Ralph de Toledano
American Music: Classical, Popular, & Jazz

Cleveland Regional Meeting of The Philadelphia Society
September 21, 2002

The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once remarked that a musical work required three people: Composer, performer, and critic.  Of these, two are mandatory, for a musical score, unlike a poem, is incomplete until it has been delivered to the ear.   The critic is something else again, and though I may comment on everything from Gregorian chant to Igor Stravinsky, American “serious” music is not my bag.  It is with this lack in mind that I present myself.  My musical education, I confess, began when I was seven and I was taken by the hand to Juilliard for testing to determine whether I had the makings of a wunderkind.  It took several years before I had convinced my family that I was not Yehudi Menuhin.  I could, by that time, make noises with a violin and could follow a score by Mozart, but nothing more complex. It was my involvement in the renascence of jazz—plus the fact that as editor of campus publications I was receiving free records—that led me back to earlier music.  That reawakening carried me from the pre-Baroque of Frescobaldi to our times—though I remain forever hung up on Hector Berlioz.  Commenting on the American aspects of music, namely the so-called classical and jazz is my assigned theme—and to this I have added what is called “popular” music.  I am perhaps the wrong person to offer insights into “the American classical product.” No one, to my knowledge, has offered a convincing explanation of why British music ended with the passing of Purcell and his contemporaries.  Similarly, it can be asked why, in the so-called “serious” forms, an America which dominated poetic composition since the second decade of the Twentieth century, still lives in Europe.  It’s as if, in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing, the characters spoke in Oxford accents.  What music of distinction was composed on this side of the Atlantic here in the Twenties and Thirties—Stravinsky’s and Bartok’s come to mind—were ours courtesy of Hitler and Stalin.  This country, which has more concert halls and symphony orchestras than all of Europe, has produced little that is native. 

Virgil Thomson is a case in point.  He, like Aaron Copland and most other Americans writing for the concert hall in the past century, learned their art in Paris at the feet of Nadia Boulanger, or in the stews of Weimar Berlin and Vienna.  Thomson is a composer of great merit.  And his score for the Depression film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, speaks in an idiom that is truly American, and responds to the American love of melody. But most of his work, like the opera Four Saints in Three Acts (libretto by Gertrude Stein), is a prisoner of another geist.  Copland in his later work turned from orchestrating the Talmud to Western folk themes as in his ballet Rodeo but other than this thematic borrowing, he gives us nothing that could not have been written by Darius Milhaud.  Richard Rodgers’ ballet, Slaughter on Tenth Avenue is more to the point. 

A case may be made for John Cage.  He is held in the highest esteem by our most distinguished critics as one of this country’s finest composers, who reflects the hustle and clang of industrial and urban America.  Cage set out to produce what Virgil Thomson would admiringly describe as “a homogenized chaos that would carry no program, no plot, no reminders of beauty, and no personal statement”—all tied somehow to Arnold Schoenberg’s twelve-tone clusters.  A 1940 work employed brake bands, flowerpots, electric buzzers, and other noise-makers.  In a later work for harpsichord, he employed 52 tape machines, 59 power amplifiers, 64 slide projectors, etc, constituting what one critic lauded as “an art of noises.”  But perhaps out of pity, Cage’s later works includes 4:33. Its three movements consist of 4 minutes and 33 seconds of complete silence.  

George Gershwin is, of course, the exception.  His larger works—in theme, in approach, and in content, captured the urban American spirit without resorting to the bowdlerizations of the academy.  Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and his other orchestral works have often been given the back-of-the-hand by critics for not challenging Mozart and by jazz aficionados who label them with an oxymoronic sneer as “symphonic jazz” on a par  with the pretensions of Paul Whiteman’s full orchestra.  Gershwin died while still young, studying form and structure, and a long way from his full potential. 

His art and genius were rooted in jazz and popular song, out of Tin Pan Alley and that truly American vehicle, musical comedy.  We look down our noses at Tin Pan Alley, as if it was still Yes, We Have No Bananas.  But it gave us such giants of song as Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and other in and out of musical comedy—melodies which we took into our lives, because they reflected those lives in their musical cadences and lyrics.  The American popular ballad, James T. Maher notes in his introduction to Alec Wilder’s analytical study, American Popular Song, “took on and consolidated certain native characteristics—verbal, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic—that distinguished it from the popular song of other countries…It used the aural grammar of Western diatonic music…But the sum of its distinctions was unique.”  The influences were many, some coming out of the blues and ragtime and it is as soundly constructed but far more interesting than leider. 

Musical comedy grew out of popular song and fed it, and both along with jazz were America’s greatest contribution to music.  For musical comedy booted off the stagethe vapidities of Viennese operetta and the vulgarities of the British music hall.  Musical comedy and popular song also provided vehicles for singers in a special bandstand and nightclub genre, related to jazz.  But this musical and cultural field is a topic in itself. 

It is a question whether jazz will survive its rape in the Ken Burns series Public Broadcasting.   That series was full of historical and musical errors—which is easy in dealing with jazz—but its basic them that jazz is strictly African-American in derivation is entirely false and reversely racist.  When the Swing Era broke upon us in the mid-1930s I was one of a group of young critics, many of us still in college, who tried to define the music which Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and many others were playing—and to dig back to the roots.  The easy answer was that jazz is performance.  But if we played Vivaldi as we play Stravinsky, where would we be?  As we investigated jazz, we leaned heavily on the recordings made from 1917 on—when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band opened at Reisenweber’s in New York to tremendous and unwarranted acclaim—and in such descriptive wirings as we could find. In time, solemn critics would tell us that jazz was the application of “pentatonic thinking to the diatomic scale”—which was not very helpful. 

Instrumental techniques are, of course, important.  A jazz musician hits a note on the head, whereas his classical cousin slips into it.  Jazz musicians phrase differently, mostly because no one taught them to do it the way Juilliard dictates.  And since most early jazz musicians could not read music, they had an open field based on their inventiveness and the quality of their ear, free of any score.  Instrumental techniques, moreover, were revolutionized by Louis Armstrong, cornet, and Sidney Bechet, clarinet and soprano saxophone.  It is amusing to recall that when Louis Armstrong played at Paris’s Salle Pleyel, hitting C above high C and E above high C, suspicious French musicians inspected his horn, convinced that something had been added to the instrument. 

Jazz is also rhythm.  But its rhythms, contrary to pious opinion, did not come from Afria.  African music is basically drumming—and this is so complex that it is impossible to score.  Whereas jazz drumming, which gives it the beat, was a simple 6/8 over 2/4 which, except from a persistent Dixieland strain, became 4/4—plus syncope.  And that syncope derived not from West Africa but from the movement and the rhythm of levee workers, as they slung cargo, the work pats of field hands, and the surge of New Orleans marching bands.  And the syncope did not spring out of Africa, but was a device in the jam sessions Frescobaldi held at the Vatican in pre-Baroque times. 

The musical expression which formed jazz had no roots in Africa except in the psyche of those who played it.  This is not to gainsay the tremendous contribution made by slaves and freemen in the South.  But the spiritual evolved from the four-part hymns sung in white churches.  So did its secular cousin, the blues, a twelve-bar form on an A-A-B pattern.  You can note that relationship in the Sorrow Song, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, or the rousing Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho  to the blues sung and recorded by Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and so many others of less talent but equal passion reflecting the life and loves of southern blacks.  The blues were everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line, with their diminished sevenths and thirds—the so-called “blue” notes discovered by musicologists long after jazz had adopted popular song.  W.C. Handy picked up the great blues tunes he heard, copyrighted them, and became “Father of the Blues.”  

There was that great voice and there was ragtime, which I suspect had no momma and no poppa.  And there was New Orleans, a city with a wide and eclectic musical culture.  European opera and song, the Hispano-African dance rhythms of Latin America, and the bamboula which was chanted and danced to in the city’s Congo Square.  Mix it in with ragtime and you had jazz—hailed at first in Europe by such conductors as Ernst Ansermet and given cult status by Hugues Panassie and the Hot Club of France years later.  Jazz had been moving up the Mississippi on the riverboats, making stops in Kansas City and points east and west.  But when Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels shut down Storyville, the great New Orleans redlight section, in order to preserve the morals of our sailors—putting out of work the “professors” who played piano in the sporting houses and stifling the great musical activity of the city, it moved up, almost in a body to Chicago, and then to Harlem and the West Coast. 

Of the greatest importance as an element of jazz is its collective improvisation as it was played from its origins and into the present.  New Orleans had brought together all the elements I have mentioned.  In collective improvisations, the great instrumentalists of jazz and their minor followers could sing out, unconfined by the written arrangements of the dance orchestras, giving us the thrill of being present at the creation.  But jazz had not always been what we heard in the mid-1930s.  In Chicago it met a white influx—from the genius of Bix Beiderbecke to the Austin High School gangs to individual musicians like the trombonist Jack Teagarden, fresh out of Texas, to an ambitious Jewish boy n amed Benny Goodman. 

Swing, which eliminated collective improvisation, was an offshoot of jazz.  But in New York and other big cities, the small bands which had barely survived and the musicians who had stayed alive by playing in the “sweet” dance orchestras, came into their own.  And it was the small bands which gave us what we were already calling the “righteous” music.  “More than eight men and it ain’t jazz,” the true jazzmen argued, and that was more important than all the hype about the big bands.  But more importantly, jazz had moved out of its ghetto, out of the records, later to become collectors’ items, which kept the tradition alive.  It was recognized as America’s contribution to a music now lost in atonality and hyper-intellectualism.  I do not have the time to discuss who made jazz what it was, with horn or saxophone or at the drums, or its great innovators like Jelly Roll Morton, or Duke Ellington who gave it another dimension. 

New Orleans, the land of dreams, gave America a music of its own—and though its beat and its song has been drowned by the meanderings of bop and eventually the obscenities of rap, it left its stamp.  Hot jazz as we knew it is a scarce experience, but we still have the records—come on’a my house and I’ll play them for you—a pantheon of musical heroes, and a precious memory.