by David Schiff
We might term many of the rhythmic innovations of modernist concert music “jazz by other means,” (or “Euro-jazz”) though I'll call them cubist rhythms instead. Was this kind of rhythm as inimical to jazz as both Stravinsky and Gene Krupa, from opposite sides of the lines, would have us believe? There's no doubt that European composers were thinking about jazz and, perhaps, listening to it, though few followed the developments of jazz closely enough to distinguish its most important figures; discussions of jazz by Stravinsky and Copland never mention Louis Armstrong. Measured by the number of composers who suddenly added a saxophone to their orchestras (including Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern), the generic impact of jazz on European concert music and, of course, American as well was huge, but also, by the same measurement, short-lived. Modernist composers, moreover, were ambivalent about jazz. For some it was an alien style that could only be assimilated in unmediated fashion through collage, as Satie did in Parade, or Ives did in Central Park in the Dark with its quotations from “Hello My Baby!” (a hit tune from 1899 by Joseph Howard and Ida Emerson); or it could serve as a convenient vehicle for anarchic “wrong-note” irony, as in the piano ragtimes of Ives, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, instances of rag rage that treat the new idiom with a violent, distorting irreverence. (By comparison, Stravinsky handled Pergolesi's music with kid gloves.) But while the outer trappings of jazz-age jazz soon faded, jazzlike rhythmic devices remained an essential part of the modernist idiom, even when they appeared in music labeled Bulgarian (Bartók's Fifth Quartet) or Mexican (Copland's El Salón México) or classically Greek (Stravinsky's Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon.)43
Before we examine some examples of cubist rhythm by Bartók and Stravinsky, we need a sidebar to deal with the issue—the red herring, actually—of notation. In jazz circles discussion about rhythm usually focuses on “feel,” the subtleties of performance; when modernist composers talk about rhythm they usually have a mental picture of some page from the score of Le sacre in which the meter changes every bar, even though some of the most rhythmically sophisticated movements in the modernist canon, the first movement of Bartók's Fourth Quartet (1928), the first movement of Webern's Symphony (1930), the first movement of Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet (1937), and the first movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in C (1939), are written in throughout. (Bartók sketched first in changing meters, then renotated in .) Two rhythmically vibrant parts of Le sacre, the “Augurs of Spring” and “Dancing Out of the Earth,” are similarly devoid of meter changes.
The opposition of feel and notation, however, replays the racist stereotypes of instinct versus culture. The rhythms of jazz and modernist music share more common ground than either Stravinsky or Krupa suspected. To locate that common ground let's look at two canonized and high-spirited modernist concert works both written around the swing era, neither explicitly related to jazz: Bartók's Fifth String Quartet (1934) and Stravinsky's Concerto in E “Dumbarton Oaks” (1938)—with an inevitable detour through Le sacre.
BARTÓK: STRING QUARTET NO. 5
The rhythms of Bartók and Stravinsky often approximate the woven, multilayered texture of jazz, but from Eastern European vantage points. Their music, like Ellington's, illustrates the way rhythm functions as both sound and symbol. According to the dates in the score, Bartók composed his great String Quartet No. 5 in a month (August 6 to September 6, 1934), and few works of twentieth-century concert music can match its feeling of rhythmic spontaneity. And yet it applies the principles of rhythmic cubism (threes and twos combined horizontally and vertically) with a systematic logic. The thematic material of the first movement contrasts groupings of three and two and of five (3 + 2) and often builds up a rhythmic counterpoint either by superimposing two or three rhythmic patterns or through strettos, overlapping passages of imitation. Played idiomatically (as in the recordings by the Vegh Quartet), the ingeniously constructed music nevertheless has the improvisatory lilt of folk music.
Bartók, of course, knew a thing or two about folk music; he dedicated years of his life to recording, transcribing, and analyzing music from Hungary, the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa. His studies of folk music, and of natural phenomena as well, were not simply empirical. Many Bartók scholars find that he conceived his music in terms of a vast dialectical project symbolized by the numbers two and three. The goals of the project have been stated most broadly by Leon Botstein: “Bartók uniquely managed to reconcile the claims of formal musical aesthetics and the ideology of progressive musical modernism with the cultural politics of identity and subjective particularity;”44—well, perhaps not so uniquely, since, if we include jazz within the realm of “progressive musical modernism,” the description fits Ellington as well.
Bartók's music set out to synthesize Beethoven's dynamic classicism and Debussy's static impressionism, Schoenbergian chromaticism and the modal diatonicism of Hungarian folk melodies, culture (with a capital “C”) and nature (with a capital “N”), and, reducing this project to its rhythmic essentials, two and three. Not since medieval music, when triple rhythms (tempus perfectum) signified the divine and duple rhythms (tempus imperfectum) the human, have the smallest building blocks of rhythm carried such philosophical weight.45
Bartók worked out the symbolic dialogue of twos and threes in many ways. It first appears as a large-scale structural symbolism, I think, in the Second Quartet, a three-movement work. The calmly meditative first movement begins in time (3 × 3); the despairing third movement is in (2 × 2). Between them, a scherzo inspired by the music Bartók heard in Biskra, Algeria, at times savage, at times grotesque, begins in two, but in its compressed recapitulation its themes are refashioned in a whirling triple meter. In the Fourth Quartet Bartók used a five-movement arch structure, with the first and fifth movements in duple meters ( and ), the second and fourth in triple meters ( and ); the central movement, in the Bartókian genre of “night music,” sounds almost a-metric, outside of time.
In the Fifth Quartet Bartók pursued metric symbolism even further. Again there are five movements, but the corresponding outer movements are in contrasting meters, the first mainly in , the fifth in . The second and fourth movements can be heard as a theme in and a variation in . At the center is a scherzo marked “Alla bulgarese,” and it, too, is in an arch form, with the outer section in bars of nine eighth notes divided as 4 + 2 + 3, while the central section, the very heart of the entire quartet, is in divided as 3 + 2 + 2 + 3. To make things even more systematic, Bartók associates his duple rhythms with the interval of the fourth, his triplet rhythms with thirds; the nine-beat scherzo is a cascade of thirds.
Bartók became fascinated with Bulgarian rhythms in the 1930s; he may have felt that they were evidence, in nature, of the larger symbolic order. These dance rhythms are based on “slow” and “quick” beats, beats of different lengths. Although ethnomusicologists disagree about the relation of the beat lengths, especially when at rapid tempos, Bartók heard the beat patterns in terms of a 3:2 ratio, represented by fast beats of quarter notes (two eighths) and slower beats of dotted quarters (three eighths). Bartók pursued possible combinations of beats in a variety of compositions. Two studies in Bulgarian rhythm appear in the fourth volume of Mikrokosmos, and the sixth volume concludes with Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm. They present rhythms of 3 + 2, 2 + 2 + 3, 4 + 2 + 3, 2 + 3, 3 + 2 + 3, 2 + 2 + 2 + 3, and our old friend 3 + 3 + 2. Similar rhythms also appear in Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (fourth movement 3 + 3 + 2), the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (first movement 3 + 2 + 2 + 2), Contrasts (third movement 3 + 2 + 3 + 2 + 3), and the Concerto for Orchestra (fourth movement 2 + 2 + 2 + 3).
Apart from their possible symbolic function and evident musical charm, these Bulgarian rhythms have a few notable properties. First, in Bartók's usage they are real meters, regularly occurring accentual patterns articulated through harmonic change, not the variably accented figures found elsewhere in Bartók's music (such as the “Syncopation” study no. 133 in Mikrokosmos, volume 5) or in Copland or S
travinsky. Unlike clave-based music, where hand and feet have different, complementary rhythms, in Bulgarian music they coincide. A Cuban son pattern puts three unequal beats of the clave against two equal foot beats. In Bulgarian rhythm the 3 + 3 + 2 pattern is heard as three steps; in “I Got Rhythm” it has two (or four).
Although Bartók was one of the few European composers to appear untouched by jazz in the 1920s, he nevertheless realized that Bulgarian meters bore an uncanny relation to jazz, and he took advantage of the connection in 1938 when he composed Contrasts for Joseph Szigeti and Benny Goodman. The King of Swing was also a serious classical clarinetist; his jazz style, moreover had Eastern European klezmer overtones (most obviously in Ziggy Elman's “And the Angels Sing” based on the klezmer tune “Der Shtiler Bulgar”). Goodman comfortably crossed over to Bartók's world; a year later Bartók moved into Goodman's territory with the fourth and sixth of the Bulgarian dances, both written, as Bartók himself pointed out, in the blues-inflected style of Gershwin. The Hungarian composer must have known Rhapsody in Blue and the Preludes, which are full of 3 + 3 + 2 patterns.46
Jazz fans know Bulgarian rhythms through Dave Brubeck's “Take Five” (written by Paul Desmond), “Unsquare Dance,” and particularly “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” with a theme written as three bars of 2 + 2 + 2 + 3 plus one in 3 + 3 + 3. Though some jazz critics viewed Brubeck's hugely popular experiments as heavy-handed gimmicks,47 they could more sympathetically be heard (as many of Bartók's works can be heard) as anticipations of world music parallel to the global outreach of Ellington's Far East Suite.
Many jazz players (and rock musicians as well) have continued Brubeck's experiments (and “Take Five” became a jazz standard), but these rhythms can become ponderous, especially when players slam the downbeats. Bartók's treatment of the rhythms in his “Alla bulgarese” shows more finesse, and perhaps more of a jazz feel. He begins his melody off the beat and phrases it in call-and-response two-bar units. Instead of repeating the opening phrase Bartók turns the rhythmic shape around by making the “call” in the cello sound like an upbeat to the “response” in the violin and viola. In the recapitulation Bartók intensifies the rhythmic development, stretching and contracting the phrases over the bar lines and creating new cross-rhythmic counterpoints. From a classical point of view we might say that Bartók is developing his rhythms very much in the way Beethoven would; from a jazz point of view we might say that he is pushing them in the direction of supermelodic liberation, with a shoutlike ecstasy in the final crescendo (bar 74), followed by an ending as quietly concise as the last phrase of “Cotton Tail.”
STRAVINSKY: CONCERTO IN E, “DUMBARTON OAKS”
In the concert and ballet worlds Stravinsky's name is synonymous with rhythm; not surprisingly, he borrowed from jazz, as he admitted, throughout his life. Jazz musicians, especially in the bebop period, liked to show their respect to the Russian master by inserting a phrase of Petrouchka or Le sacre into a solo, especially when their composer was present. The young Billy Strayhorn introduced Le sacre (along with La Mer and Alborada del gracioso) to Lena Horne; it was difficult, but she liked it “when I'm a little juiced.”48 As the “separate but equal” remark at the top of the section shows, Stravinsky didn't exactly return the compliment, at least not when sober. Or when composing: Ebony Concerto, written for Woody Herman and full of details lovingly lifted from some of the Herd's greatest hits, remains the highest, hippest compliment that classical musical modernism paid to the jazz world.
Stravinsky's waspish statement about jazz from the first Conversation book uses the dismissive tone he often employed to deal with serious rivals, but his distinction between “rhythm” and “beat” sheds light on his idiosyncratic methods for creating cubist rhythms. Where Bartók often worked from music he heard in the field, Stravinsky always worked from written sources, whether they were transcriptions of folk music or scores by other composers, from Gesualdo to Webern. Where the Hungarian composer thought of basic rhythmic shapes almost like atoms, as part of the essential material of music, Stravinsky conceived musical ideas, or “matières sonores,” as static but malleable objects, to be twisted, extended, chopped; rhythm was not inherent in those materials but was a way of shaping them. To compose he would find a sound, a chord, an instrumental effect, or an entire existing piece of music, then animate it with a varied collection of techniques that I'll call Igor's tool kit.
For Stravinsky, the temporal was also spatial. Composition was a matter of shuffling, repositioning, cutting, pasting, juxtaposing and superimposing—disruptive processes that, nevertheless, like the magician's spell in Petrouchka, endowed static material with dynamic life; often at the end of the piece Stravinsky (again as magician) would restore them to their pretemporal condition.
Many of Stravinsky's rhythmic techniques had their roots in earlier Russian music. Unusual and changing meters, protocubist rhythms, were common in the music of the Russian nationalist school. Richard Taruskin shows how Glinka, in Ruslan and Lyudmila, set pentasyllabic folk poetry “isochronously” in a quintuple meter.49 Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky's teacher, similarly wrote the final chorus of his opera Snegurochka in . The “scientific” anthology of Russian folk songs by Istomin and Lyapunov transcribed folk melodies with constantly changing meters, a way of hearing already transfigured into art music in the Promenade sections of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.
We can designate the inherited technique of irregular meter as “rhythmic tool number one” and note its handiwork throughout Le sacre, most obviously at the opening of “Spring Rounds,” in which a simple melody unfolds in groupings of , , and , quite similar in effect to a Mussorgsky Promenade. This technique of rhythmic variation applies to melody; according to Taruskin, it springs from prosody, and we might compare it to vers libre, the poetic technique that uses a different meter in every line. But melody usually needs an accompaniment; Stravinsky used two additional rhythmic tools for this purpose.50 In the main part of the “Spring Rounds” a syncopated figure in the bass interlocks with the melodic phrases and expands or contracts along with them: rhythmic tool number two. This technique of synchronized irregularity also served Stravinsky's purpose in the far more irregular “Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One” and the “Sacrificial Dance,” in which the melody bounces off changing accents in the bass.
Stravinsky had a far more devious rhythmic tool (number three) in his kit. Under the irregular metric groups of the melody in the “Mystic Circle of the Young Girls,” he placed a regular pattern of four eighth notes that goes out of phase with the melody midway through. The clash between a regular ostinato and a changing accentual pattern occurs throughout Stravinsky's oeuvre, from the “Royal March” in Histoire to the “Bransle Gay” in Agon. Stravinsky often chose to notate this type-three rhythmic counterpoint in a way that emphasized the irregular element rather than the steady one. This notation calls attention to the distinct characters of the two rhythmic elements but makes it harder to see how they synchronize. We might say that it makes the “beat” secondary to the “rhythm.”
Superimposed rhythmic patterns, some more regular than others, produce some of the most exciting moments in Le sacre; I'm thinking in particular of the phrases after rehearsal number 28 in “Les augures printaniers,” in which two ostinatos, one of four eighth notes, the other of six, appear under two melodies, a fast one in the high winds, a slower one in the trumpets, whose phrase lengths vary in the Mussorgskian way; and the even more complicated layering at rehearsal number 67, “Procession of the Oldest and Wisest One,” particularly at 70, when the guiro enters in a 4:3 ratio with the bass—but since when was the guiro a Russian instrument? Or—to ask a bigger question—what connects these polyrhythmic textures to the idioms of any of Stravinsky's putative nationalist predecessors? They sound more like West African music, or perhaps like a mating of Russian melody and West African drumming, than a little reminiscent of jazz: Irving Berlin and George Gershwin also had Russian origins, after all.
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The most rhythmically charged sections of Le sacre, the “Dancing Out of the Earth,” which ends part 1, “The Naming and Honoring of the Chosen One,” which begins the Totentanz of part 2, and the final “Sacrificial Dance” display intriguingly West African rhythmic patterns and textures. “Dancing Out of the Earth” piles up rhythmic element in eighth notes, triplets, and then sixteenths, with each rhythmic strand assigned its own harmonic identity: whole tone, quartal, and octatonic. On top of this volcanic rumble Stravinsky sounds a rhythmic figure derived from the infamously off-accented “Sacre chords” from the “Augurs of Spring” in part 1:
I can think of no precedent for this kind of rhythm in Russian or European music, but it strongly resembles the West African Husago dance transcribed by A. M. Jones.51 African sculpture was the rage among Parisian cubist painters at the time; African music was imported as well.
The off-kilter shuffled meters of “Naming and Honoring” and “Sacrificial Dance” relate to African music in a different way—through Spain and the New World. In both sections I hear the strong influence harmonically and rhythmically of Ravel's Alborada del gracioso (that favorite, you'll recall, of Billy Strayhorn and Lena Horne) in particular the asymmetric rhythm (2 + 2 + 2 + 3) heard at measure 31 and after: this figure forecasts the terrified leaps and falls of Stravinsky's victim. The “Sacrificial Dance” turns the rhythmic tension several notches tighter toward vertigo. Stravinsky said that he heard this rhythm before he figured out how to notate it and he revised the notation later in his life, as did conductors like Koussevitzky and Bernstein. The spasmodic notation masks the regular and (dare I say it) ragtime element lurking in the dance. As Pieter van den Toorn noted, the main rhythmic figure, represented in a phrase unit of adds up to twelve sixteenths, also known as :
