by David Schiff
The titular interpretations listed above are found in most program notes; these also usually divide the preludes between those based on artworks and those based on nature without seeing that the two groups are connected metaphorically to the central theme of temporality, which received its most monumental treatment in “La Cathédrale engloutie,” a fresco of stone, seawater, and metallic bells. Debussy placed its Parsifalpaced unfolding between two more fleeting visions that could be termed salon music à la Grieg (a composer whom Debussy pretended to dislike): the interrupted serenade and Puck's dance. Just as each prelude associates sound with sight, each also evokes the sense of touch. Each title suggests a different physical material: stone, feathers, water, snow, flaxen hair, wind gusts, fairy cobwebs, guitar strings, drum skins, the scents of plants or perfume; each material suggests a different physical connection between pianist and keyboard.
To see how Debussy used tone color symbolically, let's examine “Danseuses de Delphes” and “Des pas sur la neige” in more detail. The title “Danseuses de Delphes” presents a conundrum similar to that of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in its suggestion of life suspended in fired clay:
O Attic shape! fair attitude! with breed
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
Debussy similarly represented a dance set in stone. The score tells the performer that the music should be “doux et soutenu,” at once sweet and sustained, no easy task, but the words encapsulate the almost impossible simultaneous evocation of grace and gravitas. The melody, an ascending legato line, hides between a bass figure in octaves and a rising chorale of three-note chords. The two framing figures are counterintuitively both slurred and marked staccato. The counterpoint demands a scrupulously controlled touch from the pianist, who must balance the three voices and also bring out the melody, all within a soft dynamic—as if the keyboard were made of modeling clay just beginning to set. Further expanding the varieties of touch, Debussy contrasts the airy heaviness of the opening texture with a cadential phrase to be played even more quietly, like a distant harp or lyre—perhaps this is the music that the dancers themselves are hearing. In the next phrase Debussy repeats what we have just heard but stretches out each figure across the keyboard, as if he were reorchestrating. The accompaniment suddenly suggests the sound of finger cymbals or crotales, which Debussy had also used as a classical Greek color in “Afternoon of a Faun.” Debussy gradually animates his three lines into a complex hand-overhand choreography at bars 15 to 17, where the interplay of elements is finally, though briefly, heard at a forte dynamic. After this climax recedes the last three bars reiterate a single harmony in three contrasting colors: a seven-note statement of a B major triad is sounded once forte, then repeated pianissimo, then underscored with a single B at the very bottom of the keyboard, which must be released while the pedal sustains the upper chords—a klangfarbenmelodie that is also a melody of touch.
Debussy gave touch an even more complex symbolic treatment in “Des pas sur la neige.” The piece is built on an evolving ostinato, a short motive with a curiously nervous rhythm on which the composer placed a heavy synesthetic burden: “Ce rythme doit avoir la valeur sonore d'un fond de paysage triste et glacé” (this rhythm should have the tonal color of the depths of a bleak, frozen landscape). The motive sounds twice in each bar, the second statement one note higher in the scale, forming a rising four-note idea that recalls a similarly freighted motive in Wagner. Both the ostinato and the plaintive melody that rises above it sound like they are trying to restate the opening of the Prelude to the third act of Tristan, and indeed Debussy's prelude retraces the steps of Wagner's phrase by phrase. Debussy indicates the complexity of the allusion by mirroring Wagner's consoling second theme, a downward chromatic drift, with a diatonic theme in G major that is not only as distant from the d minor tonic as possible but is also played mainly on the black keys, above the symbolic snow line.69
The submerged intertextual links, though, reinforce the central theme of the Préludes. Replacing romantic heat and humidity with a brittle chill, Debussy recast Wagner's heaving emotion-laden notes as black markings on a white page, evanescent as footprints in the snow. Once we hear the snowy landscape as a metaphor for the piano keyboard itself, the prelude becomes a commentary on the relation of piano and orchestra. The piano, essentially a percussion instrument, cannot simulate the swelling string crescendo (with all violins on the open G string) that begins Wagner's prelude. By comparison with that warm sound, the piano is a treacherous icy timbral landscape; the pianist's touch, skating on thin ice, must assert illusion over physics. Yet, as Lockspeiser points out, the piano's physical limitation relative to the orchestra is also a strength: “It was sometimes to be an instrument that drew music from the circumambient air, or that could project patterns made up of myriads of little sounds. It was never admitted to be an instrument inferior, in the range of shadings of its dynamics, to wind or string instruments. Its defects were its virtues.”70 Transforming Wagner's warm sounds to an icy “valeur sonore” no orchestra could produce, the piano asserts its symbolic superiority.
Debussy's musical symbolism rests on two strategies that suggest parallels with Ellington. The first is intertextuality, usually between the music and some other artwork. The second is the sound metaphor, the evocation of one timbre through another. Debussy's symbolic techniques inform the musical languages of such later and different works as Stravinsky's Sererade in A, Bartók's Out of Doors, Messiaen's Vingt Regards, or any of the preludes in Shostakovich's op. 87. But, even though the Cotton Club may have existed in a different universe from Mallarmé's exclusive symbolist gatherings, Debussy's aesthetic ideas perhaps found their richest application in the music of the Ellington Orchestra. From his earliest compositions to his last recordings, the blues provided Ellington with an intertextual discourse; his band was the source of sound symbols. Let's see if we can come up with a list of Ellington “preludes.” If we exclude the genres of songs, concertos, and extended compositions (and give Strayhorn and Tizol their own lists), and limit ourselves to pieces with a distinctive timbre, we might easily arrive at two volumes of twenty-four preludes, a Bachian “48” to set beside Debussy's three dozen:
1. Black and Tan Fantasy
2. Black Beauty
3. Immigration Blues
4. East St. Louis Toodle-Oo
5. The Mooche
6. Creole Love Call
7. Awful Sad
8. Jubilee Stomp
9. The Mystery Song
10. Echoes of the Jungle
11. Mood Indigo
12. Old Man Blues
13. Eerie Moan
14. In a Sentimental Mood
15. Delta Serenade
16. Daybreak Express
17. Menilek
18. Blue Light
19. Subtle Lament
20. Jack the Bear
21. Ko-Ko
22. Across the Track Blues
23. Harlem Airshaft
24. Bojangles
25. A Portrait of Bert Williams
26. Sepia Panorama
27. Dusk
28. Warm Valley
29. Blue Serge (Mercer Ellington)
30. Clothed Woman
31. Moon Mist (Mercer Ellington)
32. Dancers in Love
33. Happy-Go-Lucky Local
34. Transblucency
35. On a Turquoise Cloud
36. Such Sweet Thunder
37. Madness in Great Ones
38. Where's the Music
39. Single Petal of a Rose
40. Zweet Zurzday
41. Afro Bossa
42. Bonga
43. La Plus Belle Africaine
44. Depk
45. Amad
46. The Sleeping Lady and the Giant Who Watches over Her
47. Po
rtrait of Wellman Braud
48. Second Line
While we're at it, here are a dozen Strayhorn preludes:
1. Chelsea Bridge
2. Take the “A” Train
3. Balcony Serenade
4. Johnny Come Lately
5. Hear Say
6. Star-Crossed Lovers
7. Bluebird of Delhi
8. Agra
9. Isfahan
10. Lotus Blossom
11. Blood Count
12. U.M.M.G.
OUTRO: SOUNDS RECAPTURED
The “Ellington effect” is a particular instance of a much wider twentieth-century soundscape, a constructed environment of sound that always has both physical and semiotic dimensions. As Emily Thompson points out, the idea of acoustical engineering itself arose in response to the idea of “noise pollution.” Noise was a ubiquitous by-product of ever-encroaching industrialism, but it also symbolized “the many perils of the modern American city, including overcrowded tenements, epidemic disease, and industrial pollution.”71 Similarly, a “good” acoustic environment was not a simple question of physics and reverberation time but a matter of taste, and therefore a matter of class and race as well. The acoustics of Symphony Hall in Boston, for instance, were designed for an orchestra manager, Henry Higginson, who preferred “older music” to “very noisy music” (in other words, Beethoven over Strauss), part of a broader notion of the solemn, serious qualities—ethical qualities—that Higginson and others of his time associated with good music. Concertgoing, according to Theodore Thomas, was “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement.”72 Good acoustics could symbolize an entire value system.
Just a few years after the opening of Symphony Hall in 1900 its carefully controlled environment would be an anachronism. The argument about good and bad music and good and bad sound quality shifted from the concert hall to the living room and later to the kitchen, the den, and, most worryingly, the automobile. And to the movie theater as well. For most of the people most of the time, musical sound in the twentieth century meant recorded and/or broadcast sound, the revolutionary consequence of Edison's 1877 invention (and Marconi's 1895 discovery), when, as Ira Gershwin would put it, “they all laughed”—but not for long.
The surprisingly rapid acceptance of recorded music as the equivalent of live performance may appear less surprising when we realize that, at least in middle-class households, the piano already played the same cultural role in the nineteenth century that the phonograph would play in the twentieth. Through transcriptions and reductions, the piano, like the phonograph, brought into the home the orchestra and the opera house, as well as genres such as ragtime, which otherwise might only be encountered in questionable surroundings. Prefiguring the direction that recording would follow, the piano evolved in order to translate instrumental sounds with the ever-greater illusion of fidelity. Piano builders, composers, and performers took an interest in the “production” of piano sound, not just its renderings of pitches and rhythms but also its atmospherics. Debussy's use of the piano to suggest distant sounds, cultures, and sensations makes him a precursor for recording engineers. Recording allowed the esoteric researches of symbolism to shape the sound of everyday life, including the “sound” of music.
While the sound of recorded jazz reflected changes in technology as well as ongoing trade-offs between sound, convenience, and price, it was also a subliminal, symbolic “correspondence” to the way people conceptualized jazz. When Ellington's music was associated with inaccessible and exotic venues like the Cotton Club, recordings were made in a “you are there” mode (often with Irving Mills simulating the role of emcee). When jazz listeners sought to capture the nonrepeatable essence of jazz, improvisation, they would tolerate bad microphone placement and erratic balances as long as the results sounded “live.” For listeners, like John Hammond, predisposed to view jazz as a kind of folk music, a rough acoustic was a badge of honor. And when jazz became a classical music, the recording ambience had to suggest the calm, well-balanced resonance of the concert hall.
There are Ellington recordings to match all of these approaches; the Blanton-Webster recordings made for Victor in 1940 and 1941 and the live recording made at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, North Dakota, on November 7, 1940, demonstrate how contrasting styles of recording can cast completely different lights on the same repertory and players. Dick Burris and Jack Towers made the Fargo recordings on a portable disk-cutting recorder. The sound is distant, balances are erratic, and some recordings break off in the middle of a performance. It says volumes about the notion of jazz “authenticity” that many listeners accept the judgment of Alexander Coleman, cited in the Book-of-the-Month Club rerelease, that this “recording is the jazz equivalent of the Holy Grail.” For its admirers, the Fargo set represents the way the Ellington band “really” sounded, in the moment. By contrast, not only is the sound of the Victor recordings (made in Chicago, Hollywood, and New York) clearer and more evenly balanced, but the performances are more classical as well, that is, slower, even though they were mainly single takes. For a different kind of listener, these studio recordings of the Blanton/Webster band are the firmest evidence of the “masterpiece” status of most of the pieces (interestingly, the same listeners rarely give the vocals the same respect as the instrumental pieces).
We can hear a similar divide in recording styles in canonic albums made in 1959 by two of Ellington's most important successors: Charles Mingus's Blues and Roots, produced by Nesuhi Ertegun for Atlantic, and the Miles Davis / Gil Evans Sketches of Spain, produced for Columbia by Teo Macero and Irving Townsend. It's not an accident that Atlantic is best known for their recordings of Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin, while Columbia was associated with the sounds of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic. The ambience (or lack of it) of the Mingus recording screams authenticity. You feel like you are in the front row at the Five Spot. There seems to be no reverb, no room sound, no microphones, nothing between you and the music. The sound perfectly suits the gospel style of the music; it tells us that we are in a jazz church, as far from the commercial realm of Mammon as it is possible to be.
Sketches of Spain is renowned for its first track, Evans's sixteen-minute reworking of the slow movement of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, originally for guitar and orchestra, as a concerto for trumpet and a twenty-six-player jazz orchestra (including flutes, oboe, and harp). The arrangement united Davis, Evans, and Rodrigo and invited Debussy, Ravel, Falla, and Juan Tizol to the party, and Nelson Riddle and Henry Mancini as well. Given the crossover nature of the music, the sound ambience here aptly bespeaks hybridity. From the first sounds of a distant harp and castanets, the music seems to float in a highly engineered imaginary space at once resonant and intimate, where instrumental sounds drift in and out, in sharp or soft focus. The sound suits the mood of romantic exoticism, but, even more, it supports Davis's vocal approach to the music, “the jazzman as confessional poet,” as Gary Giddins put it.73 As soon as jazz singing embraced the microphone, the recording of jazz required some attention to the balance of amplified and unamplified elements, the synthetic intimacy of the voice and the acoustic space of the instruments. Nelson Riddle turned this problem into an art form in the albums he made with Frank Sinatra in the mid-1950s, In the Wee Small Hours and Only the Lonely. Evans's three concerto albums for Davis, Miles Ahead, Porgy and Bess, and Sketches of Spain, can be heard as a fusion of Ellington/Strayhorn tone parallel and concerto genres and Riddle's way of wrapping the voice in instrumental opulence.
Blues and Roots and Sketches of Spain present contrasting pictures of jazz as a music of roots and a music of branches. Mingus's music here explores the black side of the Ellington spectrum, while Davis and Evans pursue the blue side beyond “Transblucency.” Though Ellington rarely engaged in the kind of evolved production heard on Sketches of Spain, even in albums marketed as “hi-fi,” his innovative approach to timbre as sound and symbol could inspire musicians working i
n styles that might seem distant from jazz. We might even detect the influence in the music of Brian Wilson. Rock historians usually place the highly composed ambient sound of “Good Vibrations” within the framework of Phil Spector's “wall of sound” first heard in the 1963 recording of “Be My Baby” by The Ronettes, and the Beatles' recording of “Strawberry Fields.” Spector created an “overall sound tapestry” by “combining layers of electronically processed sound—miked, amplified, recorded, filtered, compressed, synthesized, and so on.”74 In “Strawberry Fields,” the producer George Martin mixed a simple guitar/bass/drums accompaniment with music for trumpets and cellos “and the strange sucking timbres produced by recording various percussion instruments with the tape reversed.”75 For the album Pet Sounds and the single “Good Vibrations,” Wilson similarly created a background track of staccato chords using recorded sounds of organ, harpsichord, piano, sleigh bells, and pizzicato strings76 and the electronic sound of the theremin. If we compare the sound of “Good Vibrations” with classic earlier Beach Boys recordings like “Little Deuce Coupe,” the difference reproduces (by other technical means) the contrasting modes of “authenticity” and “hybridity” we heard in the Mingus and Davis/Evans albums, similarly recasting Wilson from “real” beach boy to surreal rock poet. “Good Vibrations” might just be Californian for klangfarbenmelodie.
CHAPTER 2
“Cotton Tail”: Rhythm
The presence of rhythm and lack of symmetry are paradoxical, but there they are. Both are present to a marked degree. There is always rhythm, but it is the rhythm of segments. Each unit has a rhythm of its own, but when the whole is assembled it is lacking in symmetry. But easily workable to a Negro who is accustomed to the break in going from one part to another, so that he adjusts himself to the new tempo.
—Zora Neale Hurston
