The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

Like the rest

  Gwine a-be singin’ coon.

  When Cook’s mother came to the show, she was distressed to see his Berlin education going to this end. A Negro composer should write just like a white man, she told him. Yet the composer could look back on Clorindy and its successor, In Dahomey, as examples of a black composer finally finding his own voice. “On Emancipation Day,” In Dahomey’s big number, repeats the prophecy of “Darktown” in even starker terms:

  All you white folks clear de way,

  Brass ban’ playin’ sev’ral tunes

  Darkies eyes look jes’ lak moons…

  When dey hear dem ragtime tunes

  White fo’ks try to pass fo’ coons

  On Emancipation day.

  The first chords of the overture, which recur at the beginning of “On Emancipation Day,” echo the opening of the Largo of Dvoák’s New World Symphony.

  Cook’s musicals, sophisticated in technique and assertive in tone, anticipated the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, which came into its own around 1925. Since the beginning of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois had been calling for a “Talented Tenth” of black intellectuals and artists to lead the masses to a better place in society. The upsurge of artistic activity in Harlem in the twenties fulfilled Du Bois’s prophecy, although the elitism implicit in the phrase “Talented Tenth” would prove problematic. Music was essential to the Renaissance spirit, and Du Bois, the philosopher Alain Locke, and the poet James Weldon Johnson all argued that black composers should avail themselves of European forms, even as they explored the native African-American tradition. Cook himself wrote in 1918: “Developed Negro music has just begun in America. The colored American is finding himself. He has thrown aside puerile imitations of the white man. He has learned that a thorough study of the masters gives knowledge of what is good and how to create. From the Russian he has learned to get his inspiration from within; that his inexhaustible wealth of folklore legends and songs furnish him with material for compositions that will establish a great school of music and enrich musical literature.”

  Still, Cook could not break into “straight” composition. In the second decade of the century, he became a bandleader, putting together a sharp group called the New York Syncopated Orchestra, which later toured Europe under the name Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Although Cook never felt comfortable with jazz—improvisation grated against his conservatory training—he highlighted the new sounds that were emerging from New Orleans, and hired the young clarinet virtuoso Sidney Bechet as his star soloist. The conductor Ernest Ansermet, who took an avid interest in jazz just as it was developing, heard Cook’s orchestra play in 1919 and, with an alertness that has won him a place of honor in anthologies of jazz writing, acclaimed Bechet as a “genius” and Cook as a “master in every respect.” Back in 1893 Anton Rubinstein had predicted that Negro musicians could form “a new musical school” in twenty-five or thirty years. Twenty-five years later, Ansermet perceived in Bechet’s and Cook’s performances “a highway that the world may rush down tomorrow.”

  Cook was hardly the only black musician to turn from classical study to a popular career. Many classically trained black musicians played significant roles in early jazz, giving the lie to the simplistic and racist idea that it was a purely instinctive, illiterate form. Will Vodery worked as a librarian for the Philadelphia and Chicago orchestras in his youth and showed promise as a conductor, but his career took off only when Florenz Ziegfeld, the master showman of Broadway, hired him to arrange music for his Follies. James Reese Europe trained on the violin but found no work when he arrived in New York in 1903; instead, he began playing bar piano, conducting theatricals, and leading bands. His all-black Clef Club Orchestra and Hell Fighters band introduced a broad audience to syncopated music that was a step or two away from jazz. Fletcher Henderson, Ellington’s future rival for the crown of king of swing, started out as a classical piano prodigy; when he went to work with Ethel Waters in New York, he had to learn jazz piano by listening to James P. Johnson piano rolls. Johnson himself, Harlem’s reigning stride pianist, had compositional aspirations that were only partly fulfilled. In a later generation, Billy Strayhorn, destined to win fame as Ellington’s chief collaborator, shone as a composing prodigy in his youth and wowed his high-school classmates with a Concerto for Piano and Percussion.

  The same scenario kept repeating. Middle-class parents would send their sons and daughters to Oberlin or Fisk or the National Conservatory, hoping that they could achieve the wonderful things that Dvoák had forecast for African-American music. Hitting the wall of prejudice, these young creative musicians would turn to popular styles instead—first out of frustration, then out of ambition, finally out of pride. The youngest players embraced jazz as their birthright; they gave little thought to Dvoák’s old fantasy of Negro symphonies. Cook, however, never forgot the ambitions that he had nursed as a boy, when he stood on Lookout Mountain. He still dreamed of a “black Beethoven, burned to the bone by the African sun.”

  Charles Ives

  Inscribed above the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston, one of America’s great music palaces, is the name BEETHOVEN, occupying much the same position as a crucifix in a church. In several late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century concert halls, the names of the European masters appear all around the circumference of the auditorium, signifying unambiguously that the buildings are cathedrals for the worship of imported musical icons. Early in the century, any aspiring young composer who sat in one of these halls—a white male, needless to say, blacks being generally unwelcome and women generally not taken seriously—would likely have fallen prey to pessimistic thoughts. The very design of the place militated against the possibility of a native musical tradition. How could your name ever be carved alongside Beethoven’s or Grieg’s when all available spaces were filled? The fact that so many American composers still came forward is a tribute to the willfulness of the species.

  Charles Ives was one such stubborn youth. He came from a distinguished New England family, the descendant of a farmer who arrived in Connecticut fifteen years after the voyage of the Mayflower. His grandparents George White Ives and Sarah Hotchkiss Wilcox Ives had connections to the Transcendentalists, the royalty of American intellectual life; Emerson himself supposedly once spent a night in their Danbury house. Ives’s father was the bandleader George Ives, about whom little is known beyond Charles’s not always reliable recollections. Whether the father really anticipated the son’s experiments is impossible to determine, but one famous tale is corroborated by eyewitness testimony: the bandleader once marched two bands past each other for the simple joy of hearing them in cacophonous simultaneity. Ives also remembers that he and his brothers were directed to sing Stephen Foster’s plantation tune “Old Folks at Home” in the key of E-flat while George played the accompaniment in C.

  Charles attended Yale College, where he studied composition with Horatio Parker, under whose tutelage he produced an expert, Dvoákian four-movement symphony. In 1898 the young composer went to New York, where he worked a day job at the Mutual Life Insurance Company and played the organ and directed music at the Central Presbyterian Church. (He had been an expert organist since his teens, using the instrument to experiment with spatial effects and multiple layers of activity.) In 1902 Ives attracted positive attention with a cantata titled The Celestial Country. The Musical Courier detected “undoubted earnestness in study and talent for composition”; the Times called the new work “scholarly and well made,” “spirited and melodious.” Ives seemed poised for a distinguished career. First he would study with an important name in Europe, then he would find a position on an Ivy League faculty.

  Just one week after the successful premiere, however, Ives suddenly resigned his church position, and subsequently vanished from the musical scene. Why he did so remains a mystery. Perhaps he had been expecting a more ecstatic reception to his debut; tellingly, he later scrawled the words “Damn rot and worse” over one of the reviews of The Celesti
al Country. Biographers have added speculation that this athletic young male, Yale’s “Dasher” Ives, had a sort of macho hang-up with respect to American classical-music culture, which, to his eyes, appeared to be an “emasculated art,” controlled by women patrons, effeminate men, and fashionable foreigners (“pussies,” “sissies,” “pansies,” and so on). More prosaically, Ives may have lost faith when an acquaintance was picked to teach at Yale as Parker’s heir apparent.

  Instead, Ives chose to make his living in life insurance, at which he proved remarkably adept. He was a proponent of the hard sell, skilled at getting people to buy policies that they didn’t know they wanted. He didn’t go door-to-door himself; his job was to think up sales techniques that could be passed along to a network of freelance brokers. Ives codified his innovations in the pamphlet The Amount to Carry, which laid out a sales pitch “simple enough to be understood by the many, and complex enough to be of some value to all!” Ives told each salesman to plant himself firmly in front of a potential customer’s door and “knock some BIG ideas into his mind.”

  In the evenings and on the weekends, Ives continued writing music, concealing his work from his business associates and making little effort to publicize it to the world at large. In almost total intellectual isolation, he launched an American musical revolution, either discarding the rules he learned at Yale or reinventing them on his own terms. At times, he unloosed dissonances that rivaled Schoenberg’s. In more carefree moods, he delighted in popular sounds and miscellaneous Americana. His philosophy of music was almost diametrically opposed to his philosophy of insurance; he preferred to imagine a world in which music could somehow circulate without being bought or sold. “Music may be yet unborn,” he wrote in Essays Before a Sonata, the companion volume to his piano masterpiece, the Concord Sonata. “Perhaps no music has ever been written or heard. Perhaps the birth of art will take place at the moment in which the last man who is willing to make a living out of art is gone and gone forever.”

  Once Ives finally launched himself in the public eye, with the publication of the Concord in 1920, a myth began to crystallize around him. Here was an American visionary who had discovered atonality in advance of Schoenberg. When, in 1939, the pianist John Kirkpatrick finally mastered that titanic score and played it in its entirety, Lawrence Gilman of the New York Herald Tribune hailed Ives as “one of those exceptional artists whose indifference to réclame is as genuine as it is fantastic and unbelievable.” Schoenberg himself made an approving note: “There is a great Man living in this Country—a composer. He has solved the problem how to preserve one’s self-esteem and to learn [sic]. He responds to negligence by contempt. He is not forced to accept praise or blame. His name is Ives.” Later, the legend of Ives the innovator underwent skeptical scrutiny. The author Maynard Solomon wrote a paper alleging that Ives had backdated his scores in an effort to establish his precedence in the race toward atonality. Gayle Sherwood countered by proving that the composer had been tinkering with outlandish harmonies as early as 1898.

  Whatever the outcome of that debate, Ives’s originality really resides not in his outré chords but in his heterogeneous combinations of American sounds. Like Berg and Bartók, he ranged back and forth between folkish simplicity and dissonance. “Why tonality as such should be thrown out for good, I can’t see,” Ives once wrote. “Why it should always be present, I can’t see.”

  In early experimental works such as From the Steeples and the Mountains and The Unanswered Question, Ives experimented with hyperrealistic reproductions of everyday sonic events. In the first piece, bells ring out from multiple village steeples and echo against the mountains. In the second, spells of nervous, dissonant activity are set against a serene, soft swell of strings, evoking the querulousness of stranded human voices amid the indifferent vastness of nature. In the Second Symphony, finished around 1909, Ives opens the old Teutonic form to what the musicologist J. Peter Burkholder calls “borrowed tunes”: American hymns, marches, and ditties on the order of “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” “Pig Town Fling,” “Beulah Land,” “De Camptown Races,” “Turkey in the Straw,” “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” These swirl together with quotations from Brahms, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and Dvoák himself, provocatively leveling the European-American balance.

  Finally, in mature large-scale works such as the Holidays Symphony, the Concord Sonata, and the Third and Fourth symphonies, Ives forges forms that could do justice to his all-American material. Rather than set forth musical ideas in orderly fashion at the outset of a piece, Ives follows a process that Burkholder names “cumulative form”: themes materialize from a nebula of possibilities, then build toward a brief, blinding epiphany. In the Third Symphony the epiphany takes the form of the hymn tune “Woodworth” singing out crisply at the end. The tumultuous, magisterial Fourth concludes with a thick fantasia on “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  Three Places in New England, begun around 1914 and finished as late as 1929, is Ives’s deepest meditation on American myth. Coincidentally or not, it is also the work in which the black experience matters most. Ives gave clues to his intentions in the autobiographical Memos and in the book Essays Before a Sonata, both of which touch on the relationship between black and white music. On first reading, the argument may seem predictably prejudiced. Rejecting Dvoák’s program for a Negro-based American music, Ives insists that the spirituals had their origins in white gospel hymns and that the Negroes had “exaggerated” this white material. Ragtime, he writes in Essays Before a Sonata, “does not ‘represent the American nation’ any more than some fine old senators represent it.” One cannot make music from ragtime any more than one can make a meal of “tomato ketchup and horse-radish.”

  Then the argument takes an interesting turn. A composer may make use of Negro or Indian motifs, Ives says, if he identifies deeply with the spirit burning in them—“fervently, transcendentally, inevitably, furiously.” One must possess the same passion for truth that drove the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, who shouted down and shamed a pro-slavery faction at Boston’s Faneuil Hall in 1837. Otherwise, the composer should look to his own heritage. What Ives seems to be saying is that the white hymns are no less fervent than the black; singers of all colors bend notes to express their spirit. In the end, Ives flatly states, “an African soul under an X-ray looks identically like an American soul.”

  Ives took pride in the fact that his family had long embraced African-American causes. His grandparents, outspoken abolitionists, had given support to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, an industrial school for Negroes and Native Americans. After the Civil War, George Ives and his parents more or less adopted a black boy named Henry Anderson Brooks and sent him to study at Hampton. Ives evidently heard ragtime early on, perhaps at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which he attended during a summer off from high school. (He seems to have missed the fiasco of Colored People’s Day by a day or two.) He often played spirituals on the piano. At one point he planned a set of pieces dealing with black America; it would have included The Abolitionists, a dramatization of Wendell Phillips’s Faneuil Hall oration.

  In the end, this material went into the first movement of Three Places in New England. “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and His Colored Regiment)” takes as its subject Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief sculpture of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry, one of the Union’s first African-American regiments, which lost more than one hundred men in an assault on the Confederate stronghold of Battery Wagner in 1863. At the head of the score Ives placed a poem of his own composition, in which he depicted “Faces of Souls” marching through pain toward freedom, led along by the “drum-beat of the common-heart.” Whether any given tune in “St. Gaudens” represents the soul of a black soldier or a white officer is difficult to make out, but the fact that the composer sometimes called the piece his “Black March” suggests that he considered the Colored Regiment its protagonist.

  The score of Three Plac
es in New England is held at the Yale University Music Library. A bundle of revisions, additions, and last-minute corrections, it exemplifies the composer’s unruly working methods. One inspiration occurred to Ives late in the game: he decided to insert a soft, cloudy, brooding chord of six notes at the head of the “St. Gaudens” movement. The chord fuses triads of A minor and D-sharp minor, and, as in Salome and the Rite, the tritone gap between them hints at unresolved and perhaps unresolvable conflict—in this case, perhaps the Civil War itself. Out of that mist of sound, a host of hymns and songs emerge, and tunes with African-American associations take precedence. Early on, two Stephen Foster songs, “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground,” make appearances. Later come “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Marching Through Georgia,” a burst of ragtime, and “Deep River.” The “white” tunes are given a relatively straitlaced setting, indicative of the Boston rectitude of Colonel Shaw. “Deep River,” that mightiest of spirituals, sounds in noble, lonely tones on the horn.

  The tunes converge in what the musicologist Denise Von Glahn has described as an orchestral reenactment of the Colored Regiment’s suicidal siege of Battery Wagner. A C-major chord is pierced by a dissonant B: Colonel Shaw is struck by a bullet as he cries, “Forward, Fifty-fourth!” The “rally round the flag” motif from “The Battle Cry of Freedom” blares out over a stumbling, collapsing march sequence: Sergeant William H. Carney, the first African-American to receive the Medal of Honor, carries the flag above the fray. In the hush that ensues, “Old Black Joe” and “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” play once more, leading into a brief, bluesy lament for solo cello. At the end comes a hazy “Amen”—perhaps a funeral procession going up the steps of a church.