Arts and Letters

The average composer of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries had a patron, a wealthy music-lover who boarded him and paid him a salary, asking in return only that he compose music. On the other hand, the composer ate with the hired hands. His status was that of a servant. Today we have abolished that servitude. We regard the composer with respect and admiration—and let him starve. Unless he has the good luck to compose operas that find world-wide acceptance, the composer of serious music today cannot possibly make a living by the practice of his art alone. He must teach, lecture, conduct, or play an instrument as well as compose.

John Alden Carpenter was unusually fortunate in that he had a patron: a prosperous Chicago businessman named John Alden Carpenter who supported a composer named John Alden Carpenter all of his life.

The composer was born in Park Ridge, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, on February 28th, 1876, a direct descendant of the Massachusetts John Alden whom we know so well. His mother, Elizabeth Green Carpenter, was an excellent musician and a talented singer who passed on her devotion to music to her small son. At the age of five he had his first piano lessons from her, and by his tenth year he was composing tunes and writing them down. He was, however, no prodigy. Not until he was twenty-seven years old was anything of his published.

He graduated at Harvard in the class of 1897, having taken music as well as academic courses. John Knowles Paine, head of the music school (who was, incidentally, elected to the Institute in 1898) urged him to make music his career; but young Carpenter had previous commitments. For many years the firm of George B. Carpenter & Sons had done a thriving business in railroad and ship supplies; and it was a foregone conclusion that John Alden would carry on the tradition. Accordingly, in his graduation year he entered the firm as a junior partner.

We have no record of his having composed anything for the ensuing six years. If he did—which seems highly probable—at least he published nothing. He did, however, continue his musical training, studying the piano with Amy Fay, and composition briefly with Sir Edward Elgar and, later, with Bernard Ziehn in Chicago, living the double life of a businessman by day and a musician by night. Years later, he told me that after the death of his father, when he became vice-president of the firm, he and his brother made a pact whereby they took turns at running the business, each taking six months of the year off. John worked during the spring and summer months, thus affording a long vacation to his brother, who in turn took over during the fall and winter, thus making it possible for John to travel if he wished, to attend concerts and recitals, and to compose to his heart's content.

His first published work in 1903 took the form of a small song-cycle entitled "Improving Songs for Anxious Children," set to engaging verses by his wife, Rue Carpenter. It was another song-cycle, published nine years later, that established him as a composer to be taken seriously. This was "Gitanjali," a collection of settings of poems by Rabindranath Tagore. A succeeding volume, "Water Colors," settings of Chinese poems, was equally successful.

Then, in 1914, came one of the works that were to make him an international figure: that small masterpiece, "Adventures in a Perambulator." It is a suite for orchestra concerned with a baby's outing in the park, and descriptive of the marvels that he hears and sees. There are six movements; and their titles may convey something of the grace and humor of this charming work. He called them: "En Voiture"; "The Policeman"; Hurdy-Gurdy"; "The Lake"; "Dogs"; and "Dreams." The "Adventures" have been played all over the world, and recorded, and broadcast. And they are still as fresh as the day they were written.

After 1914 his main interest was in instrumental—and chiefly orchestral—writing. In 1916 his Concertina for piano and orchestra was introduced by Percy Grainger. Three years later came his ballet, "The Birthday of the Infanta," based on Oscar Wilde's famous story. It was performed by both the Chicago and Metropolitan opera companies with immense success. Its music, in the form of a suite for orchestra, has been widely played here and on the Continent.

Carpenter was an ardent devotee of George Herriman's famous newspaper comic strip "Krazy Kat," chronicling the adventures of a masochistic cat and a sadistic mouse. Accordingly, in January, 1922, in Town Hall, chortling New Yorkers met Krazy Kat as a new Carpenter ballet, danced by Adolph Bohm and his ballet company. Most of the music critics took a very dim view of the proceedings, several of them undertaking to lecture the composer for wasting his talent on such rowdy goings-on. And yet, oddly enough, this excursion into low comedy was directly responsible for the creation of Carpenter's probably best known work.

In the course of a trip to Europe, in 1922, he met Serge Diaghilieff, the famous director of the original Ballet Russe, which had toured the United States in 1916, achieving an artistic triumph and a financial disaster. Nothing daunted, the great impresario was planning a second American tour, and was anxious to obtain an American work. The fame of "Krazy Kat" had crossed the Atlantic, and hearing that its composer was on the Continent, he arranged to meet Carpenter, and asked him to compose a ballet for his company—"something typically American," he said, "something that will describe the industrial atmosphere of your country." Becoming more specific, he suggested strikes as being one of our characteristically American institutions.

A year later, in Venice, Carpenter showed Diaghilieff the score of the new ballet, which was called, not "Strikes," but "Skyscrapers." The impresario was delighted. It was just what he wanted. Everything was set for a premiere in Monte Carlo in March, 1924. To make a long story short, the American tour was abandoned, and Carpenter never heard from Diaghilieff again.

He did, however, hear from Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who produced it at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1926. As Carpenter himself described it, “‘Skyscrapers' is a ballet which seeks to reflect some of the many rhythmic movements and sounds of modern American life. It has no story, in the usually accepted sense, but proceeds on the simple fact that American life reduced itself to violent alternations of work and play, each with its own peculiar and distinctive character. The action of the ballet is merely a series of moving decorations reflecting some of the obvious external features of this life." Following its successful Metropolitan production, "Skyscrapers" was presented in—of all places—Munich, where it ran for several seasons. Rearranged as a suite for orchestra, it has proved to be as popular among symphony conductors as "The Birthday of the Infanta."

In 1932 he was commissioned to write what he called "Song of Faith," in which a narrator, against an orchestral background, recites Washington's last will and testament. Two years later he composed another orchestral suite having as its program excerpts from Walt Whitman's "Sea-Drift."

In 1936, having reached his 60th birthday, he retired from business and went, so to speak, to work. During the ensuing fifteen years he produced a violin concerto, a symphony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a second symphony for the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, a symphonic suite based on Shakespeare's "The Seven Ages of Man," and a concerto for orchestra. Meanwhile, in 1947, he was awarded the National Institute's Gold Medal for Music, being the fourth musician to receive that honor since its creation in 1919. He died on April 26, 1951, at the age of seventy-five years.

John Carpenter's career, surveyed as a whole, presents three striking features. One is that he was not a mere musician. For one thing, he had literary gifts of a high order. His program notes for the "Perambulator" suite, and the printed scenarios for "The Birthday of the lnfanta," "Krazy Kat," and "Skyscrapers" display an English prose style of limpid clarity, a keen sense of words, and a delicacy and charm of humor that would make them good reading even without music. Another feature is the effect that his business career had upon his music. Being what is known in England as "in trade," he was forever barred from climbing upstairs to that ivory tower. At least half of his days were spent in coming to grips with his fellow-man, in meeting the world as it is, in dealing with realities rather than abstractions. It is small wonder, then, that he was essentially a "program" composer. His best known—and, I venture to say, his best—works, the "Perambulator," the three ballets, and the two tone poems, had a dramatic, or narrative, or pictorial background. He himself once said, "With only a few exceptions, everything that I have written has started from a non-musical basis."

The third feature is the wide emotional range of his music. The score of the "Infanta," for instance, is written exactly in the spirit of the story, with grace, poetry, and whimsy. It has a fine reticence. There is a touch of courtly artificiality about it that never keeps it from being a poignant and unerring commentary on the action. In the "Perambulator" suite and "Krazy Kat" we find the lovable idiocy of Lewis Carroll, coupled with slapstick comedy that has oddly pathetic overtones. In "Skyscrapers" we find an early and still successful evocation of the jazz spirit that is somehow America.

There is one quality that pervades all of his music. It is not cold; neither is it ever sentimental. There is an air of elegance about it—perhaps "aristocratic" is the word I want. The prevailing mood is that of eighteenth-century France, although the idiom is utterly contemporary. Listening to it, you think that it sounds French—until you realize that it sounds like Carpenter. In common with his famous ancestor, this modern John Alden has spoken for himself in terms that will long be remembered.