In the event, the concert became famous for one reason only. One of the composers Whiteman approached to compose something hybrid that straddled jazz and classical was George Gershwin, who, just before the final item (Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches), premièred a work he had composed in just five weeks, Rhapsody in Blue. By the end of its fourteen minutes, the world of music had changed for ever.
In one sense those fourteen minutes tell the story of the next fifty years. The upstart popular musicians, invited to bow at the altar of High Art, were at first dismissed by critics despite having delighted the audience. A typically snooty review of Rhapsody in Blue’s première appeared in the following morning’s New York Tribune: ‘How trite, feeble and conventional the tunes are; how sentimental and vapid the harmonic treatment… Weep over the lifelessness of the melody and harmony, so derivative, so stale, so inexpressive!’
But great music has a way of finding its voice whatever snobbery throws at it, and what happened next is that Gershwin’s first recording of Rhapsody in Blue, made three years later in 1927, sold a million copies within a year. It is now one of the standard pieces in every orchestra’s repertoire, an out-and-out modern classic. In the thirty-odd years between December 1893, when Czech patriot Dvořák’s New World symphony had its première at Carnegie Hall, conducted by an eminent Hungarian, and Paul Whiteman’s Experiment in Modern Music at the Aeolian Hall in February 1924, the status of home-grown music in the United States had changed beyond recognition, largely due to the country having become the crucible of vibrant new forms of popular music. Race issues still scarred civil society, certainly, but one problem that Americans were happy to live without was the blight that ravaged Europe in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s: militant nationalism. So many American composers of the early-twentieth century were immigrants or the children of immigrants whose (prior) national identities were wilfully abandoned in the rush to find an ‘American’ sound in their music.
It was quite another story over in Europe, where one gruesome incident in 1927 – the same year as Gershwin’s frontier-busting Rhapsody in Blue sold a million copies – provides a glaring demonstration of the widening gulf between the two continents. It concerns the remains of composer and cellist Luigi Boccherini, a contemporary of Mozart and Haydn who was born in the Italian city of Lucca but who settled in Spain as a young man, marrying (twice) and having six children there. He was buried with his family in Madrid, his descendants putting down roots in Spain that persisted into the twentieth century. Some of Boccherini’s most memorable – and utterly enchanting – chamber music is a collection called Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid (Musical Nights in the Streets of Madrid). Nonetheless, and sidestepping the details of Boccherini’s actual life, Mussolini decided in 1927 that the remains of an Italian-born composer of nearly two hundred years earlier should be dug up and brought back to Lucca. This gesture – forcing a national identity upon someone whose music was filled with the colour, rhythm and spirit of his adopted home – would have been ludicrous and ignorant in any age, but in the twentieth century, when music escaped from its boundaries with a vengeance, it was hollow, petty and meaningless. It may be a cliché but the melting pot of the United States proved, in its domination of twentieth-century music, that leaving behind nationalistic distinctions in search of a collective voice was by far the more fruitful way forward.
In the years between the First World War and the disinterring of Luigi Boccherini’s bones, music’s family had expanded prolifically. Even before the war, a third of all homes in Great Britain alone had a record player. In 1914, twenty-seven million records were sold; by 1921, that figure had reached a hundred million. A method of synchronising sound with film was unveiled in 1922, the year the BBC was founded, and in 1926 Warner Brothers released Don Juan, the first Hollywood film containing a musical score embedded on the film’s ‘soundtrack’.
Nor was music seen as a background supplement to films. In big cities, before musical sound could be integrated into the film itself, cinema audiences would be treated to the lavish sight and sound of a live orchestra playing a score composed specially for the action on screen. For many people this would have been their first experience of a live orchestra playing what was, in all but name, classical music. In smaller cinemas a pianist or organist would provide a similarly live accompaniment; Russian classical composer Dmitri Shostakovich supported himself in Leningrad in 1924–5 by doing just that. It is worth noting that the man who more than anyone launched Hollywood’s worldwide success, Charlie Chaplin, was also composer for his films, with and without sound; his first commercial venture after moving to the United States as a music hall performer was to set up a music publishing company. Chaplin’s first film with a synchronised music soundtrack was City Lights, released in 1931, for which he also composed five songs in addition to the score. Thereafter, as well as composing for all his subsequent films, Chaplin wrote and recorded retrospective scores for his earlier silent films, continuing to do so well into the 1970s.
In 1921, Eubie Blake’s Shuffle Along became the first musical comedy written by African-Americans and starring African-Americans to run successfully on Broadway. Its hit song, ‘I’m Just Wild about Harry’ (lyric by Noble Sissle), challenged a racial taboo of the time by featuring a romantic duet between two black characters. Blake, who was from Maryland, was the only surviving child of eight born to former slaves, and like Chaplin he had learnt his trade as a vaudeville performer. He made his name with ragtime but this style, as we saw in the previous chapter, was in the early 1920s being superseded all over America by jazz.
Indeed, the jazz stars of the 1920s – among them James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Bessie Smith, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington – were, alongside Hollywood’s biggest names, becoming the best-known celebrities in America. That they had virtually all come from lives of obscurity and poverty is in itself remarkable and a phenomenon rarely witnessed in Western music before the twentieth century. When such an incredible change in fortune had occurred in the past, it had typically taken composers and performers a lifetime to achieve a position of prestige, usually among a privileged cognoscenti, and even then their status was rarely recognised by the public at large. The boy Mozart was ‘famous’ as a child prodigy, to be sure, but famous in this context meant ‘attracting comment and wonderment for brief spells at various royal courts of Europe’. Ordinary working-class Europeans would not have known who Mozart was either during his life or for a long time after it.
The fame enjoyed by the first jazz celebrities, however, was of an unheard-of scale both in terms of the rapidity of their ascent and the millions of listeners who became intimately familiar with them and their music, thanks to radio, records and films. Duke Ellington, grandson of a former slave, began with his band a four-year residency at New York’s Hollywood Club in 1923. In the same year, Louis Armstrong, born into abject poverty in New Orleans and also the grandson of slaves, was playing cornet for King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in Chicago, making records, earning good money and living in his own apartment. There were precious few opportunities for young black men in the segregated America of the 1920s, yet through music these two men became icons. The historic transformation of music in the jazz age was enabling an equally historic, admittedly embryonic, social transformation. That it was a change on a grand scale is undeniable; historian Eric Hobsbawm, in The Jazz Scene (1959), estimated that on the eve of the Great Depression there were a staggering sixty thousand jazz bands containing two hundred thousand professional musicians in America.
Jazz celebrity though he was, Duke Ellington disliked his music being pigeonholed as ‘jazz’; he preferred simply to call it ‘American music’, and he experimented in many forms and genres. He had a point: from the very beginning, jazz as a style thwarted definition, so various were its manifestations in different places. The convergent tendency of twentieth-century music was manifest even in its most infant genre, articulated by
its most eloquent spokesperson: jazz was born defying categorisation, even as white critics in journals were trying their toxic best to exclude it from serious study (A New York Times editorial of 1924 dismissed is as ‘a return to the humming, hand-clapping, or tomtom beating of savages’.) It is hardly surprising that a genre that consciously eluded form, which chose improvisation over the printed page, which allowed maximum freedom and looseness in its harmony, its interpretation of melody and its rhythm, should have splintered into a hundred colourful shards on impact with the world.
In all fields of music, the do-as-you-please freedom of the roaring twenties gave way to more organised, ordered forms in the 1930s. It is tempting to link this move towards greater organisation and a curbing of carefree individuality to parallel developments in the political temperature of the times, with the rise of dictatorships – or, in a benevolent form, the New Deal programmes of state intervention, directed employment and the rise of trade union solidarity – as a response to the fear generated by the meltdown of the Great Depression. More likely, though, conformity of expression gathered momentum because the record-buying, radio-listening public liked it better, and bands reflected the change in fashion for entirely understandable commercial reasons. On top of the demands of radio, the jukebox was another factor in the slimming-down of rambling jazz sessions: by 1937 there were one hundred and fifty thousand jukeboxes in America, further stimulating the market for record buying. In jazz, the shift in emphasis meant bigger bands comprising more structured families of instruments playing well-honed, written-out arrangements, with occasional well-defined solos emerging from the texture.
Greater shape and clarity, of course, was what the fledgling record industry preferred to long-winded periods of virtuoso meandering. It wanted tracks that could be packaged and contained on one side of a ‘78’ shellac, ideas contained in catchy three- or four-minute bursts – as in Ellington’s 1928 hit, ‘Diga Diga Doo’ – a pragmatic consideration that continues to this day, despite the freedom from time constraints afforded by digital technology. The three-minute convention persists thanks in no small part to attention spans and radio playlist imperatives.
The prevailing style of the 1930s and ’40s, nurtured initially in the mob-run entertainment hub of the South, Kansas City, was both called ‘swing’ and had a swing to it, though nailing down a definition of ‘swing’ that all its practitioners would have agreed on has always been rather a minefield. Moreover, since swing is a technique that is ‘felt’ by the player in performance rather than written down and rehearsed methodically like most of music’s other rhythmic features, its application is deliberately non-standardised. It is in this respect not dissimilar to the nuance of accent when learning a language: it is relatively straightforward to learn from a book the vocabulary, idiom and grammar of a foreign language, but speaking it like a native is only possible by spending years immersed in the sound and interplay of the language as it is spoken every day.
There are two chief ingredients in swing. One of these is the syncopation we have already encountered in ragtime, whereby the melody – it is usually the melody, though inner parts of the music and even the steady bass line may be susceptible – trips ahead and falls behind the point where the beat is expected to fall. Syncopation was immediately apparent in (and essential to) ragtime style, where just one player provided both the regular pulse and the cheeky push and pull against it, the right hand being mischievous with the steadiness of the left. Ragtime’s syncopation was drawn from a relatively limited menu of possible variations, and could therefore also be written down and mastered, in time, by any competent pianist. As it was passed from ragtime to early ‘Dixieland’ jazz bands, though, syncopation became more sophisticated: now, instead of the right hand cheating the left, one instrumentalist was playing against another. The possible variations for errant beats multiplied rapidly and unpredictably. The push and pull of anticipating and delaying notes as manipulated by two, three or four improvising musicians, treating the bass and drums as their governing foundation, significantly complicated the layers of syncopation available, giving early jazz its bubbling energy and sense of fun. Indeed, as jazz reached out beyond its localised street gatherings and sleazy clubs, spreading across America and thence to Europe during the First World War, it seemed to listeners and musicians alike that it was a playfully anarchic genre; it had an appealing naughtiness that was provided almost entirely by rhythmic syncopation.
The second major component of swing was a lilting effect achieved by subtly shifting the subdivisions of the given four-in-a-bar beat. This effect was not unique to swing, though – it had by the end of the nineteenth century become ubiquitous in music hall, vaudeville and minstrel songs and, separately, in Latin American dance music – but let’s look back briefly at how the popular lilt developed into the ‘swing’ of swing music.
The nineteenth century had seen a rise in popularity of a lilting form of music known as the habanera in many Central and South American countries, particularly Cuba with its geographically concentrated, intertwined African, Creole and Hispanic communities. The habanera had been imported by Spain to various of its colonies but the Spanish had inherited it from the earlier French contredanse – and the French had in turn inherited it from an even earlier English country dance pattern. In fact, the habanera had found its way to Cuba not via the colonial Spanish – who lived very separate lives from the other classes on the island, where slavery was not abolished until 1895 – but rather via French-speaking Haitian refugees fleeing slave rebellions (and retribution from such rebellions) at the very end of the eighteenth century. A notated form of Cuban habanera, a song called ‘San Pascual Bailón’, survives from as early as 1803. Over in Europe, the prototype English country dance and its French contredanse spin-off, in duple time (two-step), fell from popularity in the nineteenth century and were replaced by the spectacularly successful triple-time (three-step) waltz from Austria, and to an extent the duple-time polka from Bohemia – which, incidentally, was something of a template for Scott Joplin’s piano rags. In the later nineteenth century, however, the habanera was reintroduced to Europe as an ‘exotic’ dance from Cuba, and it began to reappear in European music. The most celebrated example is the habanera from Bizet’s opera Carmen (1875), in which it forms the accompaniment of the song ‘L’amour est un oiseau rebelle’ (Love is a rebellious bird). Bizet’s habanera was itself an adaptation of a song, ‘El arreglito’, by the Spanish composer Sebastián de Iradier, who had visited Cuba in 1861 and been enchanted by its dances. (Iradier’s other claim to fame is that he wrote ‘La Paloma’, the most recorded Spanish song of all time.)
The habanera and its contredanse antecedents had a highly distinctive accompanying rhythm of four beats, which in musical notation – as in the opening of the Bizet song – looks like this.
The ‘2/4’ designation at the start tells us that there are two principal beats in this bar – they fall on the numbers 1 and 5 – that can, as here, be subdivided into eight shorter beats, known as ‘semiquavers’ or ‘sixteenth notes’ in music terminology. The fact that there are two principal beats indicates this is a duple-time (two-step) dance. In this example, the first note (D), with a duration value of three semiquavers, acts as a springboard for the one-semiquaver second note (A), which is followed by two notes (F and A) of two semiquavers each. To let you know that the first note is three semiquavers long instead of two it has a dot added to it, which is why this is called a ‘dotted’ rhythm. The effect of it is a slightly jerky sound, especially as the first note is in practice not sustained for all of its three beats; rather it is shortened to make it spikier and more accented, leaving a little gap between the first and second notes.
‘Dotted’ patterns, with the skipping rum-tah-tum emphasis they create, were very common indeed in European music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially in France. The royal composers Lully and Rameau, who wrote ballet music for the courts of Louis XIV and XV, were obsessed with
dotted rhythms – so much so, in fact, that they favoured a performance practice known as notes inégales, whereby even notes written out as equal (undotted) were assumed to be dotted. We shall return to this assumption very shortly, because its application finds a direct parallel, believe it or not, with swing in the 1930s.
By the nineteenth century, though, a dotted rhythm was only played if the composer had specified it with a dot in the notation. Here, though, a new oddity arose, which I shall demonstrate with the help of a rousing abolitionist song from the American Civil War, ‘John Brown’s Body’, which was adapted into a thousand other versions, including ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’. Its catchy tune is in 4/4 time – that is, it has a steady marching pulse of four principal beats per bar – and it would be written or printed out thus. (Note the prevalence of ‘dotted’ pairs.)
Here is the oddity. ‘John Brown’s Body’ is a march, and as such you would expect its rhythm to be regimented and precise, with drummers keeping everything in strict order. But when sung, the very precise-looking rhythm notated above is not what is heard. What is in fact performed and heard is a more lilting version of this rhythm, the lilt produced by a subtle reapportioning of the beats. Thanks to recordings, we know that this has been the case since at least the late-nineteenth century.
In the above example, there are two notes on the word ‘body’, E and G; the first note, E, like the first note of our habanera example, is dotted, so instead of being two semiquavers it is three. The next note, G, is just one semiquaver. This makes the two notes rhythmically identical to the first two notes of our habanera example: 3 + 1 = 4 semiquavers. The four principal beats of our bar are known as ‘crotchets’ – each crotchet is made up of four semiquavers – and we can use these crotchets to track where the strong, or accented, beats fall. The highlighted words are the beats on which our feet would step, if we were marching to the song.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 28
