. Psaltery, rebec, and recorders were grouped with Arabian nakers,Turkish cymbals, Near Eastern finger cymbals and Scottish bagpipes to

create an instrumental world rife with color. The settings of both playsalso make extensive use of tambourine and various other percussioninstruments to highlight the rhythmic, march-like or dance-like meter.

With the Play of Daniel, Greenberg also obtained advice from musicologist Edmund Bowles regarding the use of instruments for symbolic


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436 Yri

purposes.69 Bowles suggested the use of psaltery, harp, and organ with

holy characters, the trumpet with kings and characters speaking to him,

the recorder, vielle, bells and percussion with the pagan courts, and therebec with "the envious counsellors." Bowles thus helped construct a

distinction between secular and sacred characters, as well as a hierarchyof various social classes.

For the Play of Herod, Greenberg's performing edition relied on the

transcription provided by medieval liturgical drama expert William

L. Smoldon (1892-1974). The play was put together at the Benedictine

monastery of Fleury for the Feast of the Holy Innocents.70 In contrast

to Daniel, Herod contains a large number of (liturgically derived) pieceswhose provenance can be traced to the Mass or Office, and features fewer

pieces with regular rhyme and rhythm. As Smoldon notes, he set the few

pieces with obvious rhyme and rhythm in the Latin poetry to rhythmicmodes and set the rest of the material, prose passages, or service pieces

in "free rhythm."71 Accordingly, there are several prose passages wherea singular figure, such as Herod (an Angel) or Rachel, sings in long pas

sages in free rhythm, and fewer passages in regular rhythm.

But ifHerod's reliance on liturgical items meant it had less of the rhythmic drive and duple or triple meter settings associated with secular or

popular influence, Greenberg's performance made up for this lack in two

ways. First, he added four metered pieces to the performance. He chose

to add two instrumental estampies or dances, and two choral pieces on

sacred texts. Since the play included "The Slaying of the Innocents," a

feast commonly understood to take place between Christmas and New

Year's, Greenberg considered it too as a liturgical drama for the Feast

of Fools.72Accordingly,

he inserted the Christmassequence

"Orientis

Partibus," or "Prose of the Ass" as the opening processional. The liner

notes suggest this sequence was used because the play provided no

music for a procession, and the donkey was a symbol of Christ's flightto Egypt. But the medieval use of "The Prose of the Ass" as a parodyin the reversal of hierarchical roles during the Feast was well known

and surely played into the decision to include it. Greenberg also added

the thirteenth-century motet Alle-Psallite cum-luya, which highlights the

emotionalsincerity

of theAngels'

and Rachel'smourning.

Presumably to maintain accessibility and create a pageant as vibrant,

colorful, and successful as Daniel, Greenberg also decided to repeat the

estampies at three further points in the performance. Second, Greenbergalso chose to use instruments in some of the texted pieces, though he

limited them to recorder, vielle, bagpipe, tenor drum, and bell carillon.

The instrumental accompaniments provided a colorful contrast to the

passages that were a cappella or accompanied only by tenor drum. Again,since the music of Herod was

closelyrelated to the music of the service

books, such metered and instrumental additions would have been seen


18/25


as necessary to add contrast and variation, and to liven up what would

otherwise have conveyed a more liturgical atmosphere.

The significance of the inclusion of instruments in Herod cannot beoverstated, since at the time Smoldon prepared the transcription, he

had become averse to their use and strongly advised Greenberg againsttheir employment. Notably, Smoldon had changed his mind. In his New

Oxford History and Grove entries in 1954 (before he began work on Herod)he suggested that since the plays showed secular influence, it seemedhard to imagine that they did not use instruments. However, by the

time he worked on Herod, Smoldon believed that since liturgical dramas

were performed as an appendage to the church service, they would haveused only organ and bells for accompaniment. In his liner notes for the

recording and edition of Herod, he even deemed it important enough to

go on record disagreeing, noting that,

regarding musical accompaniments, the evidence for the employment of instruments during the acting of these Church dramas is

almost wholly negative. Whatever use of them is made in modern

stagings must depend upon the principles of good taste, and the

fact that in medieval times the dramas were performed during theHour services of the Church, when a restricted use of organ and

chime-bells only was permitted.73

Smoldon also later prepared his own edition of the Play of Daniel that

dispensed with the use of instruments as well as with metric rhythms.

Greenberg's scoring, staging, and edition, and his decision not to fol

low Smoldon's advice on the use of instruments are also telling in the way

they privilegethe secular

activitythat infiltrated the Church.

Greenbergknew there were medieval edicts against using particular musical formsand instruments in the churches where the plays would have been performed.74 In a guest lecture he delivered at the University of Coloradoin June 1962, Greenberg quoted Erasmus, who complained: "We have

introduced an artificial and theatrical music into the church, amorous

and lascivious melodies are heard such as elsewhere accompany onlydances of courtesans and clowns. The people run into the churches as

ifthey

were theatres, for the sake of the sensuous charm of the ear."75

Greenberg interpreted this logic as evidence that since edicts existed to

forbid the use of instruments, instruments must have been used. If the

official stance of the Church was against the use of instruments other

than organ, Greenberg chose to privilege the unofficial, marginalizedversions that he perhaps felt represented "the people," or the "popularaudience" to whom he referred in his edition.

The use of instruments, the scoring of voices in different ranges, and theuse of metered rhythms also helped to underscore the social classes andhierarchies of the characters in the plays. Greenberg's probable attraction


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438 Yri

to the plays as popular products of youth and as moral tales involving

power struggles was undoubtedly bolstered by the large numbers of

choruses included in Daniel, which he directed to sound like workers'

choruses with their strict meter, repetitive rhythms, and robust presentation. Greenberg adds contrast and variety to the longer "chorus" piecesand processionals through instrumental, timbrai, and registral means.

Typically, each strophe is given different instrumental and/or registraltreatment. In the Play ofDaniel, Greenberg's performance also marks the

characters' public and social status by employing different registers and

timbres, such that Belshazzar's Prince, a countertenor, is distinguishedfrom the Princes, who are baritones, and from the Satraps, who are sung

by a boys' choir. As Greenberg notes in his edition, he transposed particular sections because of range and tessitura.76 Greenberg scored both

King Belshazzar and King Darius as low voices (a bass and baritone re

spectively), and rendered their lines in a rhythmic language that suited

their authority. The king's syllabic declamation, his bass register, and

slow tempo mark him as authoritative, stately, and severe. The king's

regal and proclamatory stature is also reinforced by a trumpet fanfare,

the musical equivalent to the vocal signifier Rex in eternum vive that

always precedes him, and by the avoidance of instrumental accompaniment. Daniel's melodic lines, particularly the lines of his lament, are

significantly different from the many secular-inspired pieces of the play,a contrast that helps to bring out his unique and holy role. Greenbergalso drew out the lyricism of Daniel's melodies by consistently settingthem for countertenor voice. In terms of instrumental accompaniment,

Greenberg chose only portative organ, drone, and the occasional strikingof the minstrel's harp to accompany the famed section in which Daniel reads the writing on the wall and prophecies the king's overthrow.

Weakland's suggestion for syllabic declamation of the text, performedin a free manner, renders it closer in style to modern performances of

chant and thus suitable for Daniel's holy prophecy.

Greenberg's treatment, which might very well be described as pageant-like, with its processions, recessions, and costumes, makes everyeffort to make the play, its music, and its message readily accessible. As

a crowning touch, Greenberg chose to have an English narrator?noless a figure as W. H. Auden?convey the meaning of the Latin texts.

Interestingly enough, Auden himself had a special relationship to the

Middle Ages that overlapped in places with Greenberg's. According to

Lucy McDiarmid, "[Yeats, Eliot, and] Auden see the twentieth century as

historically 'fallen' from the golden time which they locate in the Middle

Ages. To those longing for the universalized system that Auden found

lacking in 1927, a disunified present might be compensated for by a uni

fied past, a time undisturbed by secularism, capitalism, or science."77


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* * *

I have argued that Greenberg's work with the Play of Daniel and Play ofHerod is aligned with the ideological values of the cultural front. This

sharing of values encourages the plays to be considered against the his

torical and cultural contexts that made Gebrauchsmusik and folk musicso attractive to the American left and suggests ways that Greenberg'srevival of the plays grew out of them. The McCarthyite climate of the

postwar United States differed to such an extent from prewar New Deal

liberalism that the ideological values associated with the cultural frontwere stripped of their partisan or communist associations in the postwar

period and in some cases constructed as democratic and "American."

Without mentioning socialism, Trotskyism, Marxism, or communism,

Greenberg nevertheless constructed the two plays as if he were devel

oping a form of "People's Music." Through careful presentation, use

of instruments, lively, rhythmic interpretations, the addition of secular

pieces, as well as a literal emphasis on "folk" elements and folksong,he forged connections to other music whose emphasis lay in its social

significance.If Greenberg had lived into the 1970s, he would have been able to

witness the incredible flourishing of medieval music in concert halls,on airwaves, and on sound recordings. He would have been gratified to

see that what began as a tiny group of listeners could grow to becomea significant portion of the classical music audience. He would surelyhave seen his role in the 1970s stereotype of early music described byLaurence Dreyfus as relying on social codes of democracy, harmony,and fellowship in contrast to the hierarchical and competitive nature of

mainstream classical music.78 These social and cultural codes were set in

motion under Greenberg's tenure with the New York Pro M?sica. Under

his leadership, ideals of "community," "roots," and tradition, all values

that defined the "Old Left" in intellectual circles in New York City, were

mapped onto the practices of reviving "pre-Bach" music.

Greenberg may have believed he was reconstructing performancesclose to the original by focusing on elements he understood to have in

formed the unofficial backdrop to the plays during the Middle Ages. Yethis choices are symbolic of the sleight of hand that tricks us into think

ing we have ready access to the Middle Ages, and that masks the fact

that our access is always mediated. While Greenberg's activities with

the New York Pro M?sica are not an "authentic" reflection of medieval

musical ideas, they provide a window to the birth of medievalism as a

democratizing force in the United States at mid-century, and continue to

enrich the musical experiences of listeners and music-makers not only

in sound, but in imagination.


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440 Yri

NOTES

Iwould like to thank Joseph Auner, Sarah Fuller, Lisa Barg, and David Fallows for their

helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay. The author also gratefully acknowledgesthe financial support for this research from a grant partly funded by Wilfrid Laurier Uni

versity operating funds and partly by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council

Institutional grant.

1. E. D. [Edward Downes], "Medieval Drama Sung at Cloisters," New York Times, Jan.

3,1958,15.

2. These were released as recordings: New York Pro M?sica, The Play of Daniel, Decca

79402,1959, and New York Pro M?sica, ThePlay

ofHerod, Decca DXSA 7187,1964.Greenbergalso published performing editions: The Play of Daniel: A Thirteenth-Century Musical Drama,

ed. Noah Greenberg, based on a transcription by Rev. Rembert Weakland (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1959); and The Play of Herod: A Twelfth Century Musical Drama, eds. Noah

Greenberg and William L. Smoldon, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965). Iwill use

the editions' full titles to distinguish them from the recordings.3. Richard Taruskin, "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," in Au

thenticity and Early Music, ed. Nicholas Kenyon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988);Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention ofMedieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2002). Leo Treitler makes a similar point in his "The Politics of Reception:

Tailoring the Presentas

Fulfillment ofa

Desired Past," Journal of Royal Musical Association116, no. 2 (1991): 280-98.

4. Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth

Century (London: Verso, 1997), 4.

5. The New York Pro M?sica also performed Renaissance music in addition to medieval

secular music, but I have focused on the plays because of their widespread appeal. I as

sign agency to Greenberg because although he consulted musicologists in his work, he

ultimately made the final decisions, sometimes to the chagrin of those who advised him.

6. Denning, Cultural Front, 25.

7. For a reading of Blitzstein's piece, see Carol J. Oja, "Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will

Rock and Mass-song Style of the 1930s," Musical Quarterly 73, no. 4 (1989): 445-75; and

Denning, Cultural Front, 285-94.

8. For Copland's involvement in the Popular Front, see Elizabeth B. Crist, "Aaron Copland and the Popular Front," Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 2 (Summer

2003): 409-66.

9. Mike Collins, "Personal Observations on the Folk Craze," Catholic Times, Feb. 28,1964,

quoted in Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1996), 282.

10. No reviewer cited, Sing Out! 13, no. 5 (1963-64): 77 and 79 respectively. Note that

the reviewer is also referring to the confluences of liturgical music, peasant music (read"folk song") and court music, and a manuscript that epitomized "wandering scholars'

frank comments on love and wine," the Carmina Burana. This overlapping of medieval

and folk-music spheres has recently been discussed in John Haines, Eight Centuries ofTroubadours and Trouv?res: The Changing Identity of Medieval Music (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004), 245. Haines claims that in the mid-twentieth century, "folk songwas a frequent inspiration for interpreters of medieval monophony" and involved the

"well-known circular sequence that trouv?re songs flow from living folk traditions which

lead straight back to medieval song."11. According to Izzy Young, who owned and operated the Greenwich Village-based

folk-resource storeFolkways, Greenberg's

An ElizabethanSong

Book and ThePlay of

Daniel,


22/25


as well as Renaissance sheet music, were stocked and sold during the 1950s and 1960s;

Young, personal communication with the author, June 3,1999. An Elizabethan Song Book

was also advertised inSing

Out! in the 1950s.

12. The crossover is also evident on Vanguard Recordings, which included sleeves for

the Connoisseur label advertising medieval, folksong, and early music. For instance, on the

Ravens album discussed below, recordings by the following musicians are advertised: the

Weavers at Carnegie Hall, Joan Baez, Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, and John Hammond's

Spirituals to Swing. The Folkways label released albums of Renaissance music, English

folksongs, and Robin Hood tunes, as well as albums by the Almanacs, the Weavers, and

Leadbelly.13. A. L. Lloyd, "Revolutionary Significance of 14th-Century English Song," Sing Out!

4, no. 1 (1953): 4-6.

14. Paul Henry Lang, "Christmas Music: A Tradition of Centuries," Sing Out! 12, no. 5

(1962-63): 19-21.

15. For a discussion of jazz as people's music, see Sidney Finkelstein, Jazz: A People'sMusic (1948; New York: Da Capo, 1975).

16. N. A., "Shawm and Sackbut Charm Muscovites," New York Times, Oct. 6, 1964,34:2.

17. Judith Davidoff, "Tribute: LaNoue Davenport," Early Music America 6 (2000): 6.

18. Elizabethan and Jacobean Music, Vanguard BG-539,1955, is reviewed by Les Brown as

an LP of songs "larded with attractive interludes of lute, harpsichord, and violins," that

features Alfred D?lier, "a natural male alto"; Down Beat 22, no. 9 (1955): 18.

19. "Editor's note," Down Beat 26. no. 25 (1959): 47.

20. Don Henahan, "Review of Liturgical Jazz" [Ecclesia ER 101], Down Beat 27, no.

1 (1960): 84. Four months later, Down Beat reported that Liturgical Jazz's success led to

Summerlin's decision to go on tour with it?see Don Henahan, Down Beat 27, no. 8 (1960).A live performance was also telecast on NBC's TV-Net in 1960.

21. C. S. S, "The Play of Herod," Musical America 84, no. 1 (January 1964): 55.

22. V. R. R., "Concert: M?sica Antiqua," New York Times, Nov. 11,1957,34.

23. For further discussion, see Arthur Liebman, Jews and the Left (New York: John Wileyand Sons, 1979), and Stanley Rothman, Roots of Radicalism: Jews, Christians, and the New Left

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).24. James Gollin, Pied Piper, The Many Lives ofNoah Greenberg (Hillsdale, N.Y.: Pendragon

Press, 2001), 28, 29, 42. Although Gollin carefully details Greenberg's associations with

socialist and communist organizations, he consistently downplays Greenberg's cultural

politics by citing accounts of friends who do not remember Greenberg actually discuss

ing his political views. Gollin's desire to will away Greenberg's political and ideologicalactivities is part of a larger symptom of anticommunist ideology that, as Elizabeth Crist

has argued in "Aaron Copland and the Popular Front," has informed accounts of Copland

among others. The exact date of Greenberg's affiliation with SWP is not known.

25. Mark Davenport interview with Jesse Simons, "Noah Greenberg, The Man Behind

theMusic," Early

Music America3,

no.3, (1993): 40,41.

26. Gollin, Pied Piper, 87. According to Gollin, the Independent Socialist League was

placed on the U.S. Attorney General's list.

27. Noah Greenberg, letter to Raymond Arvio, Dec. 3, 1964, in Box 6, New York Pro

M?sica Archives, Research Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

(hereafter New York Pro M?sica Archives).28. Ibid.

29. For details about this incident, see Gollin, Pied Piper, 220.

30. Sol Stein, personal correspondence with the author, April 11, 2005.

31. Serge Denisoff, Sing a Song of Social Significance (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State

University Press, 1983), 85. Also see Serge Denisoff, Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the


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442 Yri

American Left (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), for a discussion of social causes

in music of the 1930s and 1940s.

32.Roger Sherman Loomis, quoted by Jeff

Rider in"Roger Sherman

Loomis:Medieval

ism as Antimodernism," Studies inMedievalism 6 (1994): 144.

33. Norman Cantor, Inventing theMiddle Ages (New York: Quill William Morrow, 1991),229-30. According to Cantor, the first of Lewis's messages "is the reality of evil, personified

by the devil and represented in the materialism, selfishness, corruption, and self-destruc

tiveness of everyday life. Like medieval Catholics, Lewis preached a pessimistic, dualistic

view of the world as the scene of struggle between good and evil," 221. Tolkien's fictional

works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings also use the Middle Ages therapeutically, and

speak of loss, of decay, and the desire to bring about peace in the world. Cantor asserts

that The Lord of the Rings employs medieval themes to comment on both the Middle Ages

and the present: "But his book can be read, and was by himself, as an argument againstthe mechanistic state and society that commit evil even when their intentions are good"

(229-30).34. Jane Chance, Preface, "Inklings and Others," Studies inMedievalism 3, no. 3 (1991):

231.

35. Timothy H. Evans, "Folklore as Utopia: English Medievalists and the Ideology of

Revivalism," Western Folklore 47, no. 4 (Oct. 1988): 246.

36. William Morris was first amember of the Social Democratic Federation and then the

Socialist League.37. Evans, "Folklore as Utopia," 264-65.

38. Noah Greenberg, lecture delivered at the University of Colorado, June 23, 1962,

typescript in Box 14, New York Pro M?sica Archives. In this lecture, Greenberg attributes

this interest in early music to the "tolerance and intellectual curiosity of our time and

willingness to examine different cultural expressions."39. Taruskin makes this point in "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the

Past."

40. Joseph Horowitz, "Sermons in Tones," American Music 16, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 311,

329.

41. Ibid. Greenberg was certainly not alone in his criticism of the stranglehold of "stan

dardrepertoire."

Modern Americancomposers,

whose works were alsoplayed

infre

quently, labeled Toscanini's audience "prestige-hypnotized and fashion enslaved" (ibid.,

330). Copland referred to the "endless repetition of a small body of entrenched master

works" as having a negative effect on American culture (ibid.).42. Richard Taruskin, "Review: Back toWhom? Neoclassicism as Ideology," 19th Century

Music 16, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 295.

43. The other trajectory describes an elite version of Bach as espoused by Stravinsky,

among others, which viewed Bach as a "transcendent impersonal artisan" writing for an

aristocratic audience of experts. Both views are described in ibid., 297.

44. For more on The Feast of Fools and Daniel, see Margot Fassler, "The Feast of Fools

and Danielis Ludus: Popular Tradition in a Medieval Cathedral Play," in Plainsong in theAge of Polyphony, ed. Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),65-99.

45. Weakland, liner notes for Play of Daniel, 4.

46. Paul Henry Lang, liner notes for Play of Daniel, 3.

47. George P. Elliot, "The Achievement of Noah Greenberg," loose clipping, Box 7, Series

1, New York Pro M?sica Archives. I am unable to locate the original source in which this

document was published, but the page includes the heading "Observations" and the pagenumber 67.

48. Hindemith's 1935 Mathis der Maler, about the sixteenth-century painter Matthias

Gr?newald and his role in the German Peasant's Revolt, is an example of a work from that


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period that spoke to the role of the artist in times of political upheaval. Even Beethoven

was understood as having a revolutionary or left-wing agenda, as "reaching the masses

with his Jacobin Symphony of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.. . .The most important

thing for Beethoven was the message, and he did deliver that revolutionary message to

the masses in a language as clear as it could be done." Bishop Fan S. Noli, Beethoven and

the French Revolution (New York: International Universities Press, 1947), 4-5, quoted in

Raina Hayim, "Beethoven, 125 Years Later" Sing Out! 2, no. 10 (1952): 4-5. See also Peter

Davies, The Character of a Genius: Beethoven in Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood

Press, 2002).49. This "dialogue" between Marxism and Christianity was particularly visible in the

1930s: see Marxism and Christianity: A Symposium, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Hu

manities Press, 1968). See also Alasdair Maclntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London: Gerald

Duckworth, 1969);Charles C.

West,Communism and the

Theologians: Study ofan Encounter

(New York: Macmillan, Westminster Press, 1958); Denys Turner, Marxism and Christianity

(Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble Books, 1983); Christians and the Many Faces ofMarxism,

ed. Wayne Stumme (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1984).50. Santiago Alvarez, Espa?a Republicana, published by the Spanish Communist Party;

quoted in Aptheker, Marxism and Christianity, 18.

51. Engels, "On the History of Early Christianity," quoted in Aptheker, Marxism and

Christianity, 30.

52. Denning, Cultural Front, 298.

53. See Richard A. Reuss and JoAnne C. Reuss, American Folk Music and Lefi-Wing Politics,

1927-57 (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2000); Cantwell, When We Were Good; Denisoff,

Sing a Song of Social Significance; and Denisoff, Great Day Coming.54. See Gustave Reese, Music in theMiddle Ages (New York: Norton, 1940), particularly

201 and 218.

55. See Sidney Finkelstein, Art and Society (New York: International, 1947), and his later

Composer and Nation: The Folk Heritage ofMusic (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1960); and

Lang, Music in Western Civilization (New York: Norton, 1941). Denis Stevens also writes,

"folksong and art music are often unified and interdependent" in his notes for The D?lier

Consort's 1956 album The Three Ravens, Songs of Folk and Minstrelsy out of Elizabethan England,

Vanguard VSR- 479,1956, with Desmond Dupre (lute) and Alfred D?lier (voice).

56. Claudie Marcel-Dubois, Grove's Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, 4th ed. (1947),

"Song," 2. There is no entry for "folk music" or "folksong" in this edition.

57. Maud Karpeles, Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed. (1954), "Folk Music,"

182. The main feature of folk music is oral transmission and the refashioning of this music

by the community. The author further notes that folksong could merely be any song that

has enjoyed a great deal of popularity.58. E. Martin Browne, preface to The Play of Daniel: A Thirteenth Century Musical Drama,

vi.

59. Lang, liner notes, Play of Daniel, 3.

60. Weakland, liner notes, Play of Daniel, 11.

61. The Play of Herod, eds. Greenberg and Smoldon, vii, viii.

62. Saul Novak, liner notes, Music of theMedieval Court and Countryside, Decca DL 79400,1959.

63. Greenberg's plans were recorded in the form of contracts with Decca, which, upon

Greenberg's premature death at age forty-seven, posthumously released Medieval Roots,

Decca DL 79438, 1971, and Music for a Medieval Day, Horizon DL 34541, 1968, from a

compilation of older recordings with several new renditions under the direction of JohnReeves White.

64. Greenberg, lecture at the University of Colorado.

65.Cantwell,

When We WereGood,

307.


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444 Yri

66. Weakland's transcription is of British Museum Egerton 2615 (fol. 95R-108R).67. See the New Oxford History ofMusic, vol. 2 (London: Oxford University Press, 1954)

foran

overview of duple meter as itwas then understood. The complexity of this issue andthe changing opinions of scholars on the matter of mensural interpretation of troubadour

and trouv?re music are discussed in detail in Haines, Eight Centuries of Troubadours and

Trouv?res.

68. See Edmund Bowles, "Were Musical Instruments Used in the Liturgical Service Dur

ing the Middle Ages?," Galpin Society Journal 10 (1957): 40-56; and Frank Harrison, Music

inMedieval Britain (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958). On liturgical dramas, see

Reese, Music in the Middle Ages, and the sections devoted to liturgical dramas in the New

Oxford History of Music, 175-213, and in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed.

(1954), 317-43, both by William Smoldon.

69. Greenberg and the New York Pro M?sica acknowledge the specifics of Bowles's"invaluable assistance" on the Play of Daniel recording. Although Bowles had advocated

against the use of instruments in liturgical services, in "Were Musical Instruments Used," he

wrote in support of their use in sacred drama in Edmund A. Bowles, "The Role of Musical

Instruments in Medieval Sacred Drama," Musical Quarterly 45, no. 1 (Jan. 1959): 67-84.

70. The play appears in the Fleury Playbook, in MS 201 of the Bibl de Ville, Orl?ans, ff.

176-243.

71. Smoldon, liner notes for Play of Herod, 14.

72. Smoldon mentions that he suggested this to Greenberg as a possible influence for

the work. See the posthumous publication by William L. Smoldon, Music of the Medieval

Church Dramas, ed. Cynthia Bourgeault (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), 255.

73. Smoldon, liner notes for Play of Herod, 15, and in The Play of Herod, A Twelfth CenturyMusical Drama, ed. Greenberg and Smoldon, 80. The use of instruments must have been

a sore spot for Smoldon; in his lengthy passage arguing against the use of instruments in

Herod and Daniel in The Music of theMedieval Church Dramas, he stated, "I have mentioned

before that I happened to be concerned with the preparations of the New York Pro M?sica

for the Play of Herod... inasmuch as I deciphered, transcribed, and rhythmed the musical

settings and wrote one of the articles in the published edition. Imanaged to have my wayin certain features, but there was much else that I objected to?unsuccessfully" (255).

74. In "Were Musical InstrumentsUsed,"

Bowles mentions several of theedicts,

inpar

ticular the Council of Milan (1287), which decreed only the use of organ, and prohibitedrecorders and clarions.

75. Greenberg, lecture at the University of Colorado.

76. Greenberg, The Play of Daniel,x. Greenberg does not provide more information, but

it is clear from the manuscript that the ranges for Daniel and King Darius are inconsistent;

perhaps he felt he was correcting these inconsistencies.

77. Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars (Cam

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 35. Like many of his generation, Auden was

also influenced by Marxism early in his career (xiv).

78. Laurence Dreyfus, "Early Music Defended against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century," Musical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (Summer 1983):297-322.

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