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

by Howard Goodall

  It is entirely understandable that there should be sensitivity about the non-African elements in the origin of the Blues, since the music of the slaves from which it sprang was so often a lament or protestation against the harsh treatment they received. But music does not observe racial or national boundaries; it is, as we have seen repeatedly, open and available to all cultures, owned by none. Whatever elements went into its kit of parts, the early Blues musicians made something unique and lasting of their own. The issue of ownership in the breakneck speed of growth and dissemination of popular music styles was to recur time and time again in the twentieth century, with the poorest, least visible musicians often finding their creativity swallowed up in the commercial exploitation that went with it.

  The intermingling of styles and traditions that gave birth to the Blues can be seen in the arrival, at around the same time, of ‘rag’ or ‘ragtime’ music, which reached its apogee in the sheet-music publications of Scott Joplin (1867–1917). It had originated in the bars and brothels of St Louis and Chicago, where house pianists copied the marching-band style popularised in the 1880s and ’90s by bandleaders such as John Philip Sousa. In order to emulate a whole band – bass, accompanying chords and tune – the solo pianist had to leap about the keys frantically, resulting in a rather virtuoso left-hand motion from bass to chord and back. On top of this accompanying oompah the rag pianists wove a catchy tune that pulled the rhythm around, a technique called syncopation. Syncopation is like talking with the emphasis on the wrong words to create a jerky sound.

  Ragtime picked up this playful jumping ahead of the tune from the banjo or piano accompaniments for ‘cakewalks’, also called ‘chalk-line walks’: parodic dancing competitions held by African-American communities, during which coconut cake may have been offered as a prize. Debussy, in Paris, cashed in on the popularity of cakewalk piano rags, with his ‘Golliwogg’s Cakewalk’ of 1908 – which incidentally also includes a jokey musical quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

  Ragtime’s syncopation fed directly into an energetic, driving piano style of the 1920s known as ‘stride’. The style was made famous in Harlem by the pianistic wizard James P. Johnson, a quintessential stride performance of his being ‘Harlem Strut’ of 1921. Ragtime’s revolutionary lovechild, though, was a hyper-syncopated form of piano and band playing that flickered into life in the 1910s in the Storyville district of New Orleans and which charismatic performers like Jelly Roll Morton took on tour around the Southern States in travelling vaudeville shows. Though Jelly Roll called a lot of his numbers ‘Blues’, we now know this as the beginning of a distinct genre of its own: jazz.

  The etymology of the term ‘jazz’ is hotly debated but the most likely derivation is from a non-musical nineteenth-century slang word, jasm, meaning energy, vigour or liveliness. Its choice of instruments – cornet, trombone, clarinet and tuba, supported by banjo, drums and sometimes piano – was heavily influenced by the practical windfall of an injection of cheap, ex-military band stock at the end of the 1898 Spanish-American War. Some elements of the marching-band style remained in the formation of street bands for funeral processions and for dancing, though these bands had a cheerful anarchy to them, each lead instrument taking its turn to improvise solos around the established chordal pattern or tune. The New Orleans prototypes acquired the generic label ‘Dixieland’, after the huge success of a band called the Original Dixieland Jazz (or ‘Jass’) Band, whose 1917 hit, ‘Livery Stable Blues’, sold a million copies.

  Despite jazz’s African-American origins in the Blues and in New Orleans’s funeral procession bands, the members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band itself were the children of white European immigrants. But as jazz spread from the red-light Basin Street area of New Orleans to the clubs of Chicago and New York, thriving in Prohibition-era speakeasies, it provided mobility most of all to black musicians who made up the critical mass of its player pool. Indeed, the spread of jazz into northern and Midwestern cities had coincided with the massively increased availability of wartime factory work, which had encouraged mass black migration in the same direction. Soon, the urban black working class would also have money in their pockets to buy the records of the jazz artists whose success for the first time proved that the American Dream might yet have some meaning for African-Americans after all.

  Up to this point in musical history – the first few years of the twentieth century – ethnic folk elements had been co-opted into classical music as subsidiary exotic flavouring. With the emergence of jazz, all this was to change. The unavoidable historical truth is that, despite their best efforts – and they were damned fine efforts, make no mistake – the classically trained composers of the early twentieth century were to be totally outflanked by the newer genres of Blues and jazz, which, as they made common cause with popular songwriters of exceptional skill and panache, swept all before them. Once the choice of which music thrived passed into the hands of an audience of millions through recording and later broadcasting, new priorities very rapidly started to prevail: popular music was taking centre stage while classical music began to move into the slipstream. How was classical music going to respond to this new, potentially fatal relationship between mass audiences and new genres that were irresistible to them? Was this a schism too far for the already reeling Western tradition to handle?

  Not quite. Faced with the twin rebellions of dissonant modernism and the mass market, the classical tradition found an ace up its sleeve and played it with impeccable timing. In a world of turmoil and change, its response was nostalgia. A work like Elgar’s Enigma Variations of 1899 typifies this response, self-consciously backward-looking in its thematic intentions, comprising as it does a series of affectionate portraits of his friends and family, as well as its musical character, with its homages to Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Brahms. Other interpretations of the nostalgic impulse abound as the nineteenth century slipped into the twentieth: Edvard Grieg’s Holberg suite (1884), Isaac Albéniz’s Tres Suites antiguas and Suite española (1886), Reynaldo Hahn’s Caprice mélancolique (1897), Maurice Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte (1899), Jean Sibelius’s Finlandia (1899), Carl Reinecke’s Serenade in G minor (1900), Max Bruch’s Serenade in A minor (1900), Hugo Alfvén’s Swedish Rhapsody no. 1–Midsommarvaka (1903), Enrique Granados’s Escénas romanticas (1904), Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings (1905), Amy Beach’s Suite française (1907), Gustav Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody (1907), Frederick Delius’s Brigg Fair (1907), Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesfreud and Liebesleid (1910) and Max Reger’s Eine Romantische Suite (1912). As the world began to slide towards a final showdown of the European empires, this kind of music increasingly reminded people of the way of life they were about to lose.

  ‘Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes.’ So wrote H. G. Wells, somewhat prophetically, in the conclusion of his semi-autobiographical satire, Tono Bungay (1909). This chapter, describing a warship heading down the Thames, past London’s familiar shoreline landmarks towards the open sea, inspired the final, elegiac movement of Vaughan Williams’s majestic London symphony, first performed in March 1914 in London and dedicated to his friend and fellow composer George Butterworth. In what could be described as the first cultural casualty of the Great War, Vaughan Williams sent the score to the conductor Fritz Busch in Germany following this performance, where it was promptly lost in the turmoil of the outbreak of war. It subsequently had to be reconstructed from the orchestral parts.

  Without doubt, the impending and actual sense of loss motivated British composers in the period before and during the First World War to compose music of outstanding beauty – from Vaughan Williams’s heartbreaking ‘The Lark Ascending’ to Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ and Songs of Farewell, to Hoist’s Planets suite (whic
h begins with ‘Mars: The Bringer of War’). Added to the 1914–18 list should be, by dint of his association with the war, George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow of 1913; he was killed by sniper fire on the Somme in July 1916. The tragedy of the war, on so many levels, and the apparent unravelling of the certainties of the previous century, elicited an unprecedented collective response from British composers. Charles Hubert Parry viewed the war, as did Elgar, from an older generation’s perspective, composing a cycle of choral songs of mature, eloquent poignancy in Songs of Farewell. (Although Parry survived the war, he died in the influenza epidemic that took twenty-two million lives worldwide in 1918.)

  There was no shortage of patriotic, empire-extolling music provided by home-front composers during the Great War, including Elgar’s ‘The Spirit of England’ and ‘The Fringes of the Fleet’, and Ivor Novello’s ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. But the two greatest national songs that were the fruit of the conflict, Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Jupiter’ from Hoist’s Planets – the big tune from which was adapted by him to become ‘I vow to thee, my country’ in 1921, using Cecil Spring-Rice’s poetic response to the human sacrifice of the war – were not traditional, jingoistic anthems as one might expect. Rather they were thoughtful challenges to conscience and faith that asked as many questions as they provided answers.

  While the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 had provoked in its wake a defensive, nationalistic reaction from composers in France and hundreds of pages of Teutonic vitriol from Wagner, the growing internationalism of music, the intermingling of genres, the easier availability of travel and the growing mass market for records ensured that the great broadening of horizons that had begun before the Great War was, this time, unstoppable, even in the face of such devastation and loss. The twentieth century’s musical adventure was just getting into its stride.

  3 Letter from Cui dated 9 March 1863, quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective, 2nd ed. (University of Washington Press, 1969), pp. 230–31.

  4 Igor Stravinsky, Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography (Norton, 1962), p. 39.

  7

  The Popular Age I

  1918–1945

  ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1906, from a wind-lashed transmitting station overlooking the Atlantic Ocean at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, a momentous sound was heard. It was the first ever wireless broadcast of a piece of recorded music: ‘Ombra mai fu’, Handel’s ‘Largo’, transmitted by an intrepid radio pioneer named Reginald Fessenden.

  The intended recipients of this ‘broadcast’ – a term not yet coined for radio transmission, and subsequently borrowed from farming – were Fessenden’s colleagues at a specially constructed receiving station on the west coast of Scotland, but this had recently been destroyed in a storm. Consequently the programme was picked up, to their amazement, by ships at sea. The test broadcast went unreported for some time, but it was nonetheless the first tentative step towards a new age for music.

  By 1922, ten million American households owned a radio receiver – up from just sixty thousand in 1919 – many of which were homemade ‘crystal’ sets. Six hundred broadcasters fuelled the boom, with Chicago’s KYW broadcasting nightly operas from 1921 onwards, and lighter fare outside the opera season. Meanwhile, in Argentina, a radio station had in August 1920 transmitted a live performance of Wagner’s Parsifal from the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires, to the fewer than thirty households in the city with radios able to hear it. Over in Britain, the world’s first national broadcaster, the BBC, came into being in 1922, ushering in an age when music would come to belong to everyone, everywhere, often enjoyed completely for free. (In the USA, advertising was in fact paying for radio broadcasting from the mid-1920s; in the UK, a radio licence fee was charged by the government to fund the BBC.)

  The advent of free-to-air music for the world’s grateful millions would change the value, purpose and style of music more dramatically than any other development in its history. And the dramatic advances in technology in the twentieth century affected popular and classical music in very different ways.

  For pop, broadcast technology stimulated a thirst for new sounds and new voices that proliferated vigorously across the world. The explosion of popular songwriting – from George Gershwin and Cole Porter in the 1920s to Dylan and Lennon and McCartney in the 1960s, Stevie Wonder in the 1970s, Michael Jackson in the 1980s, Prince in the 1990s, and Bruno Mars and Adele in our own time – is a glorious, life-affirming phenomenon. The popular age, as it rapidly became known, brought undreamed-of musical benefits and rewards to humankind.

  But pop’s success also provoked a concern, voiced in every decade since 1900, that it had wittingly or unwittingly brought about the near extinction of other, older forms of music – an accusation specifically levelled at jazz by the writer, conductor and composer Constant Lambert, musical director of the Vic-Wells, later Royal Ballet, in his widely read book Music Ho! (1934). It did not help that ‘non-popular’ music was genetically becoming known as ‘classical’ music, a term that began circulating in the 1930s as a marketing distinction used by record companies hoping to target listeners through the genres they preferred. The label was, initially at least, intended to grant the Western art music of approximately 1600 to 1900 a deferential sheen of permanence and class, but by the 1960s it had come to mean, for many millions, simply ‘old-fashioned’. That a whole genre of music acquired a description that said ‘antique and formal’ when it was often startlingly new, young or informal was indicative, so many believed, that the music they loved was being deliberately sidelined in mainstream culture. (To be fair, as many if not more disliked what they saw as the ghetto of the genre term ‘folk’ music.) That one branch of the family tree had begun to own the term ‘popular’ was to many classical music aficionados in itself a revealing and disturbing fact of life.

  Is it true that classical music has been slowly suffocated in its sleep over the past hundred years? I would say emphatically not. I hope to show in these final two chapters that, despite taking the odd experimental cul-de-sac on its journey, classical music has been alive and well since Reginald Fessenden’s test broadcast. It has changed, certainly, and it is now experienced in all sorts of ways that would have surprised, for instance, Edvard Grieg, the Norwegian composer who died a few months after that historic transmission. But classical music’s DNA is also embedded everywhere in the popular mainstream, whether in the stage musical, the cinema or in the albums of, say, The Beatles, Paul Simon, The Verve or Alicia Keys.

  Of course, music has always had its tribal loyalties and its audience stratification. It is conceivable that a few people in 1875 would have sought out tickets for, and relished with equal pleasure, the openings of Bizet’s Carmen in Paris, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury in London, Richard Wagner’s concert version of Götterdämmerung in Vienna, Ponchielli’s cantata Omaggio a Donizetti in Bergamo, or squeezed themselves into one of Greater London’s three hundred and seventy-five music halls, but in general the audiences at these events would mostly have been people of different tastes and classes. The stylistic parting of ways that started to become evident in the early twentieth century, though, was on an unprecedented scale. This wasn’t just about record-buying preferences, either: being a composer in the twentieth century meant making career-defining choices that simply were not relevant to earlier generations. A highly skilled, celebrated musician of the 1920s such as Cole Porter interacted with his (vast) public in clubs, bars, theatres, cinemas and dance halls – a party to which everyone was, in effect, invited – in a manner that was a universe away from the invitation-only aristocratic salons of Vienna’s Imperial palaces, where Mozart and Haydn were compelled to ply their trade.

  The inheritors of Mozart’s legacy in the twentieth century – classically-trained, self-styled ‘serious’ composers – struggled desperately with this challenge. After all, if you are not popular in a popular age, what are you for? The anxiety that underpins such a question can be seen playing itself out tim
e and time again, and it is an anxiety that has often led classical musicians and their fans to look with disdain upon their counterparts in the popular field.

  The awkward exchange between the two worlds was addressed with (unintentionally) prophetic poignancy at a concert given at the Aeolian Hall in New York in February 1924. Indeed, the event was something like a musical equivalent of nuclear fusion. The point of the concert, An Experiment in Modern Music, whose programme had an exhausting twenty-six different items, was educational, the third of three concerts designed to convince critics and the concert-going public that jazz was America’s modern music and worthy of serious consideration. Led by the (classically trained) jazz bandleader Paul Whiteman, the concert was designed to bring about some kind of rapprochement between the two genres, and to show that jazz would develop from the rougher New Orleans ‘Dixie’ style towards an orchestral milieu in the near future. The highbrow world of classical music would be presented with examples of how various forms of jazz might work in a ‘proper’ concert hall setting, as if to say, ‘One day jazz will grow up and will be respected like Beethoven.’ At the same time, Whiteman hoped the kind of people who liked jazz might discover that a formal concert hall wasn’t so scary and unapproachable after all, and might be encouraged to come again to a more conventional symphony concert.