Ballad of an American: The Autobiography of Earl Robinson by Earl Robinson; Eric A. GordonReview by: Burton W. PerettiNotes, Second Series, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Sep., 1999), pp. 159-161Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/900505 .

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

dued account of the years of heroin addi- tion and the devastating suicides of Evans's longtime companion Ellaine and his brother Harry. This is very much a musical biography; Pettinger covers the dramas of Evans's life, but does so discreetly. A single paragraph tells us that Ellaine threw herself under a New York City subway train after Evans announced he was leaving her to have a child with another woman, and the incident is barely mentioned again. The re- strained prose, however, has the effect of heightening the building sense of tragedy. Long passages read like a lovingly written annotated discography, so that when one stumbles into one of these tragic episodes it is as though a bomb has been dropped in a placid landscape. About Evans's early death after relapsing into drug abuse at the height of his career, Pettinger concludes that "His slow suicide carried its own pain, but the agony was defied to the end by his artistic ecstasy" (p. 286).

In a sad coincidence, the author himself died at about the same age as Evans, just as his book was being published. Despite Pettinger's overemphasis on the classical side of Evans's music, this biography is highly recommended.

ALLAN CHASE New England Conservatory of Music

Ballad of an American: The Autobiog- raphy of Earl Robinson. By Earl Robinson with Eric A. Gordon. (American Folk Music and Musicians, 3.) Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. [xxviii, 475 p. ISBN 0-8108-3433- 2. $49.50.]

Earl Robinson (1910-1991) is best known today among devotees of American folk music who recall his long career as a pianist, songwriter, and colleague of Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, and others. His 1930s labor song 'Joe Hill" became a folk classic; the patriotic ballad "The House I Live In" was a Frank Sinatra standard; and "Black and White," a cheerful repudiation of prej- udice, was a best-selling hit recorded by Three Dog Night in 1975, decades after its composition. Robinson achieved his great- est fame during World War II with Ballad for Americans (1939), an eleven-minute pa-

dued account of the years of heroin addi- tion and the devastating suicides of Evans's longtime companion Ellaine and his brother Harry. This is very much a musical biography; Pettinger covers the dramas of Evans's life, but does so discreetly. A single paragraph tells us that Ellaine threw herself under a New York City subway train after Evans announced he was leaving her to have a child with another woman, and the incident is barely mentioned again. The re- strained prose, however, has the effect of heightening the building sense of tragedy. Long passages read like a lovingly written annotated discography, so that when one stumbles into one of these tragic episodes it is as though a bomb has been dropped in a placid landscape. About Evans's early death after relapsing into drug abuse at the height of his career, Pettinger concludes that "His slow suicide carried its own pain, but the agony was defied to the end by his artistic ecstasy" (p. 286).

In a sad coincidence, the author himself died at about the same age as Evans, just as his book was being published. Despite Pettinger's overemphasis on the classical side of Evans's music, this biography is highly recommended.

ALLAN CHASE New England Conservatory of Music

Ballad of an American: The Autobiog- raphy of Earl Robinson. By Earl Robinson with Eric A. Gordon. (American Folk Music and Musicians, 3.) Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1998. [xxviii, 475 p. ISBN 0-8108-3433- 2. $49.50.]

Earl Robinson (1910-1991) is best known today among devotees of American folk music who recall his long career as a pianist, songwriter, and colleague of Pete Seeger, Lee Hayes, and others. His 1930s labor song 'Joe Hill" became a folk classic; the patriotic ballad "The House I Live In" was a Frank Sinatra standard; and "Black and White," a cheerful repudiation of prej- udice, was a best-selling hit recorded by Three Dog Night in 1975, decades after its composition. Robinson achieved his great- est fame during World War II with Ballad for Americans (1939), an eleven-minute pa-

triotic cantata first popularized by Paul Robeson. Its popularity encouraged Robin- son to compose larger works such as bal- lets, operas, and choral extravaganzas, often on patriotic themes. The Lonesome Train (1942), a choral ode to Abraham Lincoln, also became celebrated. Like many depression-era idealists, Robinson was drawn to communism, and he re- mained an active member of the Commu- nist Party until the mid-1950s. Despite post- war FBI surveillance, blacklisting, and a 1957 appearance before the House Un- American Activities Committee, Robinson found varied work as a Hollywood com- poser, folk performer, and teacher. In his later years, Robinson's robust health enabled him to travel widely, fulfill com- posing commissions, promote ambitious projects (including an opera about the Armenian folk hero David of Sausson and a pageant depicting Washington state his- tory), and explore New Age psychology and spirituality. In July 1991, his autobiography (written in collaboration with Eric A. Gordon) nearly complete, Robinson was killed in a Seattle automobile accident.

Gordon, the author of an excellent biog- raphy of Marc Blitzstein (Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989]), deserves high praise for guiding this book to com- pletion. In print, Robinson and Gordon's collaboration is neither seamless nor trans- parent, but it does introduce readers to a fascinating man and wide swath of twentieth- century history. Robinson sketches his family, childhood, and college music train- ing in Seattle, followed in 1934 by piano- playing jobs on Pacific steamships and along a cross-country drive to New York. His infatuation with the intense communist political agitation in Manhattan was appar- ently instantaneous, although it is not ex- plained clearly here: "my mind had been developing along as most young minds do. ... [e]xcept now I saw that solutions to the crisis existed" (p. 29). Staying in New York and joining the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, Robinson became a leading radi- cal theater composer; work with the Theatre of Action and the WPA Theatre Project followed. Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Marc Blitzstein, and Orson Welles were among his colleagues, and Aaron Copland was a teacher and stylistic mentor. Work at

triotic cantata first popularized by Paul Robeson. Its popularity encouraged Robin- son to compose larger works such as bal- lets, operas, and choral extravaganzas, often on patriotic themes. The Lonesome Train (1942), a choral ode to Abraham Lincoln, also became celebrated. Like many depression-era idealists, Robinson was drawn to communism, and he re- mained an active member of the Commu- nist Party until the mid-1950s. Despite post- war FBI surveillance, blacklisting, and a 1957 appearance before the House Un- American Activities Committee, Robinson found varied work as a Hollywood com- poser, folk performer, and teacher. In his later years, Robinson's robust health enabled him to travel widely, fulfill com- posing commissions, promote ambitious projects (including an opera about the Armenian folk hero David of Sausson and a pageant depicting Washington state his- tory), and explore New Age psychology and spirituality. In July 1991, his autobiography (written in collaboration with Eric A. Gordon) nearly complete, Robinson was killed in a Seattle automobile accident.

Gordon, the author of an excellent biog- raphy of Marc Blitzstein (Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989]), deserves high praise for guiding this book to com- pletion. In print, Robinson and Gordon's collaboration is neither seamless nor trans- parent, but it does introduce readers to a fascinating man and wide swath of twentieth- century history. Robinson sketches his family, childhood, and college music train- ing in Seattle, followed in 1934 by piano- playing jobs on Pacific steamships and along a cross-country drive to New York. His infatuation with the intense communist political agitation in Manhattan was appar- ently instantaneous, although it is not ex- plained clearly here: "my mind had been developing along as most young minds do. ... [e]xcept now I saw that solutions to the crisis existed" (p. 29). Staying in New York and joining the Workers' Laboratory Theatre, Robinson became a leading radi- cal theater composer; work with the Theatre of Action and the WPA Theatre Project followed. Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Marc Blitzstein, and Orson Welles were among his colleagues, and Aaron Copland was a teacher and stylistic mentor. Work at

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NOTES, September 1999

the communist Camp Unity and marriage to a Jewish New York activist cemented Robinson's commitment to the Left, a ro- mantic and folksy allegiance in the tradi- tion of Eugene Debs, the Wobblies, and Woody Guthrie. His first film score, a collaboration with Alex North on the docu- mentary People of the Cumberland (1938), testifies to the diversity of his work from the early years. Like many leftist artists, Robinson portrayed Abraham Lincoln as a progressive revolutionary, and like Welles and others, he made connections with the show-business mainstream; his song "Abe Lincoln" caught producer Lee Shubert's fancy and landed in the 1938 Broadway revue Hellzapoppin. Ballad for Americans made Robinson a minor celebrity as Amer- ica prepared for war. In December 1941, he dined at the White House, meeting Winston Churchill and beginning a long friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. Robin- son was apparently not highly disturbed by the Left's ideological paroxysms after the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact. His insouciance probably resulted from his strict party dog- matism in these years, but while he (like others) reconciled this ideological rigidity with wartime support for the Allied cause, it was less congruent with his highly roman- tic and optimistic musical expression. The autobiography never defines Robinson's general disposition clearly, but it certainly suggests that his party loyalty was a search for spiritual answers that music did not pro- vide, a search he eventually replaced with investigations into New Age theologies.

Robinson's professional life brought him into contact with many composers, lyricists, teachers, and performers, including such diverse notables as Robeson (a longtime friend), Hanns Eisler, E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, and Waldo Salt. His story sheds light on ne- glected aspects of the classical-music story in post-World War II America, where un- ambiguous tonal practices (like straightfor- ward political radicalism) went out of fash- ion and patronage outside of academe was scarce. Robinson enjoyed lucrative radio and movie contracts for a while after the war, and even when blacklisted, he was sur- prisingly adept at finding work. Tours with Seeger, Robeson, and others brought some economic security to his family (which in- cluded two sons) and allowed him to de- velop projects such as The Sandhog, an epic

musical about Hudson River tunnel work- ers at the turn of the century. The book re- lates copious material from Robinson's FBI file, obtained by the authors in the 1980s, showing decades of superfluous (and often amusingly incompetent) surveillance of this harmless artist. This segment of the book also makes clear that Robinson had seethed at former radical colleagues like Carl Sand- burg and Burl Ives who turned anticommu- nist and occasionally named former com- rades to save their careers. He is quite frank about his marital infidelities, as well as the guilt he struggled with (sometimes all too successfully) after his first wife's death in 1963. Past passions, though, are generally muted in this latter-day recollection.

These early segments of the book will be of most interest to music students and his- torians. Although Robinson and Gordon do not fully sketch any of Robinson's well- known colleagues, they do show how his career (partly because of his constant search for paying work) intersected with a diverse range of political, commercial, and artistic personages. For this reason, the book might best be appreciated by knowl- edgeable students of mid-twentieth-century American music already familiar with at least some of these contexts. The final sec- tions find Robinson enjoying some emi- nence as a musical elder, toasted and feted in America and Europe, but struggling to mount increasingly ambitious projects in increasingly humble and insufficient venues such as community-college theater departments. His devotion to psychic chan- neling lends an unusual perspective (to say the least) to this chronicle of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite this, as well as odd switches to third-person narration that suggest dis- ruptions in the rewriting process, Robin- son's unavoidably selective view covers nearly all of his life, creating a rare illusion of totality. It is a fascinating and revealing self-portrait.

A superb list of works and discography complete Ballad of an American. Scarecrow Press has produced a handsome volume. The book encourages listeners to explore Robinson's music, particularly to deter- mine if his brand of folk expression was successfully adaptable to larger musical forms. It is worth noting, finally, that Robinson's voluminous papers can be found at the University of Washington, and

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Book Reviews Book Reviews

that there is a videorecording in existence, Earl Robinson: Ballad of an American (Seattle: KCTS, 1994). This book is a welcome addi- tion to the growing collection of life stories of contemporary American composers.

BURTON W. PERETTI Western Connecticut State University

New Music and the Claims of Moder-

nity. By Alastair Williams. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1997. [xi, 163 p. ISBN 1-85928-368-3. $68.95.]

Alastair Williams's fine new book draws heavily on Theodor Adorno, whose work mixes immanent music analysis and cul- tural critique in an especially compelling way. Williams is particularly impressed by Adorno's interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven, which, Williams notes, colors Adorno's evaluation and understanding of all subsequent music. In Adorno's view, Beethoven was the first composer to achieve a self-critical musical articulation of subjectivity, and any music that does not grapple with this compositional achieve- ment must necessarily regress to a precriti- cal form of subjectivity. Yet Williams is trou- bled by Adorno's deep distrust of any music that refuses to address directly subjectivity and its growing alienation from itself. "The problem lies less in Adorno's understand- ing of Beethoven, than in the extent to which the degree of artistic rigour located there becomes the standard by which Adorno judges subsequent culture. It is unjust to imply ... that music is necessarily regressive or repressive if it does not meet the challenge presented by Beethoven's achievement" (p. 25). Instead, Williams at- tempts to develop a more nuanced position that can accommodate Igor Stravinsky "and other composers whose music does not as- pire to philosophical knowledge" (p. 39). The way Stravinsky juxtaposes sets of re- peating motivic cells, for instance, might be interpreted not simply as "a vehicle for ar- ticulating the repetitive networks of com- modity production and the pre-given," but instead, and perhaps more productively, as "a direct collision between the lived spaces of pre-industrial repetition and the empti- ness of mass production" (p. 36).

Still, Adorno's basic historical framework forms the basis for Williams's appraisal of

that there is a videorecording in existence, Earl Robinson: Ballad of an American (Seattle: KCTS, 1994). This book is a welcome addi- tion to the growing collection of life stories of contemporary American composers.

BURTON W. PERETTI Western Connecticut State University

New Music and the Claims of Moder-

nity. By Alastair Williams. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1997. [xi, 163 p. ISBN 1-85928-368-3. $68.95.]

Alastair Williams's fine new book draws heavily on Theodor Adorno, whose work mixes immanent music analysis and cul- tural critique in an especially compelling way. Williams is particularly impressed by Adorno's interpretation of Ludwig van Beethoven, which, Williams notes, colors Adorno's evaluation and understanding of all subsequent music. In Adorno's view, Beethoven was the first composer to achieve a self-critical musical articulation of subjectivity, and any music that does not grapple with this compositional achieve- ment must necessarily regress to a precriti- cal form of subjectivity. Yet Williams is trou- bled by Adorno's deep distrust of any music that refuses to address directly subjectivity and its growing alienation from itself. "The problem lies less in Adorno's understand- ing of Beethoven, than in the extent to which the degree of artistic rigour located there becomes the standard by which Adorno judges subsequent culture. It is unjust to imply ... that music is necessarily regressive or repressive if it does not meet the challenge presented by Beethoven's achievement" (p. 25). Instead, Williams at- tempts to develop a more nuanced position that can accommodate Igor Stravinsky "and other composers whose music does not as- pire to philosophical knowledge" (p. 39). The way Stravinsky juxtaposes sets of re- peating motivic cells, for instance, might be interpreted not simply as "a vehicle for ar- ticulating the repetitive networks of com- modity production and the pre-given," but instead, and perhaps more productively, as "a direct collision between the lived spaces of pre-industrial repetition and the empti- ness of mass production" (p. 36).

Still, Adorno's basic historical framework forms the basis for Williams's appraisal of

what is at stake in the New Music. If "in Schoenberg's struggle to invent a musical medium that would simultaneously enable more freedom and greater discipline, Adorno detects a dialectic that goes right to the heart of Enlightenment rationality" (p. 32), then Williams maps this same di- alectic onto the musical situation after the war, demonstrating how compositional technique oscillates between the two poles of construction and indeterminacy. In a provocative comparison of Pierre Boulez andJohn Cage, Williams shows how this di- alectic drives both composers from a very systematic approach in Structures and Music of Changes, respectively, to a more open structure in later works. The earlier works, Williams writes, "touch at the extreme: Boulez's all-pervasive structure of identity is unable to exclude the chance surface con- figurations generated by local detail, and Cage's all-pervasive structure of chance and extreme particularism cannot shut out inferred identity. Both texts strive for an anonymity in which the organizational pro- cedures work out their own consequences, and both represent extreme examples of compositional systems, with all their atten- dant problems" (p. 68). In Williams's view, later works of both composers remain highly problematic. Neither Boulez's Third Piano Sonata nor Cage's Variations IV, for instance, manages to achieve the freedom promised by the open structure. Yet taken together, the two works cogently articulate the immanent musical difficulties facing composers in the early sixties.

Following a chapter-long excursus on Gyorgy Ligeti, where Williams argues that the composer's strategy of"decentering" al- lows him to avoid the stark choice between construction and indeterminacy (p. 90), Williams returns to the "logics of disinte- gration pursued by Boulez and Cage" (p. 123), this time considering a more recent work by each composer. Cage's Roaratorio and Boulez's Rep6ns are important works, Williams says, because each confronts, in its own way, the fact that construction and in- determinacy have collapsed as structuring poles of high modernism. Though Cage's aesthetic may appear to anticipate certain strands in recent poststructuralist criticism, his procedure is in fact more radical: "Instead of destabilizing the sign-unit, he veers close to abandoning it" (p. 98). A

what is at stake in the New Music. If "in Schoenberg's struggle to invent a musical medium that would simultaneously enable more freedom and greater discipline, Adorno detects a dialectic that goes right to the heart of Enlightenment rationality" (p. 32), then Williams maps this same di- alectic onto the musical situation after the war, demonstrating how compositional technique oscillates between the two poles of construction and indeterminacy. In a provocative comparison of Pierre Boulez andJohn Cage, Williams shows how this di- alectic drives both composers from a very systematic approach in Structures and Music of Changes, respectively, to a more open structure in later works. The earlier works, Williams writes, "touch at the extreme: Boulez's all-pervasive structure of identity is unable to exclude the chance surface con- figurations generated by local detail, and Cage's all-pervasive structure of chance and extreme particularism cannot shut out inferred identity. Both texts strive for an anonymity in which the organizational pro- cedures work out their own consequences, and both represent extreme examples of compositional systems, with all their atten- dant problems" (p. 68). In Williams's view, later works of both composers remain highly problematic. Neither Boulez's Third Piano Sonata nor Cage's Variations IV, for instance, manages to achieve the freedom promised by the open structure. Yet taken together, the two works cogently articulate the immanent musical difficulties facing composers in the early sixties.

Following a chapter-long excursus on Gyorgy Ligeti, where Williams argues that the composer's strategy of"decentering" al- lows him to avoid the stark choice between construction and indeterminacy (p. 90), Williams returns to the "logics of disinte- gration pursued by Boulez and Cage" (p. 123), this time considering a more recent work by each composer. Cage's Roaratorio and Boulez's Rep6ns are important works, Williams says, because each confronts, in its own way, the fact that construction and in- determinacy have collapsed as structuring poles of high modernism. Though Cage's aesthetic may appear to anticipate certain strands in recent poststructuralist criticism, his procedure is in fact more radical: "Instead of destabilizing the sign-unit, he veers close to abandoning it" (p. 98). A

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