It is at ground level, in the public spaces, that van der Rohe’s sense of architectural order remains unqualified and supreme, and here again his lesson is a salutary one. The fact that 375 is set back from Park Avenue some ninety feet not merely makes it visible but makes it approachable, and the open plaza in front, plus the arbored green rectangles at the sides, gives the same satisfaction that the building itself does. This plaza is open without being formidable; the absence of any kind of ornament, except the tall bronze flagpole, seventy-five feet high, slightly to the right of the main entrance, and the fountains and rectangular, step-rimmed pools of water on either side, only emphasizes the quality of the space itself. In spite of the towering shaft, the plaza, thanks partly to the treatment of the ground floor, maintains the human scale, and its emptiness is a part of its serenity, while the impending tower itself disappears from the observer’s field of vision. It needs no ornamental fixtures other than those it has in order to increase this human quality; all it needs—and it already has these, both by day and by night—is people capable of enjoying the primal aesthetic pleasures: ordered space, air, the spray of the fountains on one’s face, and sunlight or the regal mixture of black and gold that greets one from the lighted building at night. Small plazas like this, if repeated often enough about the city, would accomplish more for recreation than thousands of distant wild acres hardly worth the effort of a crawling Sunday journey.
This post-Whistler nocturne, by public consensus, is perhaps the highest aesthetic achievement of the building, more than justifying its daytime reserve by its unexpected nighttime splendor. The nocturnal brilliance is enhanced by the amber window glass, which takes the curse of coldness off the fluorescent lights, and it gives one a hint of what such integral illumination, divorced from advertising, might do to enliven the townscape at night.
Unfortunately, the least error in such a simple design hurts like a splinter under one’s fingernail, and there are two or three lapses that call for correction. One is a purely aesthetic error: the use of weeping beeches for ornamental greenery at either side of the building—beeches whose writhing forms (already, such is the New York climate, apparently in the agonies of death) seem closer to the spirit of Salvador Dalí than to that of Mies van der Rohe. This is fashionable claptrap, which defiles the whole spirit of the design. Another error is a practical one. In creating this plaza, the architects beckoned the passerby to loaf and invite his soul, but they absurdly failed to provide any benches, which they no doubt thought might mar its spatial purity. Though the pools and the ivy-covered rectangular beds are edged by long marble walls, parallel to the side streets, the designers seemingly never imagined that they were thus providing a natural seat for those who would enjoy the play of water and air and green branches; as a result, one can find a seat only by stepping hazardously along the narrow stone rim of the pool. Grievous as this oversight is, it could be overcome merely by lowering the water in the pools until the next level in the step-rimmed basin emerges. This brings me to the final error, a strangely gross defect in a design as refined and costly as this one: the materials and execution of the pool and its fountains. The pools, composed of large, square granite slabs, are shallow, and it is obvious that some of the blocks have been defectively laid, for there are smudges of cement filling the cracks; even worse, the pipes that feed the jets are just so much raw plumbing. The fact that the workmanship, here so exposed, is not as impeccable as in the rest of the building, and that the pipes themselves are not concealed, seems almost beyond explanation. Where close contemplation demands perfect craftsmanship, such a failure becomes an aesthetic enormity.
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In appraising this design, I have confined myself to its manifest aesthetic qualities. I have not considered the practical and functional demands that must be integrated in any complete work of architecture, nor have I asked at what cost or sacrifice these aesthetic qualities were achieved. Like so much architecture of today, 375 falls into the category of the Pyramid—a building that exhausts every resource of art and engineering to create an imposing visible effect out of all proportion to its human significance. This error is not the architects’; it characterizes our whole civilization, which now sacrifices on the altar of the bureaucratic functions and engineering services what it once gave, in awe and exaltation, only to divinities. What Mies van der Rohe has demonstrated in this building is how to do, with superb aesthetic aplomb and with all but unerring taste, what his colleagues do coarsely and clumsily, in a spirit of tepid compromise with forces to which they have surrendered all too complaisantly in advance. For once, an outstanding human personality got the better of a system that places a premium upon self-effacing conformity and impersonality. And the result is a building that will not be cheapened by imitation—as Lever House was so quickly, if unsubtly, caricatured by the building directly north of it on Fifty-fourth Street. Nevertheless, the thirty-eight-story Seagram tower, for all its prodigal disinclination to occupy every square inch of its site, has a few urban drawbacks. Its municipally sanctioned congestion of occupancy, its lack of visual outlook for all but the occupants of outside offices, its wasteful disproportion of elevator shafts to usable floor space, and its inevitable over-mechanization make it not a desirable model for the city of the future. Yet its positive qualities demonstrate what such a city might be, once whole blocks and quarters, themselves limited in height, were characterized by occasional towers that have the same cavalier attitude toward quick returns and high profits from the investment. Taken with all its inherent limitations, this seems to me the best skyscraper New York has seen since Hood’s Daily News Building; in classic execution it towers above the doubled height of the Empire State Building, while its nearest later rival, Lever House, more package than Pyramid, looks curiously transitory and ephemeral when one turns from one to the other. Sombre, unsmiling, yet not grim, 375 is a muted masterpiece—but a masterpiece.
WHITNEY BALLIETT
JUNE 15, 1957 (ON SONNY ROLLINS AND THELONIOUS MONK)
OSSIBLY THE MOST incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker is a twenty-seven-year-old tenor saxophonist named Sonny Rollins, whose bossy, demanding style has made him the unofficial leader of a new and burgeoning school of modern jazz known as hard bop. Most of the members of the movement, which includes Horace Silver, Sonny Stitt, and Art Blakey, came to the front during the height of bebop, and as a result they largely formed their styles on Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Lester Young, and Bud Powell. At the same time, they absorbed much of the nervous hotness of this music, which—though often regarded as an unduly complex type of jazz, what with its extended melodic lines, broadened chord structures, and jerky, rhythmic base—in many ways was a direct return to the pushing, uncomplicated vigor of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five. Rollins, who continues to use standard bop frameworks and instrumentation, has, however, developed a solo style that makes bop sound as placid as Handel’s Water Music. At first, there is something almost repellent about his playing, for his bleak, ugly tone—reminiscent, at times, of the sad sounds wrestled by beginners out of the saxophone—is rarely qualified by the gracefulness of a vibrato or by the use of dynamics. He seems, in fact, to blat out his notes as if they were epithets, and his solos often resemble endless harangues. After a time, though, it becomes clear that most of this staccato braying is a camouflage for a tumultuous and brilliant musical imagination and a rhythmic sense that probably equals Parker’s.
Rollins is in his fearful prime in a new recording, Saxophone Colossus (Prestige LP-7079), made in company with Tommy Flanagan, piano; Doug Watkins, bass; and Max Roach, drums. Of the five numbers on the record—three are by Rollins—the best are “Moritat,” from The Threepenny Opera, which he turns into a surprising combination of the brusque and the tender, and Rollins’ “Blue Seven,” a long, rolling medium-tempo blues that features, in addition to his brooding variations, a remarkable solo by Roach, in which he ticks off on every part of his equipment a compelling, metron
omic series of beats, the difficult tempo notwithstanding. Flanagan is a delicate, pearly-sounding pianist and Watkins is a firm new bassist. Both are impeccable throughout, and even manage to be more than foils for Rollins’ red-necked vigor.
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Thelonious Monk, the extraordinary and iconoclastic pianist and composer who was one of the founders of bop in the early forties, has made a recording, Brilliant Corners: Thelonious Monk (Riverside RLP-12-226), that is as provocative as any he has produced in recent years. In three of the five numbers he is joined by Ernie Henry (alto saxophone), Rollins, Oscar Pettiford (bass), and Roach, and in one by Clark Terry (trumpet), Rollins, Paul Chambers (bass), and Roach. The fifth, “I Surrender, Dear,” is an unaccompanied piano solo. The rest of the tunes, in all of which Monk had a hand, are, like his earlier ones, queer, moody, humorous compositions (dissonant, bumping ensembles, a variety of subtle rhythms, and an over-all needling piquancy), and they have a tortuous, concentrated power that produces a curious effect: the soloists, no matter how vigorous, seem secondary to their materials. As a result, although Rollins plays with much of his customary vibrancy, there is a subdued air about his work that fortunately balances the frenetic saxophone of Henry, who at his calmest (in an ingratiating blues called “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are”) plays in a wild, chanting fashion that is undeniably effective. Monk is superb in “I Surrender, Dear,” in which, free of a rhythm section, he produces a straggling army of flatted chords and off-notes that continually poke at and prick the melody. Chambers and Pettiford are satisfactory, but Roach occasionally becomes so energetic behind the soloists that he appears to be uncontrollably soloing rather than providing sympathetic support.
WINTHROP SARGEANT
MARCH 22, 1958 (ON GLENN GOULD AT CARNEGIE HALL)
WING TO THE enormous and conflicting traffic of events that confronts a New York concertgoer, I had not, up to one of the Philharmonic’s performances in Carnegie Hall last week, had an opportunity to witness the playing of the now rather celebrated young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. I had heard a number of his recordings, and while all of them had seemed to me to be the work of an artist of extraordinary gifts, they had scarcely prepared me for the visual spectacle Mr. Gould presents as he displays these gifts before an audience. The spectacle is, to say the least, somewhat eccentric compared with the formal platform manner of the average concert performer. To begin with, Mr. Gould is a lanky, slightly dishevelled, and intensely earnest-looking young man, who sits on a remarkably low stool at a piano that has been raised several inches on jacks, bringing the keyboard almost to the level of his chin. When he is at rest, he leans back, allowing his long arms to dangle listlessly to the floor. When he is not at rest, he gives the impression of a man subduing a piano by jujitsu. He staves it off with upraised feet, pummels it, feints with elaborate motions that seem designed to distract its attention, recoils from it as if it were a hot stove, beats time with one hand while playing with the other, and croons the music, inaudibly but very visibly, throughout the performance. When he rises to take his bows, he does so with a sort of awkward casualness, saluting the orchestra and shrugging with a “Shucks, fellas, ’taint nothin’ ” air, which seems to imply that the whole business has been an episode in a hoedown.
It would be easy to dismiss all this as deliberate exhibitionism, but after watching it with some amusement the other night, and listening to what emerged from the piano, I concluded that Mr. Gould’s manner is a perfectly sincere expression of his Gesamtpersönlichkeit. He is obviously an original, whom one must accept on his own terms, and I would be quite happy to see him stand on his head if he felt such a posture necessary to the projection of his musical ideas. For the fact is that none of his physical flamboyance enters into what one hears. On the contrary, his performance of Bach’s D Minor Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was a masterpiece of coherence, control, and fine musical taste. Mr. Gould is the possessor of a tremendous pianistic technique, and though it may be highly unconventional, it enables him to bring off all the feats of speed, power, delicacy, contrast, and nuance that one expects from virtuosos of the first rank. He also has a penetrating intelligence, evident in the clean, unambiguous quality of his phrasing; an engaging masculine robustness; and the kind of authority that indicates a profound knowledge of the art of music. These attributes, in a twenty-five-year-old, are impressive indeed, and I look forward with great interest to Mr. Gould’s future appearances.
When Mr. Gould had finished the Bach concerto, he embarked with equal fervor and dedication on Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, and almost, but not quite, convinced me that its arid mathematical formulas contain something identifiable as musical meaning. Certainly, if I remained unconvinced, it was through no fault of Mr. Gould’s, for he played the concerto with what, had it been music of a more rewarding sort, I should describe as real eloquence. Dimitri Mitropoulos, who was in charge of the orchestra, performed his role in this work with his customary energy and enthusiasm. I thought, however, that his performance as the accompanist of the Bach concerto was slapdash and coarse—an impression perhaps intensified by the fact that he used a huge, ponderous aggregation of instrumentalists, instead of reducing the ensemble to the small dimensions appropriate to this kind of music.
The rest of Mr. Mitropoulos’ program was also unusual and generally interesting. It began with a Prologue and Fugue by the Brazilian composer Camargo Guarnieri, which seemed to me merely fashionable in more or less the style of Aaron Copland, and ended with Samuel Barber’s Medea’s Meditation and Dance of Vengeance, a familiar and worthwhile work, which I have previously discussed. The most absorbing item of the evening was the somewhat belated New York première of Gustav Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony. This composition has been the subject of considerable controversy, several later musicians—among them Ernst Křenek—having had a hand in editing the original score, which was in a very fragmentary form when Mahler died. There has also been a lot of discussion about the symphony’s autobiographical implications, based on a number of exclamations and other marginal notes that Mahler appended to the manuscript. Mahler, it appears, knew when he wrote it that he was dying; the notes seem to indicate the tortured frame of mind with which he approached death, and for those who like to examine the mental processes of an extremely complex musical genius, the work is unquestionably a document of great psychological significance. Personally, however, I preferred to listen to the symphony simply as music. Considered from this point of view, it is indeed a fragmentary affair, consisting of one solid and fairly finished movement—the opening Andante—and another movement, very tentative and not entirely satisfying, which is obviously unfinished. To what extent the opening Andante has been tampered with by its editors I am not in a position to say, but, as it stands, it is as noble an episode as ever came from Mahler’s pen, and, like all Mahler’s music, it has a strong individuality that sets it apart from the music of any other composer. The agony with which Mahler viewed the subject of death is undoubtedly expressed in it, but Mahler did a good deal of gloomy thinking about death throughout his life, and I see very little in this composition that has not been touched on or prefigured in his earlier symphonies. At any rate, the Andante is a magnificent, tragic preamble by an artist who ranks, in my mind, as the last of the really great symphonists, and Mr. Mitropoulos and the Philharmonic performed a valuable service in giving it a hearing.
WHITNEY BALLIETT
JUNE 27, 1959 (ON COLEMAN HAWKINS)
MPROVISATION, THE VERY seat of jazz, is a remorseless, bullying art that demands of the performer no less than this: that, night in and night out, he spontaneously invent original music based upon certain given themes and confined within certain limitations, by putting in perfect balance—with the speed of light—emotion and intelligence, form and content, and tone and attack, all of which, to succeed, must both charge and entertain the spirit of the listener. Improvisation comes in various shapes and colors. There is the melodic embellishment of Louis Armstr
ong and Vic Dickenson; the similar but far more complex thematic improvisation of Lester Young; the improvisation upon chords, as practiced by Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker; and the rhythmic-thematic-chordal convolutions now being put forward by Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. There are, too, the collective improvisations, such as the New Orleans ensemble, a superbly intricate homemade device that, sadly, is all but defunct, and its contrapuntal descendants, which are thriving in the hands of John Lewis and Charlie Mingus. Great improvisation is a miraculous explosion that occurs once in a blue moon; bad improvisation, which is really not improvisation at all but a rerun or imitation of old ideas, happens all the time. There is no more precarious and dominating art. Indeed, there is evidence that the gifted jazz musicians who have either died or dried up in their twenties, thirties, or forties are primarily victims not of drugs and alcohol but of the insatiable furnace of improvisation. Thus, such consummate veteran improvisers as Armstrong, Dickenson, Hawkins, Buck Clayton, and Monk deserve considerable awe. In addition to being imaginative master craftsmen, they are remarkable endurance runners. Perhaps the hardiest of these unique beings is Hawkins, who, now fifty-four, continues to play with all the freshness, vitality, and authority that he demonstrated during the Harding administration as a member of Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds.
The 50s Page 69
