The Ellington Century (48 page)

I leave to the reader the pleasures of reading the remaining two movements; in short, it's downhill, romantically but not musically, all the way. I hope that I have already demonstrated how the
Lyric Suite
, like
La Mer
, is no sordid snapshot but a richly textured contemplation of matters of life and death or, perhaps, even civilization and its discontents, to borrow the title from Berg's Viennese neighbor. I also leave to the reader to pursue an aspect of erotic representation not present in this chapter. All of the composers discussed here—Ellington, Strayhorn, Debussy, and Berg—were men. The forms and materials they created to represent erotic experience, complex and varied as they are, nevertheless represent a partial view, as does my analysis as well. The idea that meaning resides in form may be a male prejudice. What would be its female counterpart?

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

—T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Ladies and gentlemen,”, he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there was a big sensation”. He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensations!” Whereupon everybody laughed.

   “The piece is known”, he concluded lustily, “as Vladimir Tostoff's
Jazz History of the World”.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby

History is only his story. You haven't heard my story yet.

—Sun Ra

 

 

 

INTRO: CONTROVERSIAL SUITES

Almost as soon as they had thrown off the shackles of convention to represent the “century of aeroplanes” modernist composers retreated back to the past, or back to the future; neoclassicism and futurism were two sides of the same coin that showed a different side up every decade. After the First World War many composers, acting either as high-minded custodians of tradition or “bad boy” musical grave robbers, practiced neoclassicism, buttressing their musical innovations with audible reminders of Bach or Haydn or Beethoven. The post-World War
II avant-garde rereversed the flow of history forward with a renovated vanguardism, back-to-Busoni, or what I term “neomodernism”. Both of these strategies betray a certain anxiety about the present, often viewed as the worst of all possible worlds filled with the worst of all possible music. This catastrophic view shaped T. W. Adorno's essay “Perennial Fashion—Jazz”.
¹
More a projection of cultural paranoia than music criticism, it painted jazz as the negation of history. As his title indicated, Adorno placed jazz in a logically contradictory historical state: “For almost fifty years the productions of jazz have remained as ephemeral as seasonal styles”. In other words, jazz was transitory and, even worse, permanent. Adorno's rant, which does not cite a single piece of music, shed little light on jazz but evinced a deep-seated frustration from within modernist music at its own failure to connect with the everyday present, a sphere in which European concert music sat commandingly throughout the nineteenth century.

Jazz, virtually on arrival, became synonymous with the present moment. European music of the 1920s,
Gebrauchsmusik
or
Zeitoper
or
Les Six
-ism, summoned up the sound of “today” with the saccharine buzz of an alto saxophone or, as in Erik Satie's
Parade
, a half-remembered Irving Berlin tune while alienating these allusions with modernist dissonances. Figuring a return to the everyday by putting “jazz” in quotations, these modernist styles distanced themselves from it. Works like Milhaud's
La création du monde
or Hindemith's Suite 1922 treated the new vernacular as an amusing foreign language. More radically the Brecht/Weill
Mahagonny
presented jazz as the musical jargon of hell.

Euro-jazz, at least in its most overt forms, was short-lived. By the late 1920s modernists replaced pop references with conspicuous displays of historical authority. Modern music, as Hindemith said, was no longer a laughing matter. Bach, famous for being unappreciated during his own time, now served as an emblem of belated historical justice. Composers spelled out the letters of his name by their pitch equivalents like a seal of approval (or a cry for help). BACH appeared to guarantee the value of Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, or Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, or Webern's String Quartet. By implication, these claims of impeccable lineage and high seriousness consigned popular music to a state of ahistorical moon/June/spoon mindlessness. While Adorno cleverly placed all popular music on a metaphorical runway of fashion (as if its appeal were limited to the chic rich), the concert world's prejudice against jazz often bared its racism more brazenly. In 1943 Winthrop Sargent, later the music critic for
The New Yorker
, wrote that “jazz
is graphic and colorful, but, in poetic resources, it is about as rich as pidgin English.”
²

Giving the lie to Adorno's charge of “eternal faddishness”, jazz had demonstrated a consciousness of its past as early as James P. Johnson's “Carolina Shout” and Joe Oliver's “Dippermouth Blues”. Barely a quarter century after the first jazz recordings appeared, historically minded critics were debating its “evolution and essence” (to borrow André Hodeir's title) and evaluating new styles like swing and bop either as betrayals of the past or authentic heirs of tradition.
³
Even as the jazz imitations of the early 1920s lost their glow, the impact of jazz on concert music as varied as Antheil's
Jazz Symphony
, Schoenberg's
Moses und Aron
(where the orgy around the golden calf sounds like a nightmarish parody of a Weimar cabaret), and Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses showed that, far from being ahistorical, the jazz idiom had become a necessary part of historical representation in music. The question that remained on the horizon was whether historical representation in music still required a classical component. In January 1943 Ellington's
Black, Brown and Beige
answered that question from the stage of the concert world's ground zero, Carnegie Hall.

The role of history in twentieth-century music is a large subject with its own complex history—which I leave to the historians. In this chapter, I focus on two nearly contemporary instances of historical narrative in American music:
Black, Brown and Beige
, from 1943, and
Appalachian Spring
, from 1944. Both of these momentous works appeared during an ongoing conflict that raised questions about the meaning of the past and prospects for the future. In wartime, at the cusp of neoclassicism and vanguardism, history itself was up for grabs. Not surprisingly, both works faltered in their original forms as they tried to imagine a resolution. Both were revised after the war ended, downsized to suites, one in a way that critics took as an admission of failure, the other in a way that refashioned music and history in the image of victory.

BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE:
GETTING TO CARNEGIE HALL

D. W. Griffith's
Birth of a Nation
, the most popular and influential film of the silent era, premiered early in 1915 and received a private screening at the White House for the president, his cabinet, and their wives. The film, based to some extent on the historical writings of President Wilson, celebrated the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. Historian Thomas Cripps describes three of its scenes as follows:

  1. A scene set in the South Carolina legislature in the early 1870s (introduced with an intertitle that suggests that what is to follow is drawn from “historic incidents”), which depicts newly elected black legislators lolling in their chairs, their feet bare, eating chicken and drinking whiskey, leering at white women in the visitors' gallery.

  2. A scene in which one of the film's white southern heroes witnesses a group of white children donning white bed sheets, inadvertently scaring several black children playing nearby, which provides him with “The Inspiration” for the Klan's infamous outfits.

  3. A scene of Klansmen, dressed in white sheets and astride horses, dumping the body of the character Gus, an African American whom they had killed for causing Flora, the little sister of the story's southern white protagonists, to hurl herself off a cliff.

After viewing the film a white man in Lafayette, Indiana, shot a teenage African American boy to death. Houston audiences, according to historian David Levering Lewis, “shrieked ‘lynch him!' during a scene in which a white actor in blackface pursued Lillian Gish”.
⁴
President Wilson reportedly told Griffith that the film was “like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it all is so terribly true”.
⁵
The wild success of the film confirmed a version of American history already accepted by nearly the entire spectrum of white Americans, from Ivy League history professors to Southern lynch mobs. Anticipating the strategies of fascism, the film packaged racism with populism and paranoia, calling “for an alliance of the common folk from the formerly warring sections to overthrow a tyranny based on Northern commercial corruption allied with African Americans”.
⁶
The film made visible the ideological subtext of the Democratic Party's “Southern Strategy”, an alliance of Northern blue collar workers, Southern small farmers, and property owners to which Wilson gave the name “New Freedom” and which the Republican party, no longer the party of Lincoln, would appropriate later in the century. Wilson's strategy fortified the reversal of the Union victory in the Civil War that began with the end of Reconstruction. White Americans imposed second-class citizenship on blacks throughout the country, justifying the denial of rights and the constant threat of violence with the scarifying accounts of Reconstruction that Griffith dramatized using the most advanced artistic technology of the time. Although he claimed to be surprised and even offended by accusations of racism, Griffith was so animated by fear of miscegenation that
he forbade “any ‘black blood' among the players who might have to touch white actresses. Those actors were always whites in blackface”.
⁷

Whatever else it may have done,
Birth of a Nation
demonstrated as never before the incendiary persuasive power of the film medium. As soon as it came out the NAACP, then led by W. E. B. DuBois, attempted to counter its impact. After the failure of campaigns to cut racist scenes or ban the film altogether, plans were made for a rebuttal film, to be called
Birth of Race
, that would be based on Booker T. Washington's autobiography,
Up from Slavery.
Respected and well connected, Washington died before the film could be completed and adequately financed; as Nelson George writes, “The film slipped into the hands of con men, swindlers and incompetents.”
⁸
Its opening was a fiasco. The racist historical narrative of
Birth of a Nation
would remain unchallenged in the popular media until the appearance of the television series
Roots
in 1979.

Ellington was sixteen when
Birth of a Nation
appeared, and the humiliating failure to oppose its version of history may well have motivated his lifelong project of composing a history of African Americans. As Mark Tucker showed, the historical pageants that had already appeared during his school days in Washington, D.C. provided templates for Ellington's historical compositions. In 1911 the Howard Theater presented a musical production called
The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story
in four sections: Overture, Night of Slavery—Sorrow Songs, Dawn of Freedom, and Day of Opportunity. Even more elaborate was
The Star of Ethiopia
, produced by DuBois in 1913 and brought to D.C. in October 1915. It covered “ten thousand years of the history of the Negro race” in five scenes—“Gift of Iron”, “Dream of Egypt”, “Glory of Ethiopia”, “Valley of Humiliation”, and “Vision Everlasting”—in a multimedia spectacle with music, lights, and dancing.
⁹

These pageants gave Ellington a model for narrating black history, but their theatrical forms left open the question of whether the story could also be told through instrumental music without words, actors, dancers, and spectacle. Ellington later explored a variety of media, composing music for film, ballet, political revue, musical comedy, and television, and he often spoke of writing an operatic presentation of African American history titled
Boola.
In 1958
A Drum Is a Woman
, a history of jazz told through a fantastic mixture of allegory, music, and dance, appeared on television; in 1963 the historical pageant
My People
, a theatrical blend of religious service and history lesson that anticipated Leonard Bernstein's
Mass
, was performed twice a day over
a three-week period as part of a Century of Negro Progress exhibition. While Ellington pursued these mixed-media forms he also narrated black history in instrumental compositions. Between 1943 and 1950 he presented what might be termed chapters of an historical epic:
Black Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin', Deep South Suite, Liberian Suite
, and
Harlem.
All these works provoked intense critical controversy that continues today. Most critics, however, measured them in terms of their genre (sizing them up either as jazz or symphonic compositions) rather than their content, or they claimed that their form and content were fatally mismatched.

In composing these concert works Ellington took his music into two different contested areas.
Black, Brown and Beige
and
Harlem
(a.k.a. A
Tone Parallel to Harlem
and
Harlem Suite)
appeared as program music, or tone parallels, as Ellington called them. By the 1940s the concert world had come to think of program music as a dated genre that had peaked in the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Most modernist composers rejected the idea of musical storytelling in favor of more abstract designs; the tone poem devolved into such midcult works as Gershwin's
An American in Paris
or Grofé's
Grand Canyon Suite.
Many of the narrative techniques of program music also became clichés of movie music and cartoon music. Educated listeners unthinkingly branded most program music as kitsch and assumed that its composers were either naive, provincial, or, in the case of Hollywood composers, willfully exploitative. Predictably, critics accused Ellington's tone parallels of technical ineptitude and narrative pretentiousness, and these charges have clouded the music for years. James Lincoln Collier's biography of the composer, written in 1987, summarily dismissed all of Ellington's extended works.