John
Brown’s
Bo-dy
Lies a-
Moul-drin’
In his
Gra-ave
But although ‘bo-dy’, for example, is marked as being 3 + 1 semiquavers, the lilting variation of this song that became the norm in performance – and which you are playing in your head as you read this – does not divide each of the crotchets into four subdivisions but rather into three. Subdividing a beat by three instead of four naturally makes each of the new smaller beats slightly longer. Now the mathematical value for ‘bo-dy’ is 2 + 1. The audible result of this slight increase in length of each subdivision is that the rhythm feels more relaxed, smoother and less rigidly precise. If the audible version were written out in musical notation it would read like this, with all its ‘dots’ gone:
This ‘triplet’ reorganisation of what might otherwise have been a 3 + 1 pulse underpins an enormous number of popular parlour and music hall songs of the turn of the twentieth century, from ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’ to ‘Daddy wouldn’t buy me a bow-wow’ and ‘Hinky-Dinky Parlay Voo’. It runs through all those songs because it is a natural pattern of rhymed, spoken English: it is the rhythm, for instance, of ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall’, which dates from the English Civil War. This lolloping rhythm also became a major component of swing rhythm – and the funny thing is that it still isn’t written down: all songs, however jazzy, are transcribed with the archaic ‘dotted’ version, but 2 + 1 instead of 3 + 1 is always implied. In this respect the 2 + 1 triplet has become as habitual to post-jazz popular song as the unwritten notes inégales were to the dance music of Lully and Rameau.
The ‘swung’ triplet is absent from the surviving recordings of Scott Joplin playing in ragtime, but it can be heard tentatively in early jazz, its swagger detected in the Original Dixieland Jass/zz Band’s ‘Soudan’ (also called ‘Oriental Jass’ and ‘Oriental Jazz’), which was recorded and released in London in May 1920. By the time of Bennie Moten’s ‘Kansas City Shuffle’ of December 1926, the triplet-driven beat has acquired a new name, ‘shuffle’, and is heading towards absolute universality in the 1930s swing craze: Art Tatum’s dazzling, acrobatic solo piano version of ‘Tea for Two’ (March 1933) demonstrates how one man could syncopate, swing, shuffle and solo without the need for drums, bass and guitar to provide the rhythmic foundation. A particularly clear example of swing dynamic can be found in Count Basie’s ‘One o’Clock Jump’ of July 1937, in which the discreet brushed drums and rhythm guitar initially provide reliably straight four-in-a-bar beats, while the piano tumbles about tripleting and syncopating against this framework. Then other instruments, notably sax, trombone, and trumpet, perform similarly athletic interludes atop the structure.
Swing, which was all-conquering in the 1930s and ’40s, and which Duke Ellington, doubtless tired of explaining what made jazz tick, coquettishly refused to define in his mammoth hit of 1931, ‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing’, subsequently bequeathed its shuffling triplets to rock and roll. The handover can be plotted in stages, starting with a slow, dreamy triplet shuffle in jazz violinist Joe Venuti’s 1929 track ‘Apple Blossoms’, then in a more frantic version in his ‘Really Blue’ of 1930. The third stage in its journey to world domination has it transferred into the chordal texture provided by piano and guitar, which had hitherto been the home of the steady four-crotchet beat, as in ‘One o’Clock Jump’. This shift was in evidence as early as 1931 in Venuti’s ‘Tempo di Modernage’, in which the seeds of rock and roll were truly sown; it was precisely this triplet pattern, the one we have tracked from ‘Humpty Dumpty’ in the 1640s, which became the bedrock of the rock and roll shuffle style. The triplet configuration of chords driving the four-beats-in-a-bar rock shuffle can be heard in songs as diverse as Fats Domino’s monster hit ‘Blueberry Hill’ of 1950 and Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ of 1984.
A footnote to the riotously successful triplet shuffle of swing is that the one style it did not fully colonise was – perhaps ironically – the family tree of dance forms that began with the contredanse and habanera. The habanera’s strict dotted 3 + 1 pattern was handed down to the Spanish zarzuela, the Cuban danzón, the Brazilian maxixe and the Argentinian and Uruguayan tango. For the tango, with its abrupt, machismo movements, its upright body posture, tight physical language and the participants’ high-heeled shoes, the more rigid definition of the dotted pattern was much more suitable than the deliberately casual atmosphere of the more liquid, loose triplets. We shall return to the far-reaching influence of Cuban danzón and other related forms in the next chapter.
The transition from the chaotic, individualistic, rough-and-ready nature of the 1920s jazz to a more streamlined form of swing in the 1930s was mirrored in other musical genres. A new breed of ‘book-based’ musical emerged on Broadway – that is, shows with a clear narrative and dramatic shape, not just vague showbusiness storylines on which to hang unrelated songs – and hastily cobbled-together revues with random extravagant dance routines were shown the exit signs, at least temporarily. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Showboat of 1927 was a turning point in this respect, demonstrating what a well-written, clearly structured musical with a thought-provoking plot could be.
Showboat is many things – full of memorable tunes, daring (for the 1920s) in its confrontation of racial issues, emotionally rich, inescapably enjoyable and utterly sincere – but what it is not is a reflection of the jazzy, popular song style of the day. Its songs, with the one exception of ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’, are firmly grounded in a sentimental operetta and music hall milieu; they could all have been composed at any time in the previous fifty years. It’s as if Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong simply had never existed.
Much of Showboat’s attitude to poverty and racial stereotypes seems to us somewhat patronising, but this was the 1920s and at its core is a well-intentioned heart. Call it sentimental, but the twentieth-century Broadway musical was created by Jewish men and women whose families had – almost universally – been offered a lifeline of opportunity via immigration from Europe to the United States. Their unflinching belief in the transformative effects of populist American art forms such as the musical and the movie was heartfelt, and audiences then as now knew that a Kern and Hammerstein of Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was a cynicism-free zone.
The 1930s saw some giants of ‘musical comedy’, as it mostly was at that time, straddle the twin worlds of Broadway and Hollywood – among them George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. But the growing commercial confidence of Broadway and Hollywood musicals and of their songwriters blossomed at a time when classical music was struggling to find a sense of purpose beyond mere experimentation.
While classical composers may not have felt in direct competition with the glitz of 1920s Broadway or 1930s Hollywood, it cannot have escaped their notice that the marketplace for new music was increasingly crowded and competitive. In a handful of decades, new media had entered the fray: one can’t help wondering whether the stage spectacles of underwater Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Rhinegold in Munich (1869), or of a glass palace on the moon in Offenbach’s Voyage dans la lune in Paris (1875), would have attracted as much excited attention as the audiences had the option of seeing the same wonders evoked on film. Added to classical composers’ discomfort was the prospect of some of their most conspicuously successful ‘popular’ counterparts, such as Gershwin and Porter, threatened to set up shop in the ‘serious’ field: Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was followed by a string of orchestral commissions, including a piano concerto, and Cole Porter composed a fine ballet score, Within the Quota, for the Ballets Suédois in Paris in 1923. The twentieth century put enormous pressure on classical composers to carve out a new role for themselves. One route open to the advance guard was to play with the musical possibilities of the surreal and the absurd.
The term ‘surrealist’
was first used to describe a ballet, specifically one infamous collaboration between composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso and writer-dramatist Jean Cocteau, a clownish concoction call Parade that had its first performance in Paris in May 1917. Its series of street entertainers in jesting, facetious mood was not without its innovations, from the bizarre juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes and the disruption of any expectation of a narrative to Picasso’s cardboard costumes that made dancing all but impossible and in-joke mockery of impresarios and audiences who would put on (or watch) any old tat without discernment.
Parade’s innovations, though, ought to be seen in the context of the times. Its buffoonish hooey and end-of-the-pier music may have amused its creative team and some critics, but with the benefit of hindsight its timing seems tasteless and incomprehensible. Just a hundred miles away from the sumptuous Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris’s fashionable first arondissement, the catastrophe of the Second Battle of the Aisne, which claimed a hundred and twenty thousand French lives in two weeks on the notorious Chemins des dames, was turning into a rout and a wholesale mutiny with mass desertions. How cut off from reality had the arts world become that Cocteau and his colleagues deemed the up-yours camp of Parade, which had all the hallmarks of a hastily thrown-together student revue, an appropriate public offering in May 1917? The Parisian arts clique at whom it was targeted were both scandalized and offended by it – and the very fact that it was targeted at them rather than at, say, solders on leave from the front, precludes it from any defence that it was intended as harmless escapism, like the contemporaneous, tuneful smash-hit hokum that was Oscar Asche and Frederic Norton’s Chu-Chin-Chow in London’s West End.
It is not that slapstick distraction in itself was necessarily out of place between 1914 and 1918 – Charlie Chaplin mad over forty films during the First World War, after all – but attempts by musicological and arts commentators to justify the ‘meaning’ of staging Parade in the midst of a devastating war have never ceased to sound tenuous and desperate. Daniel Albright, Harvard Professor of Literature, described it as ‘one of the profoundest responses to the Great War’, precisely because it flew in the face of current opportunity via immigration from Europe to the United States. Their unflinching belief in the transformative effects of populist American art forms such as the musical and the movie was heartfelt, and audiences then as now knew that a Kern and Hammerstein or Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was a cynicism-free zone.
The 1930s saw some giants of ‘musical comedy’, as it mostly was at that time, straddle the twin worlds of Broadway and Hollywood – among them George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart. But the growing commercial confidence of Broadway and Hollywood musicals and of their songwriters blossomed at a time when classical music was struggling to find a sense of purpose beyond mere experimentation.
While classical composers may not have felt in direct competition with the glitz of 1920s Broadway or 1930s Hollywood, it cannot have escaped their notice that the marketplace for new music was increasingly crowded and competitive. In a handful of decades, new media had entered the fray: one can’t help wondering whether the stage spectacles of underwater Rhine maidens in Wagner’s Rhinegold in Munich (1869), or of a glass palace on the moon in Offenbach’s Voyage dans la lune in Paris (1875), would have attracted as much excited attention had the audiences had the option of seeing the same wonders evoked on film. Added to classical composers’ discomfort was the prospect of some of their most conspicuously successful ‘popular’ counterparts, such as Gershwin and Porter, threatening to set up shop in the ‘serious’ field: Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was followed by a string of orchestral commissions, including a piano concerto, and Cole Porter composed a fine ballet score, Within the Quota, for the Ballets Suédois in Paris in 1923. The twentieth century put enormous pressure on classical composers to carve out a new role for themselves. One route open to the advance guard was to play with the musical possibilities of the surreal and the absurd.
The term ‘surrealist’ was first used to describe a ballet, specifically one infamous collaboration between composer Erik Satie, painter Pablo Picasso and writer-dramatist Jean Cocteau, a clownish concoction called Parade that had its first performance in Paris in May 1917. Its series of street entertainers in jesting, facetious mood was not without its innovations, from the bizarre juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated scenes and the disruption of any expectation of a narrative to Picasso’s cardboard costumes that made dancing all but impossible and in-joke mockery of impresarios and audiences who would put on (or watch) any old tat without discernment.
Parade’s innovations, though, ought to be seen in the context of the times. Its buffoonish hooey and end-of-the-pier music may have amused its creative team and some critics, but with the benefit of hindsight its timing seems tasteless and incomprehensible. Just a hundred miles away from the sumptuous Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris’s fashionable first arondissement, the catastrophe of the Second Battle of the Aisne, which claimed a hundred and twenty thousand French lives in two weeks on the notorious Chemins des dames, was turning into a rout and a wholesale mutiny with mass desertions. How cut off from reality had the arts world become that Cocteau and his colleagues deemed the up-yours camp of Parade, which had all the hallmarks of a hastily thrown-together student revue, an appropriate public offering in May 1917? The Parisian arts clique at whom it was targeted were both scandalised and offended by it – and the very fact that it was targeted at them rather than at, say, soldiers on leave from the front, precludes it from any defence that it was intended as harmless escapism, like the contemporaneous, tuneful smash-hit hokum that was Oscar Asche and Frederic Norton’s Chu-Chin-Chow in London’s West End.
It is not that slapstick distraction in itself was necessarily out of place between 1914 and 1918 – Charlie Chaplin made over forty films during the First World War, after all – but attempts by musicological and arts commentators to justify the ‘meaning’ of staging Parade in the midst of a devastating war have never ceased to sound tenuous and desperate. Daniel Albright, Harvard Professor of Literature, described it as ‘one of the profoundest responses to the Great War’, precisely because it flew in the face of current events, cocking a snook at the solemnity of the 1917 mood, striking a pose he described in his Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and Other Arts (2000), as ‘cultivated apathy’. But explanations of the fiasco by Jean Cocteau and poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who wrote the programme note as well as coining the expression ‘surréalisme’, do not indicate that thought anything like as deep as Albright suggests went into Parade. Apollinaire claimed half-heartedly that there was a patriotic aspect to the endeavour, celebrating the new simplicity and clarity of French style in opposition to the complicated pretension of the German – but this observation came far too late to be taken seriously: Satie had begun his move towards ‘simplicity and clarity’ thirty years earlier with his Gymnopédies, Fauré had started writing songs in the newly purified sound ten years before that, and Saint-Saëns’s decidedly un-German, playful mockery of musical pretension, The Carnival of the Animals, was composed in 1886. Cocteau’s main aim, it would seem, was to shock Parade’s de facto producer, Sergei Diaghilev, who had challenged Cocteau to ‘astonish’ him.
Though music’s flirtation with surrealism was short-lived – how can such an unreal art form ever really have had any relationship with surrealism? – one controversial aspect of Parade’s score had some coincidental forward momentum. This was its integration, against the composer’s wishes, as it happens, of non-musical sound effects into the score. The rhythmic qualities of these sounds, from typewriters to factory sirens, were exploited time and time again as the twentieth century wore on, though it has to be said that the little-known Parade was not directly responsible for inspiring subsequent experiments. The most extreme early example of this ‘industrial’ sound texture, premièred in 1922, was the Simfoniya gudkov (Symphony of Factory Sirens) by Russian composer
and sound technician Arseny Avraamov. As well as factory sirens, his symphony featured bus and car klaxons, the foghorns of a Soviet flotilla in the Caspian Sea, artillery guns, cannon, machine guns, pistols (supplied and ‘played’ by an entire infantry regiment), ship’s sirens, various steam whistles and massed military bands and choirs. Aptly, it had its first performance in Baku, capital of Soviet Azerbaijan and home to the Caspian fleet. Other machine, or ‘found-sound’, works of the period included ‘Zavod, Symphony of Machines’ by another Russian, Alexander Mossolov, the soundtrack to a Soviet film Entuziazm: Simfoniya Donbassa in 1931, and solo typewriters joined the orchestra for Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter (1950) and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Fluoresences (1962).
Musical surrealism and attempts at finding what the future of sound might be ran, somewhat surprisingly, alongside another avenue being explored by classical composers in the 1920s: rummaging around in music’s attic. Led by Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev, both composers disorientated by the year-zero politics that followed the Russian Revolution and Civil War, they took to resurrecting antique musical forms and sometimes actual pieces by long-forgotten seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers, and adding their own twentieth-century slant to them. In a sense this process, given the fancy title ‘neo-classicism’ by music historians, was at times nothing more elaborate than plagiarism. Stravinsky and Prokofiev, though, were engaged in something more than simply regurgitating old styles: they tampered with them along the way, as if to modernise the originals, inserting into them, for example, unexpected and anachronistic dissonances. Playing merry havoc with the styles of previous eras was a perfectly legitimate game to play, but it is hard not to draw the conclusion that experimental modernism was running out of steam, to be replaced with the musical equivalent of repro furniture.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 29
