THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY ' S AGENDA
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tional strains, democratizing the classical tradition into nonexistence, pit–
ting town band against orchestra, hymn tune against symphony, reject–
ing consonance and often coherence. The American avant-garde
composer typically became a dissident inventor, a cobbler, like Henry
Cowell, who constructed instruments, or John Cage, who called himself
an inventor. Some of this kind of play had its roots in European
Dadaism, but the claims and styles were also recognizably American. In
other cases, dissent against European influence took a different turn.
Aaron Copland began as a European modernist but then rejected it all to
invent an American concert hall sound that cinematically resounded with
images of prairies and plains. Virgil Thomson also took his European
training with Nadia Boulanger and turned it inside out, striving for a wry
simplicity, evoking American small-town sentiment with mordant irony.
The intellectual patron saint behind these sorts of enterprises was
Walt Whitman, who wrote in "Democratic Vistas" in
1871
that while
European literature has its "birth in courts" and "smells of princes'
favors," American culture in its maturity could be created "with an eye
to practical life, the west, the workingmen, the facts of farms and jack–
planes and engineers, and of the broad range of the women also of the
middle and working strata .... a scope generous enough to include the
widest human area." Whitman wanted a culture created to contain "all
the best experience of humanity, folded, saved, freighted to us here"; it
would touch on "the deepest basic elements and loftiest final mean–
ings." Such a literature, Whitman said, would both honor individualism
and celebrate the mass.
It
would represent a kind of high populism sim–
ilar to Whitman's poetry.
But Whitman didn't anticipate that while American culture was
rejecting its birth in courts and the smells of princes' favors, another
twist was given the screw. Democratic culture didn't just attempt to
define American possibility; it also began to detest its actuality, its
"imperfect satisfactions ." This could be subtle. John Cage's Zennish
anarchism, for example, wasn't just an attempt to "liberate" music and
sound as he claimed. It was also an artistic assault on the tastes and cul–
ture of the mainstream audience; Cage was an earnestly playful provo–
cateur. He claimed to have composed his Norton Lectures by randomly
shuffling phrases and texts-but most of the texts were chosen for their
implied political criticisms of American bourgeois life. Cage generally
played with politically loaded dice.
In the last three or four decades, this variety of avant-gardism has
become even more pointed, acidly taking aim at American life and pol–
icy. At the same time, it has also become mainstream, a commonplace
