A term herein proposed to define a relationship existing between soil and soul, between land and life. One of the most remarkable geomusical facts is that an area of some 75,000 square miles (about a third of the size of Texas) and comprising such culture centers as Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Leipzig, Salzburg, and Vienna, embraces the birthplaces of so many of the world's greatest musicians: Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, Brahms, Schumann and Mendelssohn, Wagner and Bruckner, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, Smetana and Dvorak, Mahler and Schoenberg. The most accomplished violinists of the 20th century came from Poland, the Ukraine, and Lithuania, among them Heifetz, Elman, Isaac Stern, and father and son Oistrakh, all of them being Jewish. What is the secret here? What is this peculiar affinity between young Jews of Eastern Europe and the violin? The economic factor is a dubious explanation.
The small peninsula of Italy generated the finest flowering of opera, a stage form that was born as an art in Florence and produced through its course of three centuries such masters as Monteverdi, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, and such great singers as Caruso, Adelina Patti, and Pavarotti. It also produced the greatest opera conductor, the uncontrollably temperamental Arturo Toscanini. Italians, in fact, have been in charge of most opera houses; the Metropolitan Opera of New York has been in Italian hands ever since its foundation. The most popular opera composer living in America and writing his own libretti in English is Gian Carlo Menotti (who for some reason has never applied for American citizenship).
If Italy produces great tenors, Russia is the land of great basses, the grandest among them being Chaliapin. The Russians did not enter the world scene as composers until the second half of the 19th century. The names of Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, and Tchaikovsky testify to the natural gift of Russia in all musical fields. And despite the political upheavals of the Revolution, the Russian achievement continued to be great. Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich remain dominant figures in new Russia; Russian pianists, violinists, and cellists continue to win prizes at international festivals.
France contributed to music in a less heroic, less grandiose way. The French of the modern age, Debussy and Ravel among them, provided the music of sensual beauty, leaving the field of symphony and grand opera to the Germans and the Russians. It is the task of geomusic to account for these selective pursuits within particular nations. Besides the music of these nations are the totally different musical arts of North and South America, Asia, Africa, and Australia. Who could imagine until recently that the two greatest American orchestras would be led by Orientals, namely Seiji Ozawa and Zubin Mehta, that the finest cellist after Casals would be a Chinese named Yo-Yo Ma? And it must not be omitted in a study of geomusic that the most vital type of folk music of the 20th century was a product of the United States - Jazz.