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CHAPTER 23

Music in America: Jazz and Beyond

As we have observed a number of times in this book, in the nineteenth century a rift opened between popular music and the music we now call classical. Nowhere has this rift been more apparent than in the United States of America, the most populist of all nations.

“Popular” and “classical” are fuzzy terms, however; think of the popularity of the Three Tenors, singing opera excerpts in stadiums around the world; think how broad the application of classical and the related classic can be, from the “classical antiquity” of Greece and Rome to “classic rock.” For music in America, the terms “cultivated” and “vernacular” have proven to be more illuminating. To cultivate means to nurture, as microorganisms are cultivated in a petri dish in a laboratory, or orchids in a greenhouse. Vernacular, on the other hand, refers to one’s native language. Cultivated music, then, is music that has been brought to this country and consciously developed, fostered at concerts, and taught in con­ servatories. Vernacular music is music we sing and hear as naturally as we speak our native tongue.

There is a bitter twist to this terminology as applied to American music. The word vernacular comes from the Latin word vernaculus, which is itself de­ rived from verna: and “verna” meant a family slave. The heritage of African American music was and is central to the story of American music.

1 Early American Music: An Overviev^ Long before European settlers and African slaves arrived here. Native Ameri­ cans had their own musical styles. (We touched on one of these in discussing sacred chant; see page 75.) As Native Americans were pushed farther and far­ ther west, however, their music played little role in the development of Euro­ pean American and African American music.

The history of music among the early European settlers and their descen­ dants is not a rich one. The Puritans disapproved of music; they thought it was frivolous, except for its supporting role in religion. In Puritan church services, rhyming versions of the psalms were sung like hymns, but when the words of the psalms were printed in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640—the first book ever printed in North America — the music was not included, because just a few tunes, known to everyone, were used for all 150 psalms. In succeeding years.

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much of the energy of early American musicians was devoted to the composi­ tion of new psalm and hymn tunes, and to the teaching and improvement of church singing.

William Billings (1746-1800) of Boston is often mentioned as our first composer. He wrote hymns and fuguing tunes, which are simple anthems based on hymns, with a little counterpoint. (An anthem is a choral piece in the ver­ nacular for use in Protestant services.) When sung with spirit, fuguing tunes sound enthusiastic, rough, and gutsy.

Billings’s more secular-minded contemporaries enjoyed the Classical music of the era. Benjamin Franklin, who tried his hand at most everything, also tried composing. But without well-established musical institutions, there was not much support for native composers outside the church. The problem in those years is hardly that of distinguishing between cultivated and vernacular music. The problem is finding written music to listen to and talk about at all.

• Vivaldi's concertos in parts • Bach's songs 2nd

collection • Handel's Coronation

anthems • Heck's art of playing the

harpsichord • Hayden's [sic] cantatas ...

In 1783 Thomas Jefferson’s music library contained these and a hundred other items.

The Cultivated Tradition

As cities grew, first on the East coast and then farther west, more and concerts appeared, and with them faithful concertgoers. One such was a York lawyer and civic leader named George Templeton Strong, who left a and-a-half-million-word diary discussing (among other things) all the phonies, oratorios, and organ music he heard, in unending enthusiastic detail.’^ By the mid-1800s, all our major cities had their concert halls and opera organizations and amateur choral societies. The 1860s saw the foundation of our first conservatories of music, in Boston, Cincinnati, and elsewhere.

Americans eagerly bought tickets to hear traveling celebrities from Europe, and skilled native composers and performers began to appear. The first American musicians to gain worldwide reputations were the immigrant German composer Anthony Philip Heinrich (1781-1861), a quirky early Romantic, and the Louisiana piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869).

On the whole, however, Americans were content to look to Italy for opera and to Germany for instrumental music. That the cultivated tradition in American music was essentially German in orientation is not sur­ prising. Ever since the time of Mozart and Beethoven, German music had achieved wonders and had earned enormous prestige all over Europe. The mid-nineteenth-century immigration from Germany brought us many musicians who labored for the cause of music in this country. We can hardly blame them for their German bias.

more New four- sym-

*Bits of Strong’s diary are cited on pages 232 and 234. “Cultivated” music in America; a scene from Philadelphia society of the 1890s, The Concert Singer, by Thomas Eakins.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 393

A concert at New York’s Castle Garden in 1850, in a print issued by Currier &c Ives. Their hand-colored lithographs are famous for vividly illustrating nineteenth-century America.

There were significant native composers at the end of the nineteenth century: John Knowles Paine, Arthur Eoote, and Henry Chadwick of the so-called Boston School, and Edward MacDowell of New York. They wrote symphonies, piano miniatures, and so on, in a competent but conservative German Romantic style. Time has not been kind to their work, despite recent efforts to revive it.

The music of Amy Beach (1867-1944), in particular, has stirred interest in recent years. Active as both a composer and a pianist, she made her debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of seventeen. “Mrs. H. H. A. Beach” (as she always signed her works) contributed to many established genres, such as the piano concerto, the piano quintet, and the symphony. Her Gaelic Symphony of 1896 was the first symphonic work ever composed by an American woman.

The emergence of Charles Ives in the midst of this conserva­ tive tradition seems like a miracle of music history (see page 349). Yet Ives profited more than he sometimes cared to admit from the grounding in European concert music he received from his Ger­ man-trained professor, Horatio Parker.

Music in the Vernacular

We might well count the psalms and hymns mentioned above as vernacular music, for in colonial days everybody who could carry a tune sang them at church and in the home, and later they were widely sung at revival meetings and the like. Nineteenth-century Amy Beach

394 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Hymn singing at home in Revolutionary times, an en­ graving by Paul Revere; the music is by William Billings.

America was also rich in secular popular music. Our two most famous com­ posers wrote timeless tunes and ever-popular marches, respectively: Stephen Collins Foster (1826-1864) and John Philip Sousa (1854-1932).

Foster, it is sad to say, led a dispiriting life. Even in those days, song writing was closely tied to the music business; Foster was dependent on Christie’s Min­ strels, the leading traveling theater troupe of the time. They had exclusive rights to his songs and helped popularize them — so much so that some of them soon achieved the status of folk songs. But Foster had a hard time making ends meet. Flis marriage broke up. He turned to drink and died at the age of thirty-eight.

John Philip Sousa, son of Spanish and German immigrant parents, was a Marine Corps bandmaster who later formed a wildly successful touring band of his own. All Americans know his master­ piece The Stars and Stripes Forever (even if they don’t all know its name). Leonard Bern­ stein once said that his greatest regret as a musician was that he hadn’t composed that march.

African American Music

Foster excelled in sentimental ballads, such as “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” But his most notable songs have to do with the black slaves of his time. There are sentimental “plantation songs” such as “Swanee River” (“The Old Folks at Home”) and “Old Black Joe,” and comic min­ strel songs such as “Oh, Susanna!” and “Camp-

Original illustration accompanying a song by Stephen Foster (1862).

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 395

town Races.” The minstrel show, performed by white actors in blackface, was very popular at mid-century; it consisted of comedy routines, “Ethiopian” songs, dances, and solos on the banjo (an instrument with African roots). Though today this kind of entertainment strikes us as an ugly parody of black speech and character, it was also an acknowledgment of the vitality of the slaves’ music. From at least the time of Foster, African American music has had a profound effect on the music of America at large.

What was the slaves’ music like? This is hard to say, for there were no de­ voted folk-song collectors to write it down. Nevertheless, by studying some­ what later black American music and comparing it with today’s African music, scholars have been able to show how much the slaves preserved of their native musical traditions.

For example, a musical procedure known as call and response is common in West Africa. Phrases sung by a leader — a soloist — are answered or echoed again and again by a chorus. This procedure is preserved in black American church music, when the congregation answers the preacher’s “call,” as well as in spirituals, work songs, and “field hollers,” by which the slaves tried to lighten their labors. It is also an important feature in blues and in jazz, as we shall see.

Spiritual is a term for a religious folk song that came into being outside an established church (white or black). Moving “Negro spirituals,” such as “Nobody Knows the Trouble Eve Seen,” “Go Down, Moses,” and others, were the first black American music to gain the admiration of the white world. After Emanci­ pation, black colleges formed touring choirs. To be sure, spirituals in their concert versions were considerably removed from folk music.

The music of African Americans got a powerful boost from the first major European composer to spend time in America, Antonin Dvorak. This highly respected Bohemian musician, head of New York’s National Conservatory of Music (ancestor of the Juilliard School) in the 1890s, announced his special admiration for spirituals, advised his American colleagues to make use of them in their concert music, and showed the way himself. He incorporated the essence of spirituals so skillfully in his ever-popular Symphony No. 9, From the New World, that one of his own tunes was later adapted to made-up “folk song” words, “Goin’ Home.” This is the first of several examples we shall see of the conscious effort to narrow the gap between America’s vernacular and cultivated styles.

2 Jazz: The First Fifty Years But if Dvorak and his contemporaries could have been whisked for a moment into the twenty-first century, they would have been astonished to see and hear what actually happened. With little help from the cultivated tradition, a strictly vernacular type of music had emerged from African American communities. It was called — at first contemptuously—jazz. Erom the most modest beginnings, this music developed prodigiously. It produced a whole series of new musical styles, performers of the greatest artistry, and composers of genius.

Jazz developed into America’s most distinctive — many would say greatest—contribution to the arts worldwide. And if our time-travelers were to find it hard to believe their ears, there would be something else to amaze them. All this music was actually preserved — preserved on acetate discs by means of a revolutionary new technology, sound recording. These discs have mostly deteriorated by now, but many have been remastered on CDs.

^^ The singing was accom­

panied by a certain ecstasy of motion, clapping of hands, tossing of heads, which would continue without cessation for about half an hour. One would lead off In a kind of recitative style, others joining in the chorus."

A former slave recalls call-and- response singing, 1881

!Vi I 1^’ Go-in’ home, . . .

396 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Negro spirituals were first popularized after the Civil War by groups like the Fisk Singers. In 1871, this group of former slaves toured to raise funds for Fisk, one of the earliest African American colleges.

Jazz is a style that grew up among black musicians around 1910 and has since gone through a series of extraordinary developments. It is not so much a kind of music—the music it is based on usually consists of popular songs, blues, or abstract chord-series called “changes” — but a special, highly charged way of performing that music.

The first crucial feature of this performance style is improvisation. When jazz musicians play a song, they do not stick to a written score or duplicate the way they have heard it before. Instead they fancifully elaborate around a song. They add ornaments and newly contrived interludes, called breaks. In effect, they are always making up variations on the tunes they are using—variations sometimes of such complexity that the original song almost disappears.

The second key feature of jazz is a special rhythmic style involving highly developed syncopation.

Jazz Syncopation Syncopation occurs when some of the accents in music are moved away from the main beats, the beats that are normally accented (see page 14). For example, in 2/2 meter, instead of the normal ONE two ONE two, the accent can be dis­ placed from beat 1 to beat 2 — one TWO one TWO. This is called a “back beat” in jazz parlance.

Some syncopation occurs in all Western music. In jazz, there is much more of it. Syncopation becomes a regular principle, so much so that we can speak

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 397

of at least two rhythmic “levels” in a jazz piece. One rhythmic level is a simple one — the rhythm section of percussion (drums, cymbals), piano, string bass, and sometimes other instruments, emphasizes the meter forcefully, and con­ tinuously. A second, more complex rhythmic level is produced by the melody instruments — trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, and the saxophones that were so brilliantly developed in jazz. They play a constantly syncopating music that always cuts across the rhythm section.

In addition, jazz developed syncopation of a more subtle kind, sometimes called beat syncopation. Derived from African drumming (see page 404), this technique can also be traced in earlier black American music. In beat synco­ pation, accents are moved just a fraction of a beat ahead of the metrical points. When this happens in just the right way, the music is said to “swing.”

The Blues

The blues is a special category of black folk song whose subject is loneliness, trouble, and depression of every shade. Indeed, the blues is more than song, more than music: It is an essential expression of the African American experience. Though gloom and dejection are at the heart of the blues, not infrequently blues lyrics also convey humor, banter, and especially hope and resilience.

Emerging around 1900, the blues was a major influence on early jazz — and has remained a major force in American music ever since.

A blues melody consists typically of stanzas made up of three four-measure phrases (“twelve-bar blues”), repeated again and again as the blues singer develops a thought by improvising more stanzas. The words for each stanza are just two lines long, rhyming, with the first line repeated. Each line is sung to one of the three phrases of the twelve-bar pattern. Here are stanzas 1 and 4 of “If You Ever Been Down” Blues:

STANZA 1 a If you ever been down, you know just how I feel, a If you ever been down, you know just how I feel, b Like a tramp on the railroad ain’t got a decent meal.

STANZA 4 a Yes, one thing, papa, I’ve decided to do, a Oh pretty daddy. I’ve decided to do, b I’m going to find another papa, then I can’t use you.

Composed blues — for example, W. C. Handy’s famous “St. Louis Blues” — can be more complicated than this one, but the aab poetic scheme is basic for the blues.

Blues melodies (and the bass lines and harmonies under blues melodies) provided jazz musicians with powerfully emotional patterns for improvisa­ tion. But more than that, blues also provided jazz with a sonorous model. Jazz instrumental playing has an astonishing vocal quality, as though in imitation of the blues. The trumpet, saxophone, and trombone sound infinitely more flexible and “human” played in jazz style than when played in military band or symphonic style. Jazz instruments seem to have absorbed the vibrant accents of black singing. (This is another feature that jazz passed on to rock music, where the electric guitar is the instrument that powerfully imitates the voice.)

Our example of blues singing is as authentic as it gets, by one of the legendary women who dominated the early blues recordings. Sippie Wallace (1898-1986) — her name is said to derive from a childhood lisp—was equally known for gospel singing and the blues. African American gospel music — ecstatic choral singing in evangelical church services, with high-flying sopranos over the background rhythms of the congregation—grew up at the same time as the blues and ragtime.

I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies, and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually say­ ing a word about it."

Blues, gospel, and soul singer Bay Charles, 1970

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SIPPIE WALLACE (1898-1986) “If You Ever Been Doivn” Blues (1927) (Composed by G. W. Thomas)

Sippie Wallace is not as renowned as Mamie Smith, Ma Rainey, or the great Bessie Smith, but she poured her heart out with the best of them in response to the eternal themes of the blues:

STANZA 2 I’m a real good woman but my man don’t treat me right. He takes all my money and stays out all night.

STANZA 3 I’m down today but I won’t be down always, ’Cause the sun’s going to shine in my back door some day.

Wallace accompanies herself on the piano. The recording adds two jazz musi­ cians, but she would have sung just about the same way if she had been per­ forming alone. One of the musicians is the outstanding genius of early jazz, Louis Armstrong.

After a brief instrumental introduction, Wallace sings two blues stanzas from the piano bench. The instruments play short breaks in between her lines—the trumpet (Armstrong) in stanza 1, the clarinet (the little-known Artie Starks) in stanza 2. Sympathetic respondents to her “call,” they deepen the melancholy of her song and nuance it:

))) LISTEN THOMAS “If You Ever Been Down” Blues 0:10 Stanza 1 0:45 Stanza 2 1:19 Trumpet 1:51 Stanza 3 2:24 Stanza 4

Perhaps the essential sound of jazz is Louis Arm­ strong improvising the breaks in the blues sung by [famous blues-singer] Bessie Smith.... In the break we have the origin of the instrument imitating the voice, the very soil in which jazz grows."

Composer Leonard Bernstein, Simple break jQrrc TRUMPET

If you ev - er been down you know_ just how I feel_______________ If you ev-er . . .

Then Armstrong plays a solo section — an entire twelve-bar blues stanza. He does not play the blues melody note by note, but improvises around the melody and its bass. Armstrong has a wonderful way of speeding up the dragging blues rhythm, and his rich, almost vocal tone quality echoes and complements the singer’s bleak sound. The clarinet joins him; short as it may be, this is a real example of improvised jazz polyphony.

Wallace, too, joins in quietly during this instru­ mental chorus; she too, no doubt, was singing on im­ pulse. She then sings two more stanzas, with instrumental breaks as before.

It’s necessary to listen to this recording in a differ­ ent spirit from that in which we approach the other recordings of Western music accompanying this book. The scratchy sound on these old discs cannot be helped by digital remastering, and the music itself is not “composed,” of course. It lies somewhere in be­ tween true folk music and jazz, a fascinating juxtapo­ sition of the direct, powerful simplicity of Sippie Wallace and the artistry of Armstrong. With a little imagination, one can virtually hear history happening in this recording: Jazz is evolving from the blues.

Sippie Wallace

Wallace was also a pianist and songwriter, who usually sang her own compo­ sitions, and published a good many of them. Her long performing career began

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond

Ragtime: Scott Joplin (1868-191'/)

Ragtime, a precursor of jazz, was a style of piano playing developed by black musicians playing in bars, dives, and brothels. The music resembled march music, but while the left hand played strictly on the beat, the right hand syncopated the rhythm in a crisp, cheerful way. “To rag” meant to play in a syncopated style; “ragging” evolved into jazz syncopation.

In the early 1900s, when phonographs were still new and most music in the home was played on the piano, ragtime became enormously popular throughout America by means of sheet music and piano rolls for mechanical (“player”) pianos. The term ragtime could also be applied to nonpiano music: witness the famous song “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” of 1911 by Irving Berlin.

Scott Joplin was the leading rag composer. Frustratingly little is known about his early life. The son of an ex-slave, he grew up in Texarkana and worked as a pianist and band musician in many Midwestern towns. “Maple Leaf Rag,” named after the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, Missouri, where Joplin played, was published in 1899. It quickly sold a mil­ lion copies. You can hear this famous rag on your Study Guide DVD; see also Listening Exercise 2 on page 15.

Joplin followed “Maple Leaf” with “The Entertainer” and many other rags. They stand out for an elegance that might not have been expected in this simple and commercial

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genre. In “Solace: A Mexican Serenade” Joplin mixed rag­ time with Latin American dance styles in a work of nos­ talgic sophistication. He even published a small treatise on the playing of ragtime, warn­ ing those who would race through his pieces; “Never play ragtime fast at any time.” And to those who saw rag­ time as a style too lowbrow for their tastes, he wrote: “Synco­ pations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy (i.e., throw) bricks at ‘hateful ragtime’ no longer passes for musical culture.”

Joplin’s evident desire to break into cultivated musi­ cal circles was not realized. After he moved to New York in 1907 he gradually faded from the limelight. He wrote two operas, the second of which, Treemonisha, received a single unstaged, unsuccessful performance in 1915. His death in 1917 was noted by few.

There was a strong new surge of interest in ragtime in the 1960s. At last Treemonisha was fully staged and recorded. In 1975 Joplin was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in composition.

at little churches in Houston and ended with a concert at Lincoln Center, the sprawling New York music facility that houses the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera.

New Orleans Jazz

Early jazz was local entertainment for black audiences, an informal, low- budget, and even a somewhat casual art. Small bands, usually of six to eight players, typically featured three melody instruments to do the “swinging” — trumpet, clarinet, and trombone. The rhythm section could include piano, banjo, string bass, or even tuba, along with drums and other percussion.

Early jazz players developed the art of collective improvisation, or “jamming.” They learned to improvise simultaneously, each developing the special resources of his instrument — bright melodic spurts for the trumpet, fast running pas­ sages from low register to high for the clarinet, forceful slides for the trom­ bone. They also acquired a sort of sixth sense for fitting in with the other improvisers. The nonimitative polyphony produced in this way is the hallmark of early jazz.

The first important center of jazz was New Orleans, home of the greatest early jazzman, Louis Armstrong, who played cornet and trumpet. Armstrong and his colleagues developed wonderfully imaginative and individual perform­ ance styles; aficionados can recognize any player after hearing just a few measures of a jazz record. With players of this quality, it is not surprising that solo sections soon became a regular feature in early jazz, along with collective improvisation.

400 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Louis Armstrong (1901-19J1)

Louis Armstrong was born into abject poverty in New Orleans. He learned to play the cornet in the Colored Waifs’ Home, where he had been placed as a juvenile

delinquent. Determined to become a musician, Arm­ strong played in seedy clubs and on riverboats, which were floating dance halls that traveled from town to town on the Mississippi every summer. Riverboats became a cradle of early jazz, importing it up the river from New Orleans to Kansas City and other centers.

Soon Armstrong was playing in the pioneering jazz bands led by King Oliver (see above) and Fletcher Hen­ derson. He rapidly emerged as a more exciting artist than any of his colleagues. His sophisticated, flowing rhythms, his imaginative breaks and variations, and the power and beauty of his trumpet tone — all these were unique at the time. A famous series of records he made in the 1920s, playing with small New Orleans-style bands, drew jazz to the serious attention of musicians all over the world.

In the 1930s the popularity of jazz led to a great deal of commercialization, and to the cheapening and stereo­ typing that always seem to result from this process. Armstrong went right along, while often contributing moments of breathtaking beauty to records that were “listenable virtually only when Louis is playing,” accord­ ing to one jazz critic of the time. Armstrong became a

nationally loved star, familiar from his appearances in nearly twenty movies. The State Department sponsored him on so many international tours that people called him “Ambassador Satch” (“Satchmo,” his nickname, was de­ rived from “satchel-mouth”).

However, the more successful Armstrong became in the world of popular music, the more he drifted away from true jazz, to the distress of jazz enthusiasts. His last hit record was Hello, Dolly!, the title song of a 1964 Broadway musical; in this number he sang (with his famous raspy delivery) more than he played the trumpet.

Encore: Listen to “West End Blues,” “Heebie Jeebies,” “Hotter than That,” “St. Louis Blues” (with Bessie Smith).

Jazz in the early 1920s: Louis Armstrong (center) in his first important band, Joe (“King”) Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band. Oliver is to Armstrong’s left. The pianist, Lil Hardin — also a band­ leader and songwriter — later married Armstrong and is credited with directing his early career.

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Recording technology was already crucial in the dissemination of jazz. As popular records in those days were all just three minutes long, the jazz that has survived from that era is all slimmed down into three-minute segments. (If not for this, Sippie Wallace and Louis Armstrong would have given us many more blues stanzas.) Originally issued on labels that appealed to black audiences — coldly categorized as “race records” by the music business — Armstrong’s discs of the late 1920s and 1930s not only attracted white listeners, hut also excited the admiration of a new breed of jazz musicologists and critics.

Swing

Around 1930, jazz gained significantly in popularity, thanks in part to Arm­ strong’s recordings. With popularity came changes, not all of them to the good. Jazz now had to reach bigger audiences in ballrooms and roadhouses. This meant big bands, with ten to twenty-five players — and such large numbers required carefully written out arrangements of the songs played. Improvisa­ tion, which was really the rationale behind jazz, was necessarily limited under these conditions.

However, big-band jazz — called swing — compensated for some of its lost spontaneity by variety of tone color and instrumental effects. A novel style of band orchestration was developed, based on the contrast between brass (trumpets

Swing in the late 1930s: one of the most famous of the “big bands” (Glenn Miller) —brass to the left, reeds to the right. Miller’s sideman Bobby Hackett (cornet) was one of many white musicians inspired by Louis Armstrong.

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and trombones) and “reed” (mainly saxophone) groups. Soloists cut in and out of the full-band sounds. Jazz “arrangers,” who arranged current songs for the bands, treated this style with the greatest technical ingenuity and verve; they deserve the name of composers. Sometimes they contrived to allow for some improvisation within their arrangements.

With popularity, too, came white musicians and managers, who moved in on what had previously been a relatively small black operation. Not only were black jazz musicians marginalized in the mass market, but their art was watered down to suit the growing audience. The big swing bands that were commercial successes were white, and their leaders — Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw—were household names in the 1930s and 1940s. But the best of the big bands were black: those led by Count Basie (1904-1984), Jimmie Lunceford (1902-1947), Chick Webb (1909-1939), and Duke Ellington.

DUKE ELLINGTON “Conga Brava” (1940)

The tune used in “Conga Brava” was written by Ellington together with his Puerto Rican sideman Juan Tizol. (A conga is a dance of Afro-Cuban origin, named after the conga drum.) In it, the characteristic beat of Latin

American music is appropriated by jazz — a mild tit-for-tat on behalf of a musical style that had given up much more to the nonblack world.

Only the beginning of this unusual tune — the a a section of the a a b form — has a Latin beat. Played by trombonist Tizol, the first a is presented with a minimal and mysterious accompaniment; but after this ends with a fancy clarinet break, the second a includes brilliant interjections from the muted brass (an Ellington specialty). Erom now on things change rapidly. The brass choir plays b, with a speedy low clarinet cutting in. The rhythm section switches from a Latin beat to a typical jazz back-beat duple meter. The music begins to swing hard, as the trumpets remove their mutes.

The second appearance of the tune is a dazzling free improvisation by tenor sax player Ben Webster. He sounds genuinely spontaneous; he probably never again improvised around this melody in just this way. After he has gone through a and a, the muted brass come in again with a lively variation of b.

Webster has strayed far from the tune, so it is good to hear the third ap­ pearance of the tune in its original form (more or less), now on the reed choir (saxophones). This time the brilliant interpolations are by sideman Rex Stewart on trumpet. And this time, after a single a, there comes an extraordi­ nary brass-choir version of b, with wildly syncopated rhythms. The coordina­ tion of the brass instruments is breathtaking, and the sheer verve of their variation makes this the high point of the composition.

At the piano, Duke gives a quiet signal for this brass episode before it starts; he also plays a single, hardly audible note in the middle of the episode, as though to remind us who is in charge. The piece ends as it started, with the tune played by Tizol, but it fades halfway through.

How strange to be back to the rather still and mournful conga melody, with its Latin beat! The listener to “Conga Brava” can end up feeling a bit mystified. All that exhilarating jazz activity that blew up so suddenly and has now been cut off—was it some kind of dream? Only a master of musical form like Ellington could make you think of such questions after a mere three minutes of music.

))) LISTEN ELLINGTON “Conga Brava” 0:04 a a Trombone 0:45 b Brass and

alto sax 0:59 a a Sax 1:39 b Muted brass 1:46 a Reed choir

(with trumpet) 2:07 b' Brass choir 2:32 a Trombone

My band is my instrument."

Duke Ellington

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 403

Duke Ellington (i S^jf) - 1974)

Edward Kennedy Ellington was bom in Washington, D.C., son of a butler who occasionally worked at the White House. The young Ellington considered a career as an artist,

but he started playing the piano in jazz bands—ragtime was a major influence—and soon organized his own. He learned arranging too, and became an almost unique phenomenon: a major bandleader who was also its composer and its arranger

He was called “Duke” because of a certain aristocratic bearing—and he was fastidious about his music, too. Ellington held fast to his own high standards of innovation and stylishness. And although his band never “went com­ mercial,” it did as well as any black band could in the 1930s and 1940s. “Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra” were renowned as the backup to sumptuous revues put on at the Cotton Club, an upscale Harlem night spot that catered to white audiences. Their recordings from around 1930 to 1940 constitute Ellington’s major legacy.

After World War II, Ellington went his own imper­ turbable way, keeping his big band at a time when such organizations were regarded as jazz dinosaurs. He had experimented with long, symphonic-style jazz compo­ sitions as a young man, and now wrote more of these, as well as movie scores, a ballet, and an opera. The Ellington band, which had toured Europe twice in the 1930s, now toured all over the world, including the Soviet Union.

Ellington was finally recognized for what he was, just about America’s most eminent composer, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other tributes. His last creative phase found him writing lengthy religious pieces, called Sacred Concerts, for the Ellington band with a Swedish soprano, Alice Babs, who was not really a jazz singer at all.

Ellington’s Sacred Con­ certs would have been im­ possible without Babs—but the same is true of his earlier, better-known music and the musicians of his early bands. These individual soloists, or sidemen, as they are called — among them Barney Bigard (clarinet), Cootie Williams (trumpet), Johnny Hodges (alto saxophone), and Juan Tizol, who is featured on valve trombone in “Conga Brava” (see opposite page) — were vital to Ellington’s art in a way singers or instru­ mentalists very rarely are in classical music. He molded his music so closely to their sometimes eccentric styles of playing that we can hardly conceive of his music without them.

Ellington’s sidemen can be regarded as co-composers of his music — or, better, as its material, like the songs and the blues that were transformed by Ellington’s magic.

Chief Works: Very many songs — one estimate is 2,000—and jazz arrangements ■ Large-scale jazz compositions, including Creole Fantasy and Black, Brown, and Beige ■ Musical come­ dies, ballets, an incomplete opera (Boola), and other stage music ■ Five film scores; Sacred Concerts

Encore: Listen to “Mood Indigo,” “Caravan,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Ko-ko,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Sophisticated Lady.”

Jazzmen as listeners: Duke Ellington and (behind him to the right) Benny Goodman listen to Ella Eitzgerald, one of the greatest vocalists of the jazz era. Joining the group is famed composer of Broad­ way musicals Richard Rodgers (front far right). You can hear Fitzgerald sing “Who Cares?” on the Listen DVD. 14

404 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Global Perspectives 6

African Drumming

We said before that the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, blues, and jazz derived from traditional African music, particularly drumming. We don’t know enough about African or African American music in the nineteenth century to detail this connection in all its stages, but we can sur­ mise that the rhythmic complexities of modern jazz and today’s African drumming are connected in a history that reaches back centuries.

Listen now to our recording of a drum ensemble from Benin, a small West African nation situated be­

tween Ghana and Nigeria. The drummers play music used in the worship of ancestral spirits among the Yoruba people—one of a wide variety of religious and nonreligious uses of drumming in the region.

Syncopation and Polyrhythms

The rhythms of this music cannot be said to swing pre­ cisely in the manner of jazz, but they show a com­ plexity and vitality related to jazz rhythms and not found in the European classical music tradition through the nineteenth century.

These rhythms are related to what we have termed beat syncopation in jazz (see page 397). A single drum

A drumming club in another West African country, Ghana.

IP

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 6 African Drumming 405

lays down a basic, fast, four-plus-four pulse; each group of four feels like a beat, and two groups of four take about a second. (This quick pulse is heard all the way through the recording, except for three brief moments: This drummer speeds up momentarily at 1:09,1:46, and 2:33, with stunning, energizing effect, fitting six strokes into the space usually taken up by four.)

Against the main drum’s consistent pulse, the other drums play a variety of different rhythms. Some­ times they underscore the main drum’s even pulse, or even duplicate it. Often, however, they play off it with more complicated and varied rhythms, including ex­ tensive syncopation within the groups of four (or beats), and occasionally they boldly contradict it.

Such overlapping of varied patterns with the main pulse is essential in West African drumming. Since sev­ eral rhythmic formulas can be heard at once, it is sometimes called polyrhythm. From its polyrhythms the musical whole gains an extraordinary richness of rhythmic profile. And from the syncopations within the beat it derives its irresistible vitality (irresistible also to the ancestral spirits invoked).

A Closer Look To study this recording more closely, listen for a few clear polyrhythmic interactions:

7 One drummer aligns a regular syncopated formula against the main pulse, in this manner: PSSB3 BBSS BBSS BSBBS BSSB stXXx jlcsLJc JcI stXxiI — Main pulse

Listen for this four times in the recording, at 0:23-0:29, 0:50-0:53, 1:23-1:28, and 2:13-2:19.

7 Another drummer plays an even 3 + 3 pulse against the main 4 + 4, seeming to contradict its duple meter with a triple orientation. This occurs prominently twice, at 0:41-0:44 and again at 2:22-2:26.

7 One drummer in particular departs freely from the main pulse all the way through this recording. He is the soloist, so to speak, improvising against the more regular and predictable playing of his ensemble-mates. His drum is recognizable by its wooden, clickety-clack timbre and by the fact that it plays two distinct pitches (the higher pitch is more wooden-sounding than the lower).

One good way to listen for his distinctive, irregular syncopations is to clap along with the main pulse as you listen, once every four strokes. You will be clapping about twice a second. Then compare the regularity of your own clapping with the seemingly free fantasy of the clickety-clack drum.

I

406 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

3 Later Jazz After World War II the popularity of the big bands collapsed suddenly. They were too expensive to run; furthermore, styles in enter­ tainment had changed, and the smooth, high- powered band sound struck people as cold and slick. The mass market turned to rock’n’roll, itself the outcome of a vital new genre of African American music, rhythm and blues (see page 416). Even during the war, this collapse had been forecast by a revolutionary new movement within jazz called bebop.

Bebop

During the early 1940s, young black jazz musi­ cians found it harder to get work than white players in big bands. When they did get jobs, the setup discouraged free improvisation, the life and soul of jazz; the big bands seemed to have co-opted and distorted a style grown out of black experience. These musicians got together in small groups after work for jam sessions at clubs in Harlem. There they developed a new style that would later be called bebop. Contrast­ ing sharply with the big bands, the typical bebop combo (combination) was just trumpet and sax­ ophone, with a rhythm section including piano.

Bebop was a determined return to improv­ isation, then — but improvisation of a new technical virtuosity. “That horn ain’t supposed to sound that fast,” an elder musician is said to have complained to bebop sax­ ophonist Charlie Parker. In addition to unprecedented velocity, Parker and leading bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917-1993) cultivated hard, per­ cussive sounds and sharp, snap rhythms (one derivation of the term “bebop”).

Equally radical was the treatment of harmony in bebop. New Orleans jazz used simple, in fact naive, harmonies. The swing arrangers used much more sophisticated ones. Bebop musicians took these complex harmonies and im­ provised around them in a more and more “far out” fashion. In some stretches of their playing, even the tonality of the music was obscured. Bebop melodies grew truly fantastic; the chord changes became harder and harder to follow.

CHARLIE PARKER (1920-1955) and MILES DAVIS (1926-1991) “Out of Nowhere” (1948)

In a recording studio, Charlie Parker listens to a playback as the other musicians wait for his reaction. Will he approve this take of the num­ ber they are recording, or will they have to do another?

Playing bop is like play- iii; Scrabble with all the vowels missing,"

Duke Ellington, 1954

The life of Charlie (“Bird”) Parker, bebop’s greatest genius, reads like a modern-day version of a persistent Romantic myth — the myth of the artist who is driven by the demon of his creativity, finding fulfillment only in his art.

Parker was on drugs from the age of fifteen, and in later years could not control his immoderate drinking and eating. A legend in his own lifetime, Parker died

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 407

at the age of thirty-four after a suicide attempt and a period of hospitalization in a California mental institution.

“Out of Nowhere” is one of the many popular songs of the 1930s that were used as the basis for jazz, swing, and bebop singles. Our version of the number was recorded live in a New York nightclub, so it can give us an idea of what an improvised bebop number actually sounded like. Notice the informal opening — no arranged introduction as in Ellington’s “Conga Brava,” or even in the Wallace-Armstrong blues number. Parker plays the attractive song fairly “straight” to begin with, but he inserts a sudden skittering passage just before the A' section (the song is in A A' form). This is a preview of things to come.

The trumpet solo by Miles Davis has the characteristic tense, bright bebop sound, some very rapid passage work, and one or two piercing high notes. Then Parker’s improvisation shows his impressive powers of melodic development. He builds a whole series of phrases of different lengths, increasingly elaborate, that seem to leave the song behind in the dust — except that now and then he recalls ever so clearly a melodic turn from it (especially in A'). This is a Parker trademark: Again and again his solos strike this balance between fantastic elab­ oration and allusion back to a more modest starting point.

The irregular, almost discontinuous-sounding rests between Parker’s phrases have their own special fascination. You may recognize an Irish jig, named “The Kerry Dancers,” which seems to have popped into Parker’s head right in the middle of the solo, as the outgrowth of a short melody figure he had come to. He plays the jig at a dizzying rate for just a moment, before inventing some­ thing else; fantastically, it fits right in.

At the end of his solo the nightclub audience applauds, and the pianist plays his own improvised solo on the tune’s A section. The number ends with the A' section of “Out of Nowhere” played once again quite simply, except for new trumpet breaks and a new, comical ending.

))) LIS jYii PARKER “Out of Nowhere' 0:00 Tune A 0:24 A' 0:48 Trumpet A 1:12 A' 1:36 Sax A 2:00 A' 2:24 Piano A 2:49 Tune A' 3:11 Coda

Ja// alter In Ixip Melody, harmony, and tonality—these were the very elements in music that had been “emancipated” by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and other avant-gardists in the early 1900s. With the bebop movement, the avant-garde finally came to jazz.

Many new jazz styles followed after the bebop emancipation, from the 1950s to the present day. Jazz fans distinguish between cool jazz, free jazz, modal jazz, Afro-Cuban jazz, electric jazz, and even avant-garde jazz. Among the leaders in this diverse, exciting music were pianist Thelonious Monk (1917- 1982), trumpeter Miles Davis (1926-1991), keyboardist Sun Ra (1928- 1994), and saxophonists John Coltrane (1926-1967) and Ornette Coleman (b. 1930). They were the first to improvise really freely—that is, without a song or blues as a basis.

The synthesizer ha| changed everything, whether purist musicians like it or not. It's here to stay and yog can either be in it or out of it. I choose to be in it because the world has always bgen about change."

From Miles Davis's auto­ biography, 1989

MILES DAVIS (1926-1991) Bitches Brew (1969)

Trumpeter Miles Davis, one of the most innovative figures in the whole his­tory of jazz, started out playing with Charlie Parker and other bebop musi­ cians, as we heard in “Out of Nowhere.” Soon, however, he realized that his

own aptitude (or at least one of his main aptitudes) was for a more relaxed and tuneful kind of melody. Davis’s style went through many stages — from

25

408 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

bebop to cool jazz to modal jazz and beyond — as he worked in various groups with a veritable who’s-who of modern jazz artists.

Bitches Brew, one of his biggest hits, was also one of his most original. A conscious (and controversial) attempt to blend jazz with rock, the album used a rhythm section with electric guitar, bass, and two electric keyboards in addition to regular jazz drums, acoustic bass, and augmented percussion. In­ stead of the traditional chord changes of jazz, this group produced repetitive, rocklike rhythms of the greatest variety and, often, delicacy. This backdrop provides an unlikely but also unforgettable setting for Davis’s haunting improvisations.

Our selection covers a solo from the title track of Bitches Brew. Before Davis begins, the electric piano and guitar pick out rhythmic patterns against a quiet jazz drum background; mostly the electric guitar has isolated single notes and the electric piano has syncopated, dissonant chords. From the beginning a rocklike ostinato sounds quietly on the electric bass guitar.

The trumpet solo starts with short patterns of relatively long notes, a Davis signature. The mood is meditative, almost melancholy: an evocation of the blues. The backdrop tapestry of sounds grows thicker. Soon Davis is employ­ ing more elaborate patterns — a string of repeated notes, scalelike passages up and down — but the effect is, in its own way, as repetitive as the backdrop. Then he explodes into a series of little snaps, a recollection of bebop. As the whole group drives harder and harder, we realize that Davis has now arrived at a wild, free ostinato in the high register. The solo sinks down again after a climactic high trumpet squeal, another Davis hallmark.

With jazz-rock or fusion, Davis and others reached out for vernacular roots in American music. Still, jazz after bebop is usually complex and often difficult to follow. Formerly America’s dominant form of truly popular music, today this music can really only be described as “popular” with loyal fans who crowd to jazz festivals from Newport, Rhode Island, to Monterey, California. These fans view with mixed emotions efforts by Washington’s Smithsonian

LISTEN DAVIS Bitches Brew (part) 0:00 0:42 1:04 2:41 3:20

Backdrop Dies down Trumpet solo Trumpet ostinato Climax

Cuban pianist Gonzalo Rubalcaba, leading Miles Davis light of a new jazz generation.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 409

Institution and New York’s Lincoln Center to cultivate jazz in a classical-concert format, led especially by the latest great jazz trumpet virtuoso, Wynton Marsalis (b. 1961), who is also a great entrepreneur and a great publicist. The life and soul of jazz is its spontaneity. Will spontaneity survive institutionalization and “classic” status?

4 The Influence of Jazz and Blues

Jazz continues to flower cumulatively, taking on and transforming the new without ever abandon­ ing the old. It is a fugue with a life of its own, end­ lessly recapitulating."

Time magazine, 1976

How was jazz first received in this country’s “cultivated” musical circles? Many longtime symphony and opera subscribers certainly hated it. They con­ sidered its saxophones and muted trumpets vulgar, its rhythms dangerously sexual and likely to corrupt their children. This reaction was strongly tinged with racism.

On the other hand, jazz was from the first an inspiration as well as a delight for less hidebound musicians, music students, and young composers. The 1920s was a confident era, and composers coming of age at that time promised a bright new day for American music. A vital, fresh musical idiom had emerged — the decade from 1920 to 1930 called itself the Jazz Age — and the idea of working jazz into concert music was both natural and exciting.

Jazz in the Concert Hall

We have already heard one example of this trend in Maurice Ravel’s blues- influenced Piano Concerto in G (see page 356). Ravel heard the new African American styles when they took Paris by storm in the 1920s, making that city the first jazz center outside the United States.

In America, the composer who most successfully carried off the fusion of jazz with concert-hall music was George Gershwin (1898-1937). Born in New York, Gershwin received a sketchy musical education. He quit school at sixteen to work as a song plugger, or music publisher’s agent, playing through the newest sheet music hits for potential customers and promoting them to singers and bandleaders. Soon he was writing his own songs, and he went on to compose some of the finest tunes of the 1920s — “Lady Be Good,” “Embraceable You,” “The Man I Love,” and dozens of others. He was an accomplished and original jazz pianist.

Harboring an ambition to enter the world of cultivated music, Gershwin electrified musical America with his Rhapsody in Blue of 1924. Billed as “An Experiment in Modern Music,” this fourteen-minute work for piano and orchestra was first performed by Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, a sleek forerun­ ner of the 1930s big bands. This music is not true jazz, but is Gershwin’s trans­ lation of jazz into his own individual idiom, halfway between jazz and the concert hall’s concerto.

After Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin wrote more works importing jazz and blues styles into concert-hall genres: An American in Paris, a symphonic poem for orchestra; a piano concerto; and an opera, Porgy and Bess — works that have remained widely popular, known and loved by millions of Americans. Gershwin had thrown a bridge across the canyon between vernacular and cul­ tivated music. Of course, the existence of bridges doesn’t mean that the rift has

gone away.

Oh sweet and lovely Lady be good. Oh lady be good

To me. I am so awf'ly misunderstood. Oh lady be good

To me . . .

Gershwin song lyric, by his brother Ira

410 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

GEORGE GERSHWIN (1898-1937) Prelude No. 1 (1926)

Gershwin’s Prelude No. 1 for piano is the first in a set of three he published in 1927. In its dimensions it looks back to Romantic piano miniatures; its title recalls collections of such works by Chopin and Debussy that Gershwin knew well. Indeed, Gershwin originally intended a set of twenty-four preludes, just the number Chopin had published. He had the idea of calling this set The Melting Pot, a reference to the various cultivated and vernacular styles he would bring together in it.

Prelude No. 1 recalls Romantic miniatures also in its simple ABA' form. A and A' each consist of little more than a statement of the main melody of the piece:

))3 LISTEN

GERSHWIN Prelude No. 1 0:00 A 0:07 Left-hand synco­

pations begin 0:13 B 0:54 Beginning of A:

buildup 1:04 A'

B is a longer section. It changes key frequently, employing many sequences, and is dominated by a melody that begins with re­ peated notes, a favorite gesture of Gershwin in his piano music.

What gives this music its distinctive appeal, however — and what makes it sound nothing like Chopin — are the elements it borrows from jazz and blues. Both the little half-step slide up that begins the main theme and the unexpected note that ends its second bar are borrowed from the so-called blues scale — a scale characteristic of blues singing but not of tbe European classical tradition. Such “blue notes” come back again and again in the melodies of the piece.

Even more distinctive is the jazzy syncopation that marks the left-hand part. Listen to the accompaniment at the begin­ ning, before the main melody joins it, counting two fairly slow beats per measure. The beginning of each measure — the down- beat— is clearly marked by a thudding low note. The second- heat, however, is not struck, but instead undercut by a synco­ pated chord that anticipates it by a fraction. Syncopated patterns like this one continue throughout the piece, playing off against the melodies to give the piece its rhythmic verve. It may not be jazz, but it is jazzy.

Constantin Alajalov, who left unforgettable pictures of the Jazz Age, sketched himself painting George Gershwin in 1932.

The American Musical

Throughout the ages and throughout the world, the theater has always pro­ vided fertile soil for the growth of popular music. America, once the Puritan spirit had subsided somewhat, proved no exception. One of the main sources of modern American popular music can be located in the thriving New York theatrical scene in the decades around 1900. Then, as now, the New York City theater district was located at, and known as, Broadway.

Broadway was first of all home of operetta, a very popular European genre of light opera in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Operettas em­ ploy spoken dialogue (rather than recitative) between the musical numbers — light, attractive tunes and plenty of dances. Their plots are amusing, farfetched.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 411

and frothy. Typically they are set in some mythical eastern European country, where amorous, fun-loving aristocrats rub shoulders with merry, contented peasants.

Among the best European composers of operettas were Johann Strauss Jr., the “Waltz King” (Die Fledermaus —“The Bat”: 1874), and Arthur Sullivan (The Mikado, HMS Pinafore, and others —these are called “Gilbert and Sullivan” operettas as a tribute to the very witty librettist, W. S. Gilbert). The most impor­ tant American composer in this tradition was Victor Herbert (1859—1924). Born in Ireland and educated in Germany, Herbert produced more than forty operettas from the 1890s on; chiefly remembered today is Babes in Toyland (1903).

Musual Conuilv .uul rnpul.ii Smiu,

It was around 1910 that the American popular theater picked up its charac­ teristic accent. It was a musical accent, and it came from jazz. Although Broad­ way did not employ actual jazz, it swiftly appropriated and assimilated jazz syncopation and swing. As projected by white theater bands and carried over into popular songs, this jazz accent contributed more than anything else to the appeal of a new kind of musical show.

Theatergoers had also begun to demand stories that were American and up to date, and so the writers of the song lyrics learned to make up smart, catchy verses full of American locutions. To distinguish them from operettas with their Old World ambience, aristocrats, waltzes, and students’ drinking songs — these new shows were called musical comedies, or musicals.

The rise of the musical in the 1920s and 1930s was closely tied to the great outpouring of popular songs in this era. It was truly a golden age for song. Not all of them were written for musicals, of course (Ellington, for ex­ ample, wrote many songs that had no link to the theater). But the theater provided songwriters with an extra fee and gave songs invaluable exposure, magnified after 1926 by “talking pic­ tures.” Theater songs were popularized by the very successful movie musicals of the 1930s, as well as by radio and 78-rpm recordings.

The two principal composers of early American musical comedy were also composers of many favorite old tunes: Jerome Kern (1885-1945) and George Gershwin. Kern’s masterpiece. Show Boat (1927), has returned to the stage again and again, and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (1935), which is more like a jazz opera than a musical, occupies a solid place in the operatic repertory.

Gershwin’s actual musicals are seldom heard because most of the plots now seem so silly—but there are exceptions, notably Of Thee I Sing (1931), a hilarious spoof of the presi­ dential election process. There is /ys a song from this show on our companion DVD. \ vaudeville team of the 1890s, the Southern Four.

Irving just loves hits. He has no sophistication about it—he just loves hits."

Said of Irving Berlin (1888- ' 990), author of "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "Always," "Easter Parade," and "White Christmas," among other hits

412 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

The Musical after 1940

Show Boat and Of Thee I Sing both look forward to the new dramatic so­ phistication of the musical in the postwar era. From the 1940s on, the plots of musicals were worked out with more care. Instead of the plot being a mere pretext for songs and dances in the manner of a revue, musical numbers grew logically out of a plot that had interest in its own right.

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and his lyricist Oscar Hammerstein (1895- 1960) dominated this period. Their works such as Oklahoma! (1943) and The King and I (1951) ran for thousands of performances on Broadway. They still define the golden age of the musical — perhaps especially because they offered a sentimental and innocent vision of the world as America in the postwar era wished to see it.

Other musicals tackled more challenging subjects — psychoanalysis, trade unionism, gang warfare — but these rarely rivaled the megabits of Rodgers and Hammerstein. One exception to this rule is West Side Story, with music by the classical composer and symphony conductor Leonard Bernstein. Here we see the cultivated tradition reaching out to the vernacular — but in a genre defined by the vernacular.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990) West Side Story (1957)

Leonard Bernstein was one of the most brilliant and versatile musicians ever to come out of America, the consummate crossover artist before the term was invented. Composer of classical symphonies and hit musicals, interna­

tionally acclaimed conductor, pianist, author, and mastermind of wonderful shows in the early days of television, he won Grammys, Emmys, and a Tony.

West Side Story (1957) boasts three exceptional features — its moving story, its sophisticated score, and its superb dances, created by the great American choreographer Jerome Robbins. The musical, by turns funny, smart, tender, and enormously dynamic, gave us song classics such as “Maria” and “Tonight.” Our recording of West Side Story is from the soundtrack to the 1961 movie version of the show.

Background Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet tells of young lovers frus­ trated and driven to their deaths by a meaningless feud between their families, the Montagues and the Capulets of Verona. West Side Story transplants this plot to a turf war between teenage gangs on the West Side of Manhattan. In Shakespeare, the feud is a legacy from the older generation, but in West Side Story the bitter enmity is the kids’ own, though it has ethnic overtones. The Jets are whites, the Sharks Puerto Ricans.

Bernardo, leader of the Sharks, is livid when he learns that his sister Maria is in love with Jet Tony. As in Shakespeare, one Jet (Capulet) and one Shark (Montague) die tragically on stage, in a street fight. Tony is shot in revenge, and Maria is left distraught.

Some of the transpositions into the modern world are ingenious. Shake­ speare’s famous soliloquy “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” shows the lovestruck Juliet fondly repeating her lover’s name; Tony cries “Maria” over and over again in his famous song of that title. (An aria in an opera or a song in a musical is, in fact, often equivalent to a soliloquy in a play.) And

The great thing about conducting is that you don't smoke and you breathe in great gobs of oxygen."

Chain-smoker Leonard Bernstein

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 413

whereas Shakespeare’s young lovers fall in love at a Capulet masked ball, which Romeo has crashed, Bernstein’s are smitten at a gym dance organized by a clueless teacher who hopes to make peace between the gangs.

Cha-cha This is the music danced to by the Puerto Rican girls —the Sharks’ girlfriends — at the gym where Tony and Maria first meet. The cha-cha, a Cuban dance, was new to the United States when West Side Story was written.

The charm of the fragile cha-cha melody owes a good deal to Bernstein’s skillful accompaniment. Melody and accompaniment seem nervously aware of each other, but they keep slipping out of sync:

Melody I——? ■ ■ .

Accompaniment

[i cmr’fcj cj’? CT’? mir’fcj txirp 27

Meeting Scene Tony and Maria catch sight of one another. The cha-cha may be continuing, but they don’t hear it, so neither do we. Or at most they hear fragments of the cha-cha slowed down and made unexpectedly tender, as back­

ground for their voice-over. And when Tony gets to sing the big romantic number, “Maria,” the music

is yet another transformation of the cha-cha melody, now sounding rich and enthusiastic. Thematic transformation technique, which Bernstein knew from Wagner and other Romantic composers, allowed him to show Tony’s love emerging and blossoming out of that one heart-stopping moment in the gym.

Ma-ri-a! _ I’ve justiripta

girl named Ma-ri-a| —

“Cool” A little later in the action, the Jet leader. Riff, tries to persuade his troops to stay calm in the face of Shark provocations. The main production28

414 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

number of Act I, it consists of an introduction, again with voice-over; a short song by Riff; a dazzling dance; and then Riff’s song again.

The song’s introduction uses the motive of the cha-cha melody — the same motive that turns into “Maria”—in a highly charged, syncopated form;

Boy, boy, crazy boy, Get cool, boy! Got a rocket in your pocket. Keep coolly cool, boy! Don't get hot 'cause, man, you got Some high times ahead. Take it slow, and, Daddy-o, You can live it up and die in bed!

Boy, boy crazy boy, _ Get cool, boy! _ Got a rocket in your pocket Keep coolly cool,_boy!

After the introduction. Riff sings two stanzas of his song, in 1950s “hip” street language. There is a steady jazz percussion accompaniment.

The dance that follows, subtitled “Fugue,” is accompanied throughout by the soft jazz drum beat. First played by muted trumpet, the fugue subject con­ sists of four slow notes, with an ominous snap at the end of the last of them. Soon another theme — the fugue countersubject (see page 145) — comes in, played by flute and vibraphone, featured instruments of 1950s “cool jazz.” The two themes combine in counterpoint, along with fragments of the intro­ duction, getting louder and more intricate as the dance proceeds. Bernstein must have thought that fugue, about the most controlled of musical forms, would depict perfectly the Jets’ effort to stay cool.

But things appear to get out of hand toward the end of the dance. The music stomps angrily and breaks into electrifying improvised drum solos. The Jets yell various words taken from the song, and the song’s melody returns, or­ chestrated in the exuberant, brash style of a big swing band. While the brasses blare away on the tune, breaks (see page 396) are played by the reeds at the end of each line.

To conclude, the Jets sing parts of “Cool” quietly, prior to its atmospheric conclusion. The vibraphone recollects the fugue countersubject.

))) listtn i BERNSTEIN

“Cool” 0:14 Riff; “Cool” 1:12 Fugue begins 2:40 Fugue breaks

down 3:10 Band version of

“Cool” 3:39 Jets: “Cool” 4:08 Countersubject

MUTED BRASS

Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), who wrote the lyrics for West Side Story, was himself an aspiring composer. Fie has gone on to write words and music for a string of successful musicals with an intellectual bent: A Little Night Music (1972), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Into the Woods (1987). Sweeney Todd in particular pushed at the border between musical and opera, as Gershwin had done forty years earlier in Porgy and Bess.

Meanwhile the musical in the 1960s began to acknowledge the rock revolution: Hair (Galt MacDermott, 1967) has been described as a “plotless American tribal love-rock musical.” It was as much celebrated in its time for its onstage nudity as for any noteworthy rock music. In spite of its recent revival and such follow-ups as Rent (Jonathan Larson, 1997), true rock mu­ sicals have never ruled Broadway. Instead it has in recent years been home to anodyne non-American musicals, especially by the English composer Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber: Cats (1981), The Phantom of the Opera (1986), and others.

In the 1990s, however, the musical in an old-fashioned guise was revitalized from an unexpected quarter. In a series of Disney full-length animated films, including Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and The Lion King, the musical was transplanted from stage to film. Of course musicals had been filmed before —think of The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, or The Music Man.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 415

But these Disney musicals were created expressly to he animated. In a predictable twist, one of them. The Lion King, made its way back to live action as a Broad­ way hit.

Today the tradition of the musical thrives in many forms. Old shows are revived and new ones premiered to sellout audiences. Broadway can go so far as to erase the distinction between vernacular and cultivated traditions, as in the 2003 production in full of Puccini’s opera La Boheme, which had provided the inspiration five years earlier for Rent. Meanwhile you might know the musical best from the annual student revivals of Broadway hits of the past in thou­ sands of high schools and summer camps across the country.

5 Rock: The First Fifty Years Throughout the Jazz Age in the first half of the twentieth century, another, related type of vernacular music poured forth from American composers: popular songs. We have seen the beginnings of this tradition in the nineteenth century in the works of Stephen Foster (see page 394), and we have also discussed one of the best popular songwriters of the 1920s and 1930s, George Gershwin (page 409).

One thing that often happened to the best-known songs — “standards” when they became popular enough to be hummed by everyone “in the know” —was that they served as a platform for jazz improvisors. To become a standard, how­ ever, such songs needed to catch on with the public through versions by the best­ loved singers of the day. Vocalists like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra sang the sentimental, jazzy tunes to dance-hall audiences, to the ever-growing radio audience, in the movies, and — most important by the end of the 1940s — on records.

After World War II, the popularity of such songs began to be rivaled by another set of styles, less tame, louder, and with a driving beat that made the subtleties of jazz syncopation plainer and cruder — all in all, more brash and youthful. By the middle of the 1950s the new style took a name that captured this compelling rhythm: rock’n’roll. (Later, in the 1960s, the name of choice was shortened to rock.) Teenagers went wild. Their parents, reacting much as parents had thirty years earlier in the face of jazz, bemoaned the demise of civil culture and decent society.

Nevertheless, rock endured and evolved — indeed, it positively burgeoned. Its explosive development from 1955 to 1970 and its reinvention in the following decades have put rock on a historical par with jazz. If jazz can claim to be Amer­ ica’s most distinctive contribution to world art from the first half of the twentieth century, rock can make similar claims for the last fifty years. Today the develop­ ment of global pop, discussed in Global Perspectives 7 (page 422), depends on various styles of American-derived rock more than on any other musical idiom.

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The origins and subsequent history of rock and related popular styles conform to a pattern in American vernacular music we have seen as early as the min­ strel show and then in 1930s swing: the mixing of African American and white American styles. Sometimes in rock history this mix was a relatively balanced meeting of differing styles; at other times it looks more like the appropriation of African American idioms for commercial gain by white musicians. In either case it shows that the history of pop music, like so many other American his­ tories, unfolded against the backdrop of white/black race relations.

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With his sultry voice and sexual stage presence, Elvis Presley had a gripping effect

The very earliest rock’n’roll shows this pattern, emerging after World War II on audiences of the 1950s. from the blending of hillbilly or country music with rhythm and blues. Country music was a white rural style derived from southern and southwestern folk song and emphasizing acoustic guitar, fiddle, and voice. Rhythm and blues was a black urban updating of earlier blues, marked by more pronounced, driving rhythms and electric guitar accompaniment. Together they created the first rock’n’roll style, rockabilly.

The first superstar of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley, continued the trend. His amazing string of hits in the late 1950s (“Heartbreak Hotel,” “Love Me Tender,” and many others) combined a lyrical style derived from white popu­ lar singers with the strong beat and passionate, throaty vocal delivery of rock­ abilly. Many of these hits (for example, “Hound Dog”) were Elvis’s versions of songs originally recorded by black artists — “covers,” as we now call them.

Millions in white America loved Elvis’s music while millions more found it threatening. Across the late 1950s a string of both white (Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly) and black musicians (Eats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry) followed him up the charts — and soon it was “Rock around the Clock,” as Bill Haley had declared in his 1955 hit. Radio stations and record companies alike realized there was a lasting market for the new sound.

So did Elvis’s manager. Colonel Tom Parker, who shrewdly calculated the sales potential of Elvis’s crossover style and advanced his stardom by securing him TV appearances and signing him to movie contracts. Parker made Elvis the first great example of manipulative rock marketing. He would not be the last.

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 417

The 1960s: Rock Comes of Age The blending of black and white styles that resulted in early rock’n’roll lasted into the 1960s and has reappeared in various forms down to this day. At the same time, the early and mid 1960s witnessed the emergence of new styles, many of them clearly black or white in their origin and target audience. There was an explosion of new sounds, distinct from one another and gaining the allegiance of different groups of fans.

Motown, Soul, and Funk As the civil rights movement of the 1950s evolved into the Black Power move­ ment of the late 1960s, a succession of black styles asserted their independence from white rock. These grew out of several sources: the remnants of black rhythm and blues in the late 1950s, most notably represented by singer-pianist Ray Charles, urban doo-wop groups that spawned such hit-makers as the Drifters (“Under the Boardwalk”), and “girl groups” such as the Shirelles (“Will

You Love Me Tomorrow?”). The first in this line was the Motown style, created by the part-time song­

writer and record producer Berry Gordy Jr. of Detroit—“Motorcity” or “Motown.” Gordy was the most important black entrepreneur in early rock history. The groups he sponsored, among them the Supremes (“Where Did Our Love Go?”) and the Temptations (“My Girl”), evolved polished, lyrical styles and perform­ ances featuring dance steps and sequins.

A more visceral style that emerged around the same time was soul. Soul derived especially from southern gospel singing combined with the rhythm and blues of Ray Charles. Its leading lights were the powerful Aretha Franklin (“Respect”) and James Brown, self-styled as “the hardest working man in show business” —and certainly one of the hardest singing (“I Got You (I Feel Good)”). Its most haunting vocal presence was Otis Redding, whose only number-one hit, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” is doubly haunting since it was recorded just days before he died in a 1967 plane crash.

By the end of the 1960s, soul was evolving into funk, a style in which the large bands with wind instruments typical of soul gave way to a sparer, hip sound (fuzztone bass guitar ostinatos, syncopated guitar scratching). One of the early groups pointing in this direction was the Bay Area-based Sly and the Family Stone (“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)”). A decade later funk, as performed by George Clinton and his band Funkadelic, was the style early DJs sampled to accompany the first rappers.

The British Invasion On February 7,1964, the Beatles landed in New York for their first American tour. The resulting Beatlemania changed the face of rock’n’roll, and m a certain sense it has never ended. Almost forty years after they broke up, the Beatles remain one of the highest-grossing entertainment institutions in the world.

Dozens of other British rock bands followed in the wake of the Beatles arrival, some good, some not. The best of them, cast from the first as a kind of evil-twin mirroring of the Beatles, was the Rolling Stones. What British groups had in common at the start was their emulation of American rhythm and blues and the styles of black American rockers like Chuck Berry and Little Richard. One of the most influential of these British rockers, Eric Clapton, has ranged widely in the early history of the blues for his inspiration.

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The difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones was not merely the good/bad contrast of their carefully groomed market images. It was musical as well. The Stones specialized in a blues-oriented, hard-rocking style led by Mick Jagger’s manic vocal presence heard in such hits as “Satisfaction,” and “Honky Tonk Woman.” The Beatles, in contrast, seemed to blossom in all musical directions, reflecting the differing musical interests of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison — differences that would tear the group apart by 1970. From covers of Chuck Berry (“Roll Over, Beethoven”) and sneakily insightful pop/rock numbers (“She Loves You,” “Help!”), they moved on to countless other approaches: lyrical ballads (“Yesterday,” “Blackbird”), hymnlike anthems (“Hey Jude,” “Let It Be”), visionary and psychedelic rock (“A Day in the Life,” “Strawberry Fields For­ ever”), and irresistible pop songs harkening back to the 1930s (“When Fm Sixty-Four,” “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”—surely the sweetest tune imagina­ ble about a serial killer). And they easily returned, led by Lennon, to straight­ ahead, blues-derived rock (“Revolution” — listen to it in the faster of the two marketed versions).

January 1969; The Beatles in their final concert, an im­ promptu affair soon broken up hy the police, on the roof of the Apple Records build­ ing in London. From left: Ringo, Paul, John, and George.

American Counteroffensives

The irony of the British groups’ interest in American rhythm and blues is that their massive popularity chased dozens of American groups, especially black ones, off the charts and out of business. About the only American music that swam well during the highest tide of the British invasion was the surfing sound

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 419

out of southern California, led by the Beach Boys (“I Get Around,” “Good Vibrations”).

Meanwhile another movement looking back to the hill­ billy side of rock’s ancestry was gaining steam. Folk rock was led by Bob Dylan, whose evocative, often socially con­ scious lyrics (“Blowin’ in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’”) rivaled his music in importance. Dylan’s re­ suscitation of white country and folk styles, building on “folkies” such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, had long- lasting consequences.

The most important of these was creating a place, at the edge of the rock tradition, for the singer-songwriter using acoustic accompaniment. Dylan and the folkies inspired musicians as different as Paul Simon, originally part of the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel; the straight-ahead rocker Bruce Springsteen; and the unpredictable, versatile Elvis Costello. Women musicians in particular have found the singer-songwriter niche congenial. Their line extends from Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell in the 1960s down to Tori Amos and k.d. lang today. (For a picture of Mitchell, see page 28.)

In the late 1960s a broad, mainly white, stratum of American youth, espousing free love, free drugs, and ever- louder opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, embraced new styles. From San Francisco, a center of this counterculture, came acid rock, named after LSD or “acid.” In the hands of groups like the Grateful Dead, the style joined long, jazzlike improvisations on electric guitar to hallucinatory images in the words; the Dead was the first great “jam band.”

Other guitar virtuosos embraced the new, improvisational style and linked it back to rhythm and blues guitar playing. The most famous of them were Jimi Hendrix, a rare black musician in the midst of psychedelic acid rock (“Purple Haze”), and the Latin-influenced Carlos Santana (“Black Magic Woman”). This powerful new style of guitar playing would infect groups on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the Who (creators of the rock opera Tommy), Cream (led by Clapton; “Sunshine of Your Love”), and Led Zeppelin (“Whole Lotta Love”). The guitar work of such groups formed the roots of heavy metal.

Like many singer-songwriters. Tori Amos has adopted a confessional style in her lyrics; her personal revela­ tions have captivated audiences as much as her passionate stage presence and strong piano playing.

After the 1960s By 1970, many of the trends that evolved over the following decades were in place. Self-conscious art rock (for example. Pink Floyd’s album Dark Side of the Moon), singer-songwriter rock, heavy metal, and funk can all be seen, retro­ spectively, as outgrowths of music at the end of the 1960s.

The decade of the 1970s was perhaps most influential, however, in its con­ solidation of the global business of rock. Tendencies underway in the 1960s came to exert ever greater control over the music people heard: high-tech mass-marketing, play-listed, repetitive radio stations, and aggressive promotion of “superstars” (the word itself came into common usage at this time, along­ side “supertanker” and “superpower”). In 1981 a powerful new outlet emerged to promote a small and carefully selected sample of rock music: MTV began broadcasting nonstop on cable.

420 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Uiam In the wake of the 1970s it is wise to rememher that even the music that

seems to rage loudest “against the machine” is usually brought to you by a multinational communications conglomerate.

Trends since 1980: Punk, Rap, and Post-Rock

Despite — or perhaps because of—this commercialization, rock has survived. Indeed the last thirty years or so have brought something of a rejuvenation. Three trends can be pointed to:

7 The youthful disaffection that set in by the end of the 1960s, as the ideal­ istic counterculture began to sense its impotence, hardened in the next decade. Its most influential expression was the nihilistic alienation of punk rock. In New York City and Britain, groups like the Patti Smith Group (“Gloria”), the Ramones (“Blitzkrieg Bop”), and the Sex Pistols (“Anarchy in the UK”) re­ acted against the commercial flashiness of much rock with what we might call an anti-aesthetic: All expression was possible, including no expression. All mu­ sical expertise was acceptable, including none. (Some of the punks were fully aware that in this move they were following the lead of arch-modernists like John Gage; see page 380.)

The punk approach gave strong impetus to a kind of populist movement in rock, encouraging the formation of countless “garage bands” and today’s indie rock, distributed on small, independent labels. Some punk singers also pioneered an alienated, flat vocal delivery that contrasts both with the impas­ sioned singing of earlier rock and with the streetwise cool of rap. In these fea­ tures punk looked forward to the unpolished, moving, but somehow distant style oi grunge rock, led by Kurt Cobain (until his death in 1994) and his band Nirvana (“Lithium,” “Smells Like Teen Spirit”).

7 First emerging about the same time as punk, hip-hop or rap has compiled a thirty-year history as a primary black rhetorical and musical mode. Early on, its influence was transmitted, with stunning postmodern quickness, around the

The Jimi Hendrix Experi­ ence, on the cover of their first album, dressed in their Carnaby Street best.

Kurt Cobain

CHAPTER 23 Music in America: Jazz and Beyond 421

globe. Rap is now a strong undercurrent sweeping through world pop-music traditions. Its influence is heard in the vocal delivery of countless rock groups.

The early 1990s marked rap’s moment of highest notoriety in the American mass media. One strain of rap —the violent, misogynist variety known as gangsta rap — figured centrally in the public debate, which was marked not only by jus­ tifiable distaste at the vision of these rappers but also by unmistakable racist undertones. However, the debate tended to miss two important points: First, while rap originated as a pointed expression of black urban concerns, it was marketed success­ fully to affluent whites, especially suburban teens. Second, the clamor against gangsta rap ignored the wider expressive terrains that rap as a whole had traveled. Already in 1980 rap was broad enough to embrace the hip-hop dance numbers of the Sugarhill Gang (“Rapper’s Delight”) and the trenchant social commentary of Grandmaster Flash (“The Message”). By the 1990s, rap could range from the black empowerment messages of Public Enemy (“Don’t Believe the Hype”) through sensuous love lyrics and tongue-twisting word games to Queen Latifah’s assertions of women’s dignity and strength (“Latifah’s Had It Up 2 Here”). And the 2000s would bring Eminem, the first white superstar of rap.

7 Around 1990 a new, experimental rock move- , , , . r u / niuuiiu , ^ . 1 1 L j Missy Elhott, leading hip-hop artist of the new century ment began to take shape; soon it was dubbed post-rock. Early post-rock groups (for example, Slint: “Good Morning Captain”) emerged from the indie rock movement. They typically employed rock instrumentation and technology in a style that fea­ tures hypnotically repeated gestures (especially bass ostinatos), juxtaposition of contrasting plateaus of sound, slow transitions and buildups, free improvi­ sation, and emphasis of instruments rather than voice. (When a voice is pres­ ent, it often doesn’t so much sing as recite fragments of poetry in front of the instrumental backdrop.) This thumbnail sketch alone is enough to reveal post­ rock’s relation to two other musical movements we have encountered: minimal­ ism (page 381) and avant-garde jazz (page 407).

And just as jazz and classical music purists questioned those styles, some listen to post-rock and wonder, “But is it rock’n’roll?” The question grows more pressing still with post-rock groups that feature acoustic rather than elec­ trified instruments and even avoid the foremost trait of rock: a strong beat (for instance Godspeed You Black Emperor!; “Storm”).

Questions of style, it seems to us, are not a matter of pre-set categories but of fluid affiliations, changing always as new music develops. Rock will accom­ modate post-rock, just as jazz accommodated fusion, just as classical concert music accepted minimalism. But it will be transformed in the process. In fact, the transformation is already well under way. One of the most widely noticed rock bands of the late 1990s, Britain’s Radiohead, began around 2000 to expand its earlier, song-oriented style with traits of post-rock (“Pyramid Song”).

422 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

Global Perspectives I 7

Global Music

We havf seen in Global Perspectives 2 (page 93) that European efforts to colonize foreign lands never resulted in the simple substitution of European cultures for native ones, but rather in new, complex mixed cultuyes. Such is the way of all meetings of dis­ tinct culturtp and distinct musics. An Andean chorus singing Catholic Church polyphony to Quechua words and accompanying itself on Inca flutes and drums is the perfect e^cample of such mixture.

But a fujiny thing happened to mixed musical cul­ tures on thgir way through the twentieth century: recorded sopnd. Around the globe, the impact on music of technologies that store and play back sound has been nothing short of revolutionary. Combined with radio apd TV broadcasts, and with the modern ease of travel pnd commerce, it has given musicians and listeners fropj all parts of the world access to a much wider variety of music than ever before. Nothing in the whole history of culture, probably, has ever trav­ eled more vyfdely and easily than certain kinds of music do tod^y.

Complexities of Globalism

Two opposing tendencies have arisen from this situa­ tion. The first works toward the worldwide homogeni­ zation of musics. Huge stretches of the sonic landscape are now inhabited by styles that are similar in certain basic features: electrified instruments, especially guitars; strong percussive presence; extensive syncopation; and relatively brief song-form presentation.

These features spread out from the American and especially African American pop-music revolution that occurred in the decades after World War II. Since the 1960s the dispersion of styles such as rhythm and blues, rock, soul, and rap has been powerful. Musical currents have, to be sure, flowed in both directions. Reggae, to take one example, was formed in the 1960s from a merger of native Jamaican styles with Amer­ ican rhythm and blues and soul, but by the late 1970s it had crossed back over to exert a great influence on American rock itself. The global dispersion has been enabled by a recording industry that has grown

A choir—not for isica- thamiya, given the many women participating— rehearses in South Africa. The beauty of the singers’ costumes contrasts with the stark landscape of Soweto Township behind them.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES 7 Global Music 423

increasingly rich, increasingly multinational, and increasingly influential in determining our musical tastes. It is enough to make one observer of these develop­ ments speak—with some worry — of a “universal pop aesthetic.”

There is another tendency, however, opposing this move toward sameness, a move to localize music mak­ ing. People never simply take on foreign things with­ out in some way making them their own. Even as musicians around the world have felt the influence of American pop styles, they have combined these styles in their local musics to forge new, distinct styles. (Reg­ gae is one example of this process.)

Pop music is now, in some general way, recogniz­ able worldwide. We know it when we hear it, and we easily distinguish it from traditional folk musics like Andean panpipe groups or Appalachian fiddling and traditional elite musics like Japanese gagaku or Euro­ pean classical music. Nevertheless, what we recognize as pop music comes in an immense variety of distinct idioms derived from specific interactions of global and local tendencies.

South African Choral Song: Isicathamiya A South African musical tradition with a difficult name, isicathamiya (ees- ee-zaht-ah-mee-ah), pro­

vides an example reaching hack many decades of this diversity-within-sameness. It has become familiar to lis­ teners worldwide through the recordings of the singing group Ladysmith Black Mambazo. Isicathamiya is an all-male, a cappella song style that arose among an im­ poverished class of black, mostly Zulu-speaking mi­ grant laborers. A chief diversion in the laborers’ camps were Saturday-night contests among singing groups, and for the musical styles the performers looked back to earlier, complex international roots.

Standing behind isicathamiya are traditions of choral polyphony native to the Zulus and other groups of the region. In the nineteenth century, these tradi­ tions seem to have merged readily with the four-part harmony of Christian hymn-singing brought to the area by European and American missionaries. Then another ingredient was added to the mix: American vaudeville or minstrel shows, with their syncopated, ragtime songs (see page 395 and the picture on page 411). An enormously influential African American minstrel—not a white minstrel in blackface — named Orpheus McAdoo toured South Africa extensively in the 1890s, to the great acclaim of black audiences.

By the 1930s, these musical influences were put together by the first recording stars of the local Zulu singing scene, Solomon Linda and the Evening Birds. Their greatest hit, “Mbube” or “Lion,” known to most of us today as “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was origi­ nally recorded around 1939. Then it was re-recorded by pop singers and became a top-40 hit in the 1960s. Most recently it was featured in Disney’s film and mu­ sical The Lion King.

424 UNIT V The Twentieth Century and Beyond

“Anoku Gonda”

Solomon Linda’s song “Anoku Gonda” (“You Must Understand This”), from the same period as “Mbube,” combines two distinct styles that are still heard today in isicathamiya. The first is a richly harmonized, ho- mophonic style that recites the text freely and shows no clear or consistent sense of meter — choral decla­ mation, we can call it. We hear two phrases of choral declamation, each stated and repeated in the pattern a a b b a a. Notable here, and frequent in isicathamiya, is the slide in all voices from high to lower pitches.

Then, after about a minute, the music takes on a clear meter. This is the second style common in isicathamiya. It is still organized in repeating phrases, but now the texture departs from the simple homo­ phony of the recitational opening section. It uses call-and- response techniques (see page 395), pitting Linda against the rest of the group at first; later the basses in the chorus sing against the group as a whole. The call-and-response phrases alternate with a falling cadential phrase sung by the whole chorus.

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“Anoku Gonda”

0:00 Unmetered choral declamation

0:00 a

0:13 a

0:25 b

0:30 b

0:35 a

0:47 a

0:57 Metrical call and response:

Solomon Linda against the full chorus

1:27 Metrical call and response:

Basses against the full chorus

6 Conclusion Just a few words in conclusion: not so much as a conclusion to this chapter, but rather to our total effort in this book as a whole.

We might recall what was said near the end of the introductory unit, on page 53. Our basic goal has been to learn how to listen better, in order to un­ derstand and appreciate music — music of the European art tradition, mostly, but also other musics, other musical traditions. Some musical terminology has been introduced that should help clarify listening, and a somewhat rapid trip has been conducted through the history of Western music from Hildegard of Bingen to John Adams, by way of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, and Ellington. There have been side trips beyond Europe, offering us perspectives on music around the globe. The most important thing we’ve done, by far, is listen: listen with some care to numerous individual pieces of music. Not all, but many of them are famous works that listeners have found rewarding over a period, in most cases, of many generations.

Rewarding is a pale, neutral term that will cover beautiful, fascinating, profound, exciting, comforting, and any other adjective that may correspond to something deep in your personal experience. Feelings of this kind about music tend to last a long time. If you have come to appreciate and love some of the music this book has introduced you to, it may be forever. Consider your­ self ahead.

[Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence and whereto."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

bedfordstmartins.com/listen ► Quizzes and Flashcards

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