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Will Marion Cook
The early history of African-American composition, at the end of the nineteenth
century and the beginning of the twentieth, is full of sorrowful tales. Scott Joplin,
the composer of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” spent his last years in
a futile effort to stage his opera Treemonisha, which vibrantly blended bel canto
melody and rag rhythm. Syphilis invaded Joplin’s brain, and he died insane in
1917. Harry Lawrence Freeman, the founder of the Negro Grand Opera
Company in Harlem, wrote two Wagnerian tetralogies with black characters,
only one part of which was ever staged. Saddest of all, perhaps, was the case
of Maurice Arnold Strothotte, whom Dvořák singled out as “the most promising
and gifted” of his American pupils. Arnold’s American Plantation Dances was
played at a National Conservatory concert in 1894 to much applause. The
conductor-scholar Maurice Peress has shown that Dvořák’s familiar
Humoresque borrowed from an episode in Arnold’s work. The conservatory
concert was, unfortunately, the high-water mark of the young man’s career. He
continued writing music—an opera titled The Merry Benedicts, music for silent
films, an American Rhapsody, a Symphony in F Minor—but performances were
few. Instead, he made a living conducting operetta and teaching violin. Like the
hero of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, he
apparently stopped identifying as black, living out his final years in the heavily
German neighborhood of Yorkville. Oblivion engulfed him all the same.
Other stories had happier endings. The little-known life of the violinist,
composer, conductor, and teacher Will Marion Cook serves as a useful case
study in the development of African-American music from 1900 to 1930. If this
charismatic, obstinate personality ultimately failed in his quest to conquer the
classical realm, he did experience moments of triumph, and blazed a separate
trail for many black artists who followed him. Among other things, he forms a
direct link between Dvořák and Duke Ellington.
Cook’s biography, sketchily documented, has been pieced together by the
scholar Marva Griffin Carter. Born in 1869, Cook grew up in Washington, D.C.,
the son of middle-class parents. When his father died, he went to live with his
grandparents in Chattanooga, where his arrogance created the sorts of
disciplinary problems that are often noted in youngsters of unusual talent. He
used to go to the top of Lookout Mountain, outside Chattanooga, to plot his
future fame. In his unpublished autobiography, he wrote: “I would … remain
there till late at night, planning my whole life, how I would study, become a great
musician, and do something about race prejudice … Somehow I felt that such
music might be the lever by which my people could raise their status. All my life
I’ve dreamed dreams, but never more wonderful or more grandiose dreams
than those inspired by Lookout Mountain.”
Cook was then accepted into Oberlin, one of very few American colleges where
black students could enroll alongside whites. A professor noticed his skill as a
violinist and advised him to study with Joseph Joachim, who headed the
Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. With some assistance from the slave-turned-
orator Frederick Douglass, who belonged to Mrs. Cook’s social circle, the boy
gained admittance to Joachim’s academy.
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The Kaiser’s Berlin proved surprisingly welcoming. According to the
autobiography, titled Hell of a Life, Joachim took the young African-American
under his wing, expressing a liking for his passionate playing and his untamed
personality. “You are a stranger in a strange land,” the violinist supposedly said.
“We are going to become friends. Come to my house for lunch Sunday.” At
Joachim’s gatherings Cook could have met or glimpsed many of the leading
personalities of German music, including Hans von Bülow and the young
Richard Strauss. In the winter of 1889, none other than Johannes Brahms came
to the Hochschule to celebrate Joachim’s fiftieth anniversary as a performer. In
all, Cook seems to have enjoyed his time in Germany; the sight of a black
violinist was apparently too exotic to arouse racial fears.
Compare the experiences of W. E. B. Du Bois, who began studying economics
and history in Berlin just as Cook left. According to David Levering Lewis’s
biography, Du Bois “felt exceptionally free” during his Berlin sojourn—“more
liberated … than he would ever feel again.” On a train ride to Lübeck, Du Bois
sang Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—“All men will be brothers”—and dreamed of a
better world. The young philosopher also became enamored of the Wagner
operas, gaining from them an appreciation of how art could inflame national and
racial spirit. In his story “Of the Coming of John,” which appeared in The Souls
of Black Folk, a Southern youth named John Jones attends a performance of
Lohengrin and feels in it the contours of a better life: “A deep longing swelled in
all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life
that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air
where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood!” Then—here Du Bois
reveals his “double-consciousness,” his awareness of how even the most
“cultured” black man is perceived—an usher taps John on the shoulder and
asks him to leave.
That tap on the shoulder, metaphorical or not, Will Marion Cook came to know
well when he returned to America. He tried to make his name as a violinist,
advertising himself improbably as a “musical phenomenon performing some of
the masterpieces upon his violin with one hand.” Making little headway, he then
formed the William Marion Cook Orchestra, with Frederick Douglass as
honorary president. At around the same time, Cook wrote, or began writing, an
opera based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most significantly,
in 1893, he went to Chicago to participate in the World’s Columbian Exposition,
a momentous event at which America declared its new status as a world power.
In an effort to counteract the stereotypes of black savagery that figured in some
of the fair’s displays—crowds flocked to watch and hear the African drummers
of Dahomey Village—Douglass organized a Colored People’s Day, which aimed
to affirm the nobility of the black American experience. Newspapers mocked
Douglass by speculating that watermelons would be sold in bulk.
Colored People’s Day was to have featured excerpts from Cook’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, but the singer Sissieretta Jones failed to receive the travel advance that
she needed to make the trip, and the performance was canceled. Yet the
exposition wasn’t a total waste for Cook. He obtained a letter of introduction to
Dvořák, who evidently invited him to study at the National Conservatory.
(Jeannette Thurber, the founder of the conservatory, had a policy of admitting
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Negro students free of charge.) There is little record of what Cook did during his
first years in New York, but circumstantial evidence suggests that racism put a
quick end to his dreams. One anecdote is cited in Duke Ellington’s memoir,
Music Is My Mistress. Cook makes his Carnegie Hall debut, and a critic hails
him as “the world’s greatest Negro violinist.” Cook barges in on the critic and
smashes his violin on the man’s desk. “I am not the world’s greatest Negro
violinist,” he shouts. “I am the greatest violinist in the world!” Marva Griffin
Carter finds no evidence that such an incident took place, but yelling matches
probably ensued as the temperamental Cook made the rounds of the concert
halls.
Barred from the classical world, Cook got work where he could find it. In 1898
he collaborated with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar on a musical revue titled
Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, which opened on Broadway with an
all-black cast. This was, at first glance, yet another self-denigrating minstrel
show full of talk of “coons” and “darkeys.” But, as Carter points out, the lyrics
often have a hidden sting, making “confrontational jabs” at white listeners. The
hit number “Darktown Is Out Tonight” delivers a prophecy of the coming
sovereignty of black music:
For the time
Comin’ mighty soon,
When the best,
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 Dvořák’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”
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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 Dvořák had forecast for African-
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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 Dvořák’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.”
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
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.
Charles attended Yale College, where he studied composition with Horatio
Parker, under whose tutelage he produced an expert, Dvořákian 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
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.
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
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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 Celestial Country.
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
Biographers have
added speculation that this athletic young male, Yale’s “Dasher” Ives, had a sort
of macho hangup 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.
The Amount to Carry,
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
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.”
Essays Before a Sonata, the companion volume to
his piano masterpiece, the Concord
Once Ives finally launched himself in the public eye, with the publication of the
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.”
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
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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,
Finally, in mature large-scale works such as the
Ives created 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 Dvořák himself,
provocatively leveling the European-American balance.
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
Dvořák’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,
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
“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.”
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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
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
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.”
The Abolitionists,
In the end, this material went into the first movement of
a
dramatization of Wendell Phillips’s Faneuil Hall oration.
Three Places in New
England.
The score of
“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.
Three Places in New England is held at the Yale University Music
Library. A bundle of revisions, additions, and lastminute 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.
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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.
What are we hearing? Is Ives seriously suggesting that black soldiers in the
Civil War sang “Hear dat mournful sound” as they went into battle? Presumably
not. As the title indicates, the work is inspired not by the battle itself but by
Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture in honor of it. This is Shaw’s regiment, as seen by
Saint-Gaudens, as seen again by Ives. We are looking back through the eyes of
a turn-of-the-century Yankee who cannot sing as the black soldiers sang. When
he thinks “Negro,” Foster tunes come to mind, as well as anachronistic strains
of ragtime. Even so, by shattering these trite associations into fragments, Ives
draws closer to the source. The movement seems to look ahead to black music
of the near or distant future: the jagged country blues of Skip James, the
dreaming chords of Ellington’s symphonic jazz, John Coltrane’s “sheets of
sound.” Such resemblances may be nothing more than accidents, but Ives’s
whole method was to plan accidents. He was incapable of asserting a
monolithic point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening
room, a space of limitless echoes.
The Jazz Age
Ives wisely waited until 1920 before trying seriously to publicize his modern
Transcendentalist style. Ten years earlier, his work would have made little
sense to listeners reared on the courtly values of the Gilded Age. But in the
period of the Roaring Twenties there emerged what the scholar Carol Oja has
called a “marketplace for modernism,” an audience more receptive to disruptive
sounds.
Cawing trombone glissandos defined the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917
track “Livery Stable Blues,” the first jazz record to capture national attention.
Around the same time, audiences were cheering the immigrant Ukrainian
pianist-composer Leo Ornstein, a.k.a. “Ornstein the Keyboard Terror,” who
offered up savage discords and slam-bang virtuosity. Ornstein’s most startling
effect, co-invented with the California experimentalist Henry Cowell, was the
“cluster chord,” in which three or more adjacent notes are struck with the hand,
the fist, or the forearm. Somehow, Ornstein succeeded in generating an early
form of the mass hysteria that would later greet Benny Goodman, Frank
Sinatra, and the Beatles. One crowd was said to have “mobbed the lobbies,
marched at intervals to the stage, and long clung there to walls, to organ-pipes,
pedal-base, stairs, or any niche offering a view.”
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American music had grown from a well-behaved Eurocentric childhood into a
rambunctious adolescence. Oja, in her book Making Music Modern, compares
several leading composers of the period to “commuters who emerge baffled
from the subway, peering in all directions to ground their location.” Some
adopted the strategy of avant-garde assault, firing off dissonances and
percussive timbres that outdid the most unusual sound combinations of
Stravinsky and the Viennese. They were dubbed the “ultra-moderns.” Others
aimed to ingratiate themselves with the concert-going public, garnishing opera
and symphony with dollops of jazz. On the other side of the shaky popular-
classical divide, young Broadway masters like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern,
Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin copped devices from
grand opera and modern music, on their way to creating a new type of through-
composed music theater. They, too, were part of Manhattan’s “modernist
marketplace,” as Oja calls it. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington,
Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, and Paul Whiteman,
among others, were determining the fundamentals of the art of jazz. Almost all
the above-named were born in the years just before or just after 1900, and they
would dominate American music for decades to come.
Edgard Varèse, chieftain of the ultra-moderns, later recalled: “I became a sort of
diabolic Parsifal, searching not for the Holy Grail but the bomb that would make
the musical world explode and thereby let in all sounds, sounds which up to
now—and even today—have been called noises.”
Varese, born in 1883, came to New York from the Paris avantgarde, where he
patronized some of the same occult Rosicrucian gatherings that had intrigued
Debussy and Satie. After writing for a time in a style that evidently fell
somewhere between Debussy and Strauss—his early scores were
subsequently destroyed in a fire—Varese took an interest in Italian Futurism
and its “art of noise.” In 1915, having been released from the French army on
medical grounds, he decided to try his fortunes in New York City. There, he fell
in with a cosmopolitan group of artists, both native and expatriate, who were
forging a distinctively American avant-garde, visceral in impact and exuberant in
tone. Among them were Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who made art
from everyday objects and eroticized the machine. The American critic Paul
Rosenfeld, an orotund advocate of avant-garde music in the twenties and
thirties, identified these artists as avatars of “skyscraper mysticism,” by which
he meant a “feeling of the unity of life through the forms and expression of
industrial civilization, its fierce lights, piercing noises, compact and synthetic
textures; a feeling of its immense tension, dynamism, ferocity, and also its
fabulous delicacy and precision.”
Varèse’s music owes much to the cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms of
the Rite, but any trace of folklore or popular melody has been surgically
excised. His first major American work was, appropriately, Amériques, or
Americas, a gargantuan orchestral movement composed between 1919 and
1922. It echoed the sounds and rhythms of New York along the Hudson River
and around the Brooklyn Bridge—the noise of traffic, the wail of sirens, the
moaning of foghorns. The orchestra consisted of twenty-two winds, twenty-nine
brass, sixty-six strings, and a vast battery of percussion requiring nine or ten