Composers Collective of New York

COMPOSERS COLLECTIVE OF NEW YORK. Between 1933 and 1936, the Composers Collective brought together in New York a dozen or more conservatory-trained composers to create a body of music for use as a weapon in the class struggle. Originally an offshoot of the Pierre Degeyter Club, named for the composer of the “Internationale” (1871), the collective was affiliated to the Workers Music League, which published music and coordinated the activities of proletarian choruses, mandolin orchestras, and other groups.

The tradition of revolutionary music in America consisted largely of lyricists, like Joe Hill, writing new words to old hymns and popular melodies. With his hour-long cantatas October and Storm, Jacob Schaefer was one of the few who wrote original music for left-wing audiences. But in the 1930s, when mass organizations of the Left arose in response to Depression conditions, sympathetic musicians wanted to contribute their skills to the cause. Some of the Composers Collective members, comfortable with brasher twentieth-century harmonies and even atonalism, followed European models such as Hanns Eisler, Stefan Wolpe, and Dmitri Shostakovich in trying to amalgamate modern musical idioms with proletarian texts. In form, their work consisted of rounds, mass songs, four-part choruses, and solo songs; some of these composers found a large new public at demonstrations, picket lines, and benefit concerts. The Composers Collective sent out “shock troops” with programs of varying length and content to support the Left movement.

Aside from Schaefer, other members of the Composers Collective included Lan Adomian, Charles Seeger, Elie Siegmeister, Norman Cazden, Alex North, Herbert Haufrecht, Henry Leland Clarke, and Earl Robinson. Marc Blitzstein served as secretary. Hanns Eisler and Aaron Copland attended occasional meetings. For subject matter, they turned to themes such as the Scottsboro Boys, Lenin, strikes, proletarian internationalism, unemployment, and satires of the bourgeoisie. For texts they took poems by such writers as Langston Hughes, Alfred Hayes, and the Communist Party’s chief cultural authority, V. J. Jerome. In 1934 and 1935 the collective issued two volumes of the Workers Songbook. Collective members also wrote instrumental music with social content, such as Siegmeister’s symphonic movement May Day.

In 1935–1936 the Communist Party shifted its strategy to the Popular Front. In this more populist phase, almost all of the collective members retracted from their international beaux-arts style and began turning toward native American folk music for their inspiration. Shortly thereafter, they went their separate ways and the collective fizzled out. None of the sophisticated, crafted music of the Composers Collective period, with its super-militant texts, ever truly took root in the working class. But the collective was an important proving ground for its members, leading to such major statements in music as Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock and Robinson’s Ballad for Americans, and to the ideas in Siegmeister’s essay “Music and Society” (1938).

Achter, Barbara. “Americanism and American Art Music, 1929–1945.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1978.

Blitzstein, Marc. “The Composers Collective of New York.” Unison 1 (1936).

“Composers Collective of New York.” In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, edited by Stanley Sadie and H. Wiley Hitchcock. New York: Grove’s Dictionaries of Music, 1986.

Dunaway, David K. “Unsung Songs of Protest: The Composers Collective of New York.” New York Folklore 1 (1977).