by David Schiff
The music for the Fear, Wrath, and Crisis sections is unfamiliar because Copland omitted them from the orchestral suite. The action in these sections, however, is crucial to the story. The Revivalist, previously appearing as an almost comic figure despite a suspect relationship to his four female followers, who flutter around him like a flock of small birds, suddenly becomes terrifyingly stern. Graham told Merce Cunningham, “I don't know if you are a preacher, a farmer, or the devil.”54 His sermon demands that the Husbandman leave for war, which he does after first consulting the Pioneer Woman rather than the Bride. In my reading of the ballet he does not return alive but only as a ghostly memory. In the climactic reprise of “Simple Gifts” the Bride and Husbandman do not dance together. He seems at once present and absent. At the end, as Howard Pollack writes, “The Husbandman—or rather his spirit—stands behind the Bride, as she stretches her arm out toward the horizon, a remarkable gesture conjoining private and public destinies.”55
If Graham's choreography told a story of a woman's love, fear of abandonment, and inner strength, what story was Copland telling in the music, much of it written for different characters than those of the final version? Pearl Lang, one of the original Followers, described the score as “joyous”, “without a tragic moment in it—there is only the hint of one.”56 May O'Donnell recalled that the music had a “gentleness and sweetness” untypical of Graham's other dances.57 Copland's score was heard, quite aptly, as a utopian vision, well suited to the original name for the setting, Eden Valley. The music subliminally places the action in an idyllic fantasy world just after the opening when the violins echo Stephen Foster's “Beautiful Dreamer”. Whatever tensions might have appeared onstage, the music (or at least the parts of the score the people remembered) pictured a community where man was one with nature, woman was one with man, labor meshed with faith, the past gave strength to the future. A cynic might say that Copland's utopia crossed a Shaker village with a Labor Zionist kibbutz.
To represent Eden as simultaneously a legacy of the past and a hope for the future, Copland reinvented neoclassicism by way of traditional American fiddle music. This folk style preserved the straightforward harmonic logic and clear-cut phrase structure of the classical period. The music evokes American spaces through its own spaciousness of phrasing. Dissonances are rare, and Copland restricted his habitual irregular rhythmic groupings to two and three eighth notes, a device he derived from jazz, to a few moments of intensification; unusually for Copland, a lot of the music unfolds without metrical changes. No matter what convoluted situations Graham offered him, Copland seemed to perceive that his goal was to give his audience the quality that Stendhal had defined as the essence of art: the promise of happiness. It is quite likely that Copland understood that this luminous approach would serve well as a foil to Graham's darker expressionism.
Like Black, Brown and Beige, the ballet Appalachian Spring questioned the war effort under a camouflage of patriotism. While Ellington reminded his audience of the black heroes of America's earlier wars and implicitly called for a new social order, Graham portrayed the impulse to war itself in terms of demonic male fanaticism. By loosening the historical representation of the original scenario, she heightened its contemporary relevance at a time when many American women did not know if they would ever see their husbands again. In its reception and revisions, Black, Brown and Beige itself became a battlefield between Ellington and his mainly white critics. In its development and dual history as ballet and concert work, Appalachian Spring remained a contested zone in a gendered battle. In the contrasting entrances of the principals Graham not only set up the drama to come but also characterized her working relationship with Copland.
The most potent and disputed feature of the score was its treatment of “Simple Gifts”. Despite the stamp of authenticity that it lends to the action, the Shaker hymn was wildly inappropriate, as Copland enjoyed pointing out: since the Shakers were celibate, a Shaker wedding was a contradiction in terms.58 As Pollack notes, Copland may have viewed the Shakers sympathetically as protocommunists; Graham, by contrast, saw them as a typical American religious cult whose fanaticism sprang from “hidden desires”. Copland made this dark side audible in the later sections of the ballet, whose style recalls the brittle tensions of the gun-fight in Billy the Kid, but hardly any of this mood emerged in the suite, which omitted around three hundred measures from the original score.
In the ballet the four variations on “Simple Gifts” function much like the parts of a traditional pas de deux:
Theme: The Bride
Variation I: The Husbandman
Variation II: The Bride
Variation III: The Husbandman
Variation IV: Bride and Husbandman
The Husbandman's movements become increasingly outgoing and athletic in his variations. At the end of Variation IV the Bride and Husbandman enter the house, and she sits in the chair where the Pioneer Woman had sat at the opening. In the coda to the variations, however, the action shifts to the Revivalist and his flock. Suddenly the Revivalist begins to spin like a tornado, his arm jabbing out from time to time like an accusatory bolt of lightning. With the blessing of the Pioneering Woman, but without bidding his Bride farewell, the Husbandman steps across the fence that has so far bounded the action. The Revivalist and his followers pray for him and return to their regular business. Suddenly the Husbandman reappears, but no one seems to see him; perhaps he is only the image of the Bride's concern. She launches into a distraught solo in which she seems to tell her child about his or her father and recall their wedding dances. When the fifth, climactic variation of “Simple Gifts” sounds everyone dances joyously, except the Bride, who sits on the side, alone. For most of the quiet, prayerlike music that follows, she dances alone while the others are still. As the opening music returns the Husbandman joins her as the other characters depart; it is not clear whether they will face the future together, as many early accounts of the ballet assumed, or if she is alone with her memories.
However we interpret the action, the choreography for the final variation comes as a theatrical shock, and, if we only know the suite, a musical one as well. By placing the Bride off to the side, Graham stressed her alienation just as the music resonated with communal accord and marital affirmation. Indeed, watching the ballet I find myself continuously taken aback by moments of tension and pathos that I had not perceived in the music, a testimony, it might be said, to the artistry of both of its creators; there was no need for Copland to “mickeymouse” the action. And yet, as Marta Robertson warns, the fact that music and dance seem to tell such different stories might also be termed an artistic failure on the part of the composer. The concert suite, Copland's pentimento, achieved its momentous success, we might speculate, precisely because it replaced Graham's story with a plotline more familiar in the concert hall. By lopping off the episodes of Fear, Wrath, and Crisis Copland allowed the fifth variation to appear as the defining and logical completion of the series, a triumphant resolution. Instead of appearing as a midballet divertissement, the sequence of theme and variations was now the goal of the entire composition, on the model of Beethoven's Ninth, whose theme Copland must have realized has a clear kinship with “Simple Gifts”. The timing was perfect. With the war over, America (or at least its noninvisible population) was ready to sing its own “Ode to Joy”. Years later Copland made no bones about his good fortune in mirroring the national mood: “I must admit I'm influenced by public opinion!”59
“Simple Gifts” was an odd anthem for a newly emerged nuclear superpower. Copland had no interest in actual Shaker doctrine; he had voided the song of its content just as he and Graham had bleached the discordant racial elements out of their vision of the American past. At war's end none of the demands that black leaders had made for fair employment and civil rights had been implemented; indeed, the reforms would not come about for another twenty years. Due to a large extent to the continuing power of Southern Democrats in Congress, the American Arme
d Forces remained segregated until the Korean War. A new world of equality was once again a “dream deferred”. Late in the twentieth century conductors began to preface performances of Beethoven's Ninth with Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw, a chronologically inverted attempt to assert the Ninth's continuing relevance. Perhaps conductors might someday consider a similar pairing of Copland's Appalachian Spring with the Ellington/Strayhorn Deep South Suite, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in January 1946. Its first two movements, Ellington's satiric “Magnolias Dripping with Molasses” (titled “Psuedo” [sic] in the parts) and Strayhorn's grimly dissonant “Hear Say”, contrast illusion and reality in a way that parallels the interplay of Copland's bright music and Graham's dark drama. And its final movement, “Happy-Go-Lucky Local”, presents a vision of hope just as powerful as Copland's but far more reflective of the conditions over which hope would have to triumph.
OUTRO: THE ELLINGTON ARCHIVE
The study of history combines evidence and interpretation. Today much of the written evidence about Ellington's music is housed at the Smithsonian Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Archive Center is located on the first floor of the museum, just across the hall from a much-visited re-creation of Julia Child's television kitchen. For most of Ellington's compositions the Ellington Collection contains the composer's sketches, full scores, and original sets of the parts used by players. The Ellington Collection is just one of many in the care of the devoted and helpful staff of the Archive Center, though most of the other collections contain what is called “material history”. While I was looking at the original instrumental parts for Ellington's scores, a researcher across the table might be examining maps of the national power grid, or nineteenth-century cookbooks, or early twentieth-century advertisements. It seems fitting and proper that Ellington's legacy resides in the city of his birth, surrounded by such seemingly modest yet essential Americana.
The papers of American composers can be found in the Library of Congress, in the New York Public Library, or at the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, Switzerland—all places where I have worked and been spoiled rotten by superb librarians and their support staff. The Ellington Collection, though, has a particular importance, which I would like to discuss briefly in terms of the future rather than the past. Unlike the music of Copland or Carter, very little of Ellington's music was published. Many of the arrangements that are commercially available today were created without the benefit of the written materials now in the archive but were instead transcribed, painstakingly to be sure, from the recordings, especially in the pioneering efforts of David Berger. These arrangements, though, were educated guesses. Unfortunately, the lack of published scores fueled rumors that Ellington lacked the techniques of a trained composer, a slander developed at great length in James Lincoln Collier's mean-spirited biography. The Ellington Collection disproves this libel with mountains of manuscript in Ellington's distinctive hand (easy, most of the time, to distinguish from the writing of Strayhorn and Ellington's copyist, Tom Whaley). More than documenting Ellington's compositional process, the materials are essential for understanding the artistry of jazz orchestra composition as well as the working methods of its creators and performers.
To view this collection is an awesome privilege. While a researcher on, say, Mahler would use archives of sketches as a supplement to the published scores, the Ellington collection is currently the only place where you can see the music on the page as the members of his orchestra saw it, and in the precise form that Ellington composed it. Every day I spent there presented more revelations than I could assimilate. I remember in particular a day when I asked for the boxes containing the New Orleans Suite, one of Ellington's last works. Written in 1970, the suite once again figured the past with musical portraits of Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong, Wellman Braud, and Mahalia Jackson—the New Orleans roots of his New York music. My favorite movement, and the one that has become a jazz standard, is “The Second Line”, which commemorates a New Orleans social institution that endures even today.
The New Orleans Suite seems like the fitting completion of Ellington's historical project, which took a different turn after Harlem, a turn from political history to musical history signaled by the radically whimsical historical deconstruction of A Drum Is a Woman. Beginning in the late 1950s Ellington pursued a number of projects that would redefine his place in jazz history. Now that he no longer had to prove the distinctiveness of his own approach it was time to reaffirm the values it shared even with artists whom jazz critics had positioned as Ellington's adversaries. The first steps in this new direction were the collaborations with Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. Hawkins's performance of “Mood Indigo” and Coltrane's version of “In a Sentimental Mood” demonstrated how these works resonated with a far larger repertory than even that of the Ellington Orchestra; both soloists imbued Ellington's music with their own very recognizable styles, and each song took on a new life. We can detect a similar refashioning of jazz history in the two albums that recalled the music of the big band era and, in a very different way, in the suites based on Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker and Grieg's Peer Gynt. In both instances Ellington was reopening a dialogue that defied the boundaries of jazz history. Even more ambitious were such encounters with world music as the Far East Suite and the Latin American Suite, which took jazz beyond America's geographical and cultural borders. Far from novelty exercises in exoticism, these works demonstrated in musical terms the ties in African American history to the Ganges, the Euphrates, and the Caribbean that Ellington had celebrated in the script for Black, Brown and Beige. Having pushed the boundaries of jazz outward in so many directions, Ellington now returned, in 1970, to honor its birthplace, New Orleans.
In researching the New Orleans Suite I carefully worked my way, one folder at a time, through the materials, many of them the originals professionally copied in India ink. Each part was identified by the name of the player, not the instrument, and many of them included the players' own comments and doodles. When I opened folder 5 of box 242, though, I came upon the holy grail, Ellington's sketches for “The Second Line”, written, as was his habit, very distinctly in pencil with full indications of all the harmonic voicings. Often these pencil sketches show signs that they were written on the road; they may appear on the back of another piece of music and are often full of arrows that reorder the phrases between different pages. With familiarity, though, it becomes clear that Ellington and Strayhorn both worked in a systematic way that allowed Tom Whaley to extract parts from a score set out on four or five staves. The sketches look casual, but in fact they are complete (with the provision that neither Ellington nor Strayhorn wrote out a drum part and rarely indicated much about the piano part, which, of course, they would be playing). In the middle of sketches for different phrases I found Ellington's first entry for the great tune that serves as its refrain, a defiant melody that seems to capture the essential spirit of jazz. My hands began to tremble. I felt like I was witnessing the moment when the notes first hit the page. For a second Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington seemed to be looking over my shoulder, pointing to his sassy tune with pride.
The weight of that encounter suggested to me that the Ellington Archive may be only in its formative, provisional state. The entire collection, so much of which is in pencil, needs to be put in digital form, safe from the wear and tear it now receives on a daily basis, and at the same time made more accessible. (As an example, today you can access most of the Copland holdings in the Library of Congress through the Internet.) Critical and performing editions need to be carefully prepared from the materials, an effort that would at least equal those that have gone into the great scholarly monuments of European music. Since the Smithsonian already has a branch institution in New York City (the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum), I can imagine a time when the collection might be housed in its own building, an Ellington Institute, located, with all due respect for his bir
thplace, on the heights of Sugar Hill. Ellington may have been born in D.C., but his music is inseparable from Harlem.
CHAPTER 7
“Heaven”: God
We commit fewer musical sins in church.
—Igor Stravinsky
It has been said once that a man, who could not play the organ or any of the other instruments of the symphony, accompanied his worship by juggling. He was not the world's best juggler but it was the one thing he did best. And so it was accepted by God.
—Duke Ellington
INTRO: AIN'T BUT THE ONE
When I first envisioned closing this book with a chapter on religious music (a.k.a. the “God chapter”), I thought that I would examine Ellington's three Concerts of Sacred Music, which premiered in 1965, 1968, and 1973, in the context of other spiritual works of the time. There's no shortage of impressive sacred music from that era: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Mary Lou Williams's Mass for Peace, Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum, Britten's War Requiem, Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, and Leonard Bernstein's Mass are just the beginning of a long list. Many of these works—intense, disquieting, pious, questioning, epic, modest, ritualistic, theatrical—reflect the transformations of religious thought and practice brought about by Vatican II, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. These transformative historical events, however, would have overshadowed the attention I wanted to draw to the special character of Ellington's sacred concerts. They are far less appreciated, even in the jazz world, than many of the musical works listed above. Most classical listeners, I have found, don't even know they exist—and don't know what they are missing. Fulfilling many of Ellington's lifelong expressive projects, the three Concerts of Sacred Music exemplify an Ellingtonian “late style” that brought his music to its rightful home, the church.
