Today’s concert is a public foray into how the passage of time in history can be perceived subjectively. The music performed today was written approximately a century ago. A concert of music that might have been performed in 1925, made up of music from the 1820s would have struck the audience in 1925 as welcome, but quite old fashioned and historic. Beethoven, Schubert, and Carl Maria von Weber, for example, were still composing in the 1820s. Imagine further a concert put on in the 1820s of music written in the 1720s. The distance between past and present would have sounded even more pronounced.

However, the music from the 1920s being performed today may not seem overtly so old fashioned to us 100 years later. The 1920s, often referred to as the “Roaring Twenties” were an age of artistic experimentation and the transformation of taste and fashion. The 1920s were an era of glamor and speculation, and here in the United States, also a period of radical change and transgressions. During that decade, the United States closed its borders, bringing to an end the historic and transformative mass immigration to the United States, a period between the years of the late 19th century and the isolationist legislation enacted in the 1920s. The embrace of immigration represented by the Statue of Liberty ended in the 1920s and an inward-looking isolationism prevailed, marked, among other things, by America’s refusal to join the League of Nations. This shift coincided with the enactment of Prohibition and the blatant violent disregard of the law that an unenforceable moral puritanism within the law brought into being.

Like most distinct eras in history, the 1920s were consequently rife with contradictions. There was an economic boom represented by urban growth, skyscrapers and industrial expansion. The boom in construction, production and the stock market flourished side by side with rural poverty and rapid migration to the cities of the East and Midwest. Despite Jim Crow laws, jazz, the cultural expression that came out of the Black American experience became the signature cultural export of the United States and a unifying medium of musical expression and entertainment.

The Harlem Renaissance came into being. Among its leading exponents was William Grant Still. As Antonín Dvořák predicted in the 1890s, after World War I, the music of American slaves from Africa and their descendants became central to a powerful, popular and unique music that reached audiences beyond national and racial barriers. Despite the music’s origins in the life and history of an oppressed people within our nation, the power of music to bring peoples of diverse histories and traditions together rendered “cultural appropriation” in music a virtue. This is evident in Erwin Schulhoff’s fabulous piano concerto. Together with Varèse’s Arcana, and Carpenter’s opening work on today’s concert, the concerto represents the optimistic and experimental character of the art and culture of the 1920s.

Schulhoff came from a Jewish family in Prague; he never came to America. But jazz left a lasting impression on him as a composer. In somewhat the same spirit, his allegiance to the ideals of socialism and communism represented the post-world War I utopian desire for progress and fairness during the decade of the 1920s, before the devastation of the Great Depression that began after the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In the 1920s, the international and universal aspect of music that can transcend national and ethnic boundaries also took on a new character with the advent of musical modernism. No composer was more adventuresome and radical in this respect than Varèse, who came to the United States after World War I. As Arcana makes plain, Varèse helped pioneer a whole approach to sound and listening, and therefore music. He was, among other things, also one of the teachers of William Grant Still. Like Schulhoff’s concerto, Still’s Symphony represents an act of positive intercultural appropriation— a synthesis of European symphonic compositional traditions with musical sources unique to the Black American experience.

This brings us back to the composer whose music opens the concert, John Alden Carpenter. Jazz was crucial to Carpenter. So too as was the American comic book. Skyscrapers, a masterpiece of 1920s modernism, was written by the only individual on the program who qualified, in terms of the isolationist prejudices of the 1920s and, unfortunately, the nativist populism of today, as a “true American.” He was the scion of a wealthy Christian American businessman. He was a Harvard College graduate. He served as president of the Harvard Glee Club, and was a member of the Hasty Pudding Club. Like Charles Ives, he was also active as a businessman. He retired from being vice president of a company at the age of 60. Carpenter also distinguished himself as a philanthropist. At the same time, he produced an impressive catalog of distinguished compositions.

The ASO, with this concert, continues a tradition begun by its founder, Leopold Stokowski, of performing new, neglected and modernist music. He conducted music by all of the composers on this program.

The special irony of today’s concert may be that what might make, for some, the music of the 1920s seem old fashioned and historic is precisely its courage, its experimentalism, and the brashness of its sonorities. We might be well-advised therefore to emulate the artistic freedom of the 1920s, a hundred years ago, as we struggle to reject the resurgence of the intolerance, inequality, and injustice that marked American politics before the Crash and the Great Depression, before the welcome arrival of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president and with his presidency, the renewal of democracy as expressed by the ideals and practices of the New Deal.