The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization

by Howard Goodall

  Dvořák’s clear and oft-stated aim at the college, published in newspaper articles shortly after his arrival, was to encourage young American composers to adopt and develop the melodies of Native American and African-American communities in their orchestral music, as he and his Bohemian students had done with Czech and Slavic folk music back in Prague. He wrote,

  I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States… These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil… These are the folk songs of America, and your composers must turn to them… In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay, or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

  Dvořák’s optimism was as much scoffed at as admired, and his comments about ‘Negro music’ made front-page news on both sides of the Atlantic. Italian composer Puccini remarked a few years later, ‘There is no such thing as American music. What they have is Negro music, which is almost the savagery of sound.’ Added to European snobbery was white American scepticism about Dvořák’s public statements. Bostonian composer Edward MacDowell, who himself had trained in Paris and Frankfurt rather than America, and who mostly wrote German-style music, responded, ‘We have here in America been offered a pattern for an American national music costume by the Bohemian Dvořák… though what Negro melodies have to do with Americanism in art still remains a mystery.’ Nonetheless, MacDowell’s own mother, Frances, did provide a scholarship for a young African-American musician, Harry Thacker Burleigh, to join Dvořák’s classes at the National Conservatory of Music, where he introduced the Bohemian composer to spirituals and assisted him with orchestral part-copying. Burleigh arranged some of these spirituals, published in 1901 as Six Plantation Melodies for Violin and Piano, and later had considerable success with song arrangements of spirituals and the composition of sentimental ballads, including ‘Little Mother of Mine’ (1917), ‘Dear Old Pal of Mine’ and ‘Under a Blazing Star’ (1918). Of Dvořák’s other students, Rubin Goldmark responded to his call to arms with a setting of Longfellow’s Hiawatha and, in 1923, one year before the première of his own pupil George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a Negro Rhapsody. Dvořák’s other notable student, organist and composer Harry Rowe Shelley, may not have heeded the call as conscientiously, certainly not if his orchestral works Souvenir de Baden-Baden and The Crusaders are anything to go by.

  But if Dvořák’s teaching methods raised eyebrows among his adopted countrymen, his own American compositions were to prove even more controversial. His New World symphony of 1894 in particular was scrutinised for the extent to which it was actually ‘American’, the original source of its melodies, and whether it was even Dvořák’s right to appropriate folk music styles (if not actual melodies) of another community for his composition.

  One very vocal opponent of the tide of ethnic imitation was the writer, civil rights activist and co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W. E. B. Du Bois. He was at pains to point out in The Conservation of Races (1897) and in his seminal essay collection The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the slave (‘Sorrow’) songs of the plantations were not, as Dvořák would have it, a national resource open to all Americans. Rather they were quite specifically the voice of the oppressed African-American – ‘these songs are the articulate message of the slave to the world’ – and should remain so. He described having heard the ‘Sorrow’ songs as a child, including ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, which he called ‘the cradle-song of Death’, recalling that they ‘came out of the South unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine… This was primitive African music… the voice of exile.’ For Du Bois, the Negro people of America had to resist absorption into white America: ‘their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals… We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today. We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy’.

  One of the New World symphony’s greatest controversies concerns its slow movement, still instantly recognisable thanks to its innocently memorable tune, rather like a hymn, and also because it was subsequently co-opted for a bread commercial in which it evoked rural Edwardian England (which fact in itself should alert us to the dangers of music’s ability to reinforce ‘national’ characteristics). Its similarity to a hymn tune was spotted not long after its première at Carnegie Hall in December 1893, since it was given holy words and turned into a sacred song, ‘Goin’ home’, by another of Dvořák’s pupils, William Arms Fisher. Persistent claims have been made that Dvořák heard the tune from Harry Burleigh, a theory proposed, for example, in a 1922 letter written by the composer Victor Herbert: ‘Dr Dvorak was most kind and unaffected and took great interest in his pupils, one of which, Harry Burleigh, had the privilege of giving the Dr some of the thematic material for his Symphony… I have seen this denied – but it is true.’2 Burleigh himself later wrote, ‘I gave him what I knew of Negro songs – no one called them spirituals then – and he wrote some of my tunes (my people’s music) into the New World Symphony.’ Another claim was made for African-American guitarist W. Philips Dabney who suggested it was based on his own plantation melody ‘Uncle Remus’, which he had played to Dvořák in his Conservatory office and, he reported, copied down on to manuscript. The tune has often been compared to the spiritual ‘Deep River’, while another of the symphony’s melodies has been likened to ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’.

  Dvořák certainly intended his symphony’s skipping rhythms and melodic shapes derived from the five pentatonic notes we have encountered before (the ‘black’ notes on a keyboard), those common to all the world’s music cultures, to sound like those of Native American peoples. Even before his arrival in America, he had read a musicological essay published in Germany in 1882 called ‘On the Music of the North American Indians’. He stressed, though, with regard to the symphony, ‘I have not actually used any of the Native American melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint and orchestral colour.’

  Further stimulus for enquiry regarding Dvořák’s sources for the tunes in the New World symphony were prompted by his admission that he had previously been developing ideas for a musical setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem, loosely based on Indian tribal legends, The Song of Hiawatha. Dvořák abandoned the Hiawatha project but claimed to have absorbed research he had conducted for it into his musical thinking for the symphony. Without definitive documentary evidence of particular sources we may never know if this research included tribal melodies he later passed off as his own. (By far and away the period’s most successful setting of Longfellow’s poem was The Song of Hiawatha, an oratorio trilogy completed in 1900 by English mixed-race composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The hugely oversubscribed première of its first instalment, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, in November 1898 at the Royal College of Music, was described by the composer Sir Hubert Parry as ‘one of the most remarkable events in modern English musical history’.)

  Just as Longfellow’s intention in writing the poem was not colonial exploitation but rather an attempt to portray the Native American tribespeople as ‘noble savages’ with much in their folklore to value and enjoy, so Dvořák’s aim in composing his symphony was to raise the aspirations of
American music-makers and music lovers. He wanted them to have pride in their own heritage, not to see it as a second-rate imitation of European culture. The irony of course was, as Leonard Bernstein pointed out in a blow-by-blow analysis of the symphony in 1956, that in his well-meaning but superficial imitation of ‘primitive’ Native American and African-American melody types, Dvořák’s style also sounded like that of other non-mainstream cultures. These included Chinese and Scottish, as well as some Eastern European ethnic folk music. Dvořák himself acknowledged that irony, saying in a newspaper interview, ‘I found that the music of the Negroes and of the Indians was practically identical,’ going on to affirm that ‘the music of the two races bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland’. James Huneker, reviewing the first performance of the symphony, identified the ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ theme in the first movement, describing it as ‘negro or oriental, just as you choose’.

  All of which brings us to the question of whether it is legitimate to plunder the musical content of another community’s cultural inheritance, placing it in an alien and artificial milieu for the benefit of a very different audience. Why did it matter whether Dvořák’s source melodies for the symphony were borrowed from Native American and African-American folk songs, or whether they were newly composed? It mattered because Dvořák’s New World symphony has to be seen in the context of the period. American territorial expansion in the nineteenth century had repeatedly been justified by a firm belief in ‘Manifest Destiny’ – the notion that white Americans had a God-given right, or even duty, to colonise the whole continent. Time and again, though, Manifest Destiny was revealed as little more than a euphemism for the violent appropriation of Native American land for the benefit of white settlers. Would survivors and relatives of the Lakota Sioux Indians butchered at the Wounded Knee Massacre, which took place just three years before the symphony’s first performance, have recognised its melodies as theirs? If they had, would they not have seen it as yet another form of theft?

  Even Dvořák, champion of African-American musical advancement (one hundred and fifty of his six hundred students at the National Conservatory were black, a startling statistic of integration in a deeply segregated age), was able to dismiss some Native American culture as all but worthless: ‘I have heard black singers in Haiti for hours and, as a rule, their songs are not unlike the monotonous and crude chantings of the Sioux tribes.’ The moral debate as to whether it is ethical for a richer people to adapt the music of a poorer people for their musical entertainment – often uncredited and unpaid – has never gone away and is just as hotly debated in our own time, not least in the fields of Blues, jazz and world music. We will meet it again in the next chapter.

  But for the time being, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was another great controversy on the horizon. Indeed, any unease generated by Dvořák’s relationship with the culture of oppressed peoples was a walk in the park compared to the hornet’s nest provoked by Liszt’s most needy and argumentative disciple of them all: Richard Wagner.

  The colossus of Wagner is an inescapable reality of late-nineteenth-century music, indeed of recent Western civilisation. He is both brilliant and problematical, and it is fair to say that his towering legacy has had more impact on the worlds of literature, philosophy and politics than, strictly speaking, on musical development. This is because his style was so particular, his agenda so ambitious and his stature as a German national figure so all-embracing that other composers found it impossible (or unpalatable) to follow his example.

  Of Liszt’s many gifts to the musical world, arguably his most significant is what he mostly unintentionally taught this man who would eventually become his son-in-law. Wagner’s debt to Liszt is so great, in fact, that it is fair to say there is no innovation, no technique, no supposed great leap forward in expression or style anywhere in Wagner’s monumental output that is not found somewhere, first, in Liszt. Sometimes, as in the final movement of Liszt’s Dante symphony, ‘Purgatorio’, composed in 1856, it is as if whole passages have found their way – doubtless subliminally – into Wagner’s texture (in that case, Tristan und Isolde). Elsewhere, the gifts are technical. Take Wagner’s dismantling of harmony.

  One of Wagner’s favourite tricks was to take the building block of all Western harmony – the common triad – and either squash it slightly, to make a diminished chord, or enlarge it slightly to make an augmented chord. Diminishing or augmenting chords does strange things to the way they behave. They become unstable and have a tendency to unsettle the mood because they deviate from comfortable convention, seeking relationships with unfamiliar chords. They are music’s drifters and grifters. They create a sense of nervousness, of anxiety and uncertainty. Wagner uses them prolifically throughout his ten most famous operas to evoke pain or anguish, or to tell you something grim might be about to happen. In the first part of his epic Ring cycle, The Rhinegold, for example, angry diminished chords are often used to signify the dangerous power of the Ring itself.

  Diminishing and augmenting chords Wagner may have made his own, but they are all over Liszt’s daring, dark harmony. His Faust symphony of 1855 begins with an anguished opening theme entirely made up of augmented chords, followed not long after by an outbreak of demonic pain, punched out in a series of very loud diminished chords. (Liszt’s Faust is not just noteworthy for presaging Wagner. Its opening theme, albeit not instantly hummable, consists of twelve notes: it uses all twelve notes of the Western scale without repeating any of them. So what, you may ask? Well, when the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg proposed a new form of musical organisation, whereby a melody was obliged to use each of the twelve notes of the Western scale in a sequence before being allowed to repeat any of them, a method known as twelve-tone serialism, it threatened to bring about the collapse of musical civilisation as we know it. We shall encounter it later. The remarkable thing is that Liszt’s experiment with the same idea pre-dated Schoenberg by sixty-eight years.)

  Wagner’s debt to Liszt is evident even in Wagner’s most famous chord – so famous, in fact, that it has its own name. Whole books have been written about it and academics have built careers on it. It is called the ‘Tristan’ chord. The Tristan chord comes from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, and while it has been accorded the kind of mystique and reverence usually reserved for Newton’s First Law or Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, it is, when all is said and done – wait for it – a diminished chord.

  It has been credited, the humble Tristan chord, with signalling the end of four hundred years of order in Western harmony and the beginning of modernity – a bold claim, to say the least, and even bolder considering Liszt had been using this chord, and many others of its ilk, for years before Wagner wrote it into the opening phrase of Tristan und Isolde some time between 1857 and 1859.

  Notwithstanding Wagner’s debt to Liszt, it would be churlish not to stress that the greatest composers have always tended to synthesise the styles and currents of their time, that they were not necessarily innovators, and Wagner’s music in any case has far better tunes than Liszt’s. Tristan und Isolde is an out-and-out masterpiece, with sweeping, yearning themes, deserving of its place in music’s pantheon, whatever it may or may not have innovated. As a musical experience it is luxuriant and overwhelming, and has the two greatest build-ups to a climax in all music (only one of which is consummated, as it were; the first veers off at the last moment). What it is not, though, is the one thing that Wagner most wanted to bring to the world: musical drama. Clara Wieck Schumann saw the opera in Munich in 1875 and her summary says it all: ‘During the entire Second Act the two of them sleep and sing; through the entire last act – for fully forty minutes – Tristan dies. They call that dramatic!!!’ (Like Verdi’s La Traviata, twelve years earlier, Tristan is about a doomed love affair, death and destiny. Of course.)

  The relative inertia of Tristan’s plot, with so little action taking place over nearly six hours in the theatre, makes it closer in
form to an extended symphonic poem with singing than even Wagner’s other operas. It is the most extreme example in his catalogue of another striking hallmark of his style. It is not Italian.

  For a good part of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth century, the populist, light, tuneful Italian style of opera was what most people went to an opera house for. Italian style in opera was completely dominant. So much so that even an Austrian composer like Mozart should really be seen, stylistically, as a German-speaking Italian. All but one of his famous operas is literally Italian, from The Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte to La Clemenza di Tito and Don Giovanni. (The exception is his German ‘singing play’, The Magic Flute.) The other centre of operatic style in the nineteenth century was Paris, though French opera at that time was essentially a grander version of Italian opera. Wagner did not fit either of these moulds. Indeed, one of the reasons musicians from all over Europe flocked to hear Wagner’s music dramas at Bayreuth in the 1870s was because they were so radically out of step with the mainstream. Notwithstanding his debt to Liszt, Wagner’s sound was, to them, incredibly daring and original. The essence of that originality was to take what composers normally did in symphonies – long, abstract, streams of ‘pure’ instrumental music – and turn it into a sung drama on stage. Even the idea of attempting this was bracingly novel.