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

by Howard Goodall

  Stravinsky had mischievous fun pillaging music’s dusty back catalogue with the ballet Pulcinella for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes company in 1920. It coquettishly combines 1920s chutzpah and eighteenth-century courtly dance, quoting along the way actual music by eighteenth-century Italian composers. Diaghilev and Stravinsky believed the manuscripts – from a Naples library – to be the work of Giovanni Pergolesi (1710–36) but it has since transpired that they were in fact mostly by the more obscure Carlo Ignazio Monza and Domenico Gallo, who died in 1739 and 1768 respectively. Pulcinella is sparklingly inventive with its source material but it is nevertheless the musical equivalent of placing the Art Deco spire of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building on top of Christopher Wren’s Greenwich Hospital. Prokofiev, for his part, wrote a pastiche symphony in the style of Haydn, known as The Classical, and had his own stab at clownish knockabout in the ballet Chout (The Tale of the Buffoon), also for the Ballets Russes. Though Diaghilev and Prokofiev first put it together in 1915 it was not deemed ready for production until 1921 – and even then, amid post-war euphoria and forgetfulness, Chout’s black comedy of serial wife-murdering was lost on the audience. Francis Poulenc’s Ballets Russes commission, Les Biches (1924), also plundered the Old Curiosity Shop of dance styles, mixing and matching with more recent fashions and unashamedly giving movements names like ‘Rag-Mazurka’.

  There is something laudable in the attempts of these sophisticated, well-heeled composers and their fellow Ballets Russes artists to capture the popularity of Keystone Kops-style entertainment of the time, but also something rather desperate and even embarrassing about the results. It was rather like someone’s dad turning up at the school disco and jiving awkwardly with the kids. Comparing Chout with Chaplin’s The Kid of the same year sheds a cruel and amateurish light on the former. Chaplin went on to make (and compose music for) a series of truly outstanding full-length films – The Gold Rush (1925), City Lights (1931), Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) – all of them notable for being knockabout fun with consummate physical skill, contemporary resonance, social insight and considerable emotional power. Most important, and this is often conveniently glossed over, they were popular throughout the world because they were actually good.

  It was no coincidence that an urge to disinter elements from music’s past should have come about at a time when – invigorated in large part due to recording technology – scholarly interest in earlier music was enjoying a new lease of life. French composer-academic Vincent D’Indy (tutor of Cole Porter, among others) put on a performance in Paris in February 1913 of Monteverdi’s opera The Coronation of Poppea using an edition of the score he had painstakingly reconstructed from surviving but neglected manuscripts. The opera had not been heard in its entirety in public since 1651. Monteverdi’s earlier 1607 opera L’Orfeo was produced on stage at Oxford University in 1925 for the first time since its composer’s death nearly three hundred years earlier. In 1926 in a monastery in Piedmont, north-west Italy, a huge treasure trove of Vivaldi manuscripts, thought lost in the Napoleonic Wars, was rediscovered, including the scores of three hundred concertos, nineteen operas and over a hundred other works. This haul was in effect the start of the twentieth century’s Vivaldi revival and a great flowering of musicological interest in this hitherto all but forgotten master.

  Though Stravinsky had been, and continued to be, one of the standard bearers of the new-from-old trend in such works as his magnificent Symphony of Psalms (1930) and his Hogarth-inspired opera The Rake’s Progress (1951), he was instrumental in breaking away from its strictures too. Having detonated a modernist explosion with his Rite of Spring in 1913, his name subsequently becoming a byword throughout the world for the edgy, contemporary classical composer, he was not yet ready to retire from the front line.

  As is so often the case in music’s rich history, the most original, daring and influential works – Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, Richard Strauss’s Salome – are ones that creep up on the world, apparently out of nowhere. Stravinsky’s complicated 1923 masterpiece Svadebka, known mostly by its French title, Les Noces (The Wedding), is another such smoking gun.

  The basic premise of the work, which was first conceived ten years earlier in the aftermath of Diaghilev and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, is the recreation of an Orthodox Russian peasant wedding ritual, using spoken and sung fragments of speech. Stravinsky, who had by 1923 emigrated from his homeland, later reflected on the bride’s loss of virginity being to some extent a metaphor for what he saw as the 1917 Revolution’s rape of Mother Russia. At any rate, there was a brutal vigour and anonymity to the conjugal proceedings in the piece. At times the role of the voice is akin to the modern technique of rapping. The hybrid keening-singing-declaiming style Stravinsky adopted was like no sound ever before heard in a concert hall or theatre. It is an extraordinary noise, even to tired, over-bombarded modern ears. The use of voices – chorus and soloists – as quasi-instrumental sound-effect texture was revolutionary enough in itself, but the nature of the rest of the ensemble is equally startling: a large battery of percussion instruments, including four pianos. Stravinsky had at various points in the genesis of the work toyed with the inclusion of synchronised pianolas (mechanical roll-operated pianos), harmoniums and keyboard-controlled cimbaloms (a hammered-string folk instrument prevalent in Eastern Europe and Russia). The resulting jangling, sparklingly dissonant sound, which is brittle, full of edgy attack and a kind of out-of-tune resonance, would have been – literally – unimaginable, even terrifying to audiences of the day. One contemporary critic described Les Noces as ‘enough to convert intending brides and bridegrooms to celibacy’.

  To other composers, though, as they gradually came across Les Noces, its peculiar, faux-primitive, fierce sound proved irresistible. To them its assault on the senses was startlingly fresh, as if someone had uninvented the symphony orchestra and started again from scratch. The sound world of Les Noces is, quite simply, the most imitated of all twentieth-century combinations outside the fields of jazz and popular music. The auditory sensation of the piece is faithfully imitated, to a greater or lesser degree, in works as different from each other as Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (1937), Béla Bartók’s ‘Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion’ (also 1937), Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie (1948), Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), Steve Reich’s Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973), John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music (1982), James McMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (1992), and a gallimaufry of film scores, of which Bernard Herrmann’s for 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, particularly the coming alive of the skeleton army, and Hans Zimmer’s Angels and Demons (2009) – the least believable film ever made – are but two randomly plucked examples. In all of the above, it is the metallic, kitchen-utensil-like sense of attack and attrition of the percussion, combined with the high-frequency, bell-like penetration of the tuned instruments, that so effectively assaults (and enchants) the listener: the impact of this orchestrational colour is, literally and historically, inescapable.

  While Stravinsky’s notoriety as classical music’s Lord of Misrule afforded him the kind of profile that encouraged wealthy philanthropists to be generous in their support of him, especially after his move to America in 1939, in many ways he was an anomaly. For classical music as a whole, the 1920s were marked by deep fissures in the previously unchallenged prestige of Western ‘art’ music. The writing was certainly on the wall.

  The unveiling in 1926 of a new opera by the last great Italian composer in the genre, Giacomo Puccini, could fairly be described as a media event on a global scale. Turandot was performed to huge audiences from Milan to Buenos Aires in short succession. Its biggest tune, ‘Nessun dorma’, was incredibly popular, not just with a few diehard fans but rather with just about everyone who heard it. It became an instant classic, but Turandot was to be a last hurrah. With the exception of a handful of later works by American composers John Adams and Philip Glass, newly written operas gradually
became more or less invisible to the population at large, even as the audience for revivals of old operas grew and grew. A newly composed classical opera in the late-twentieth century was like Beluga caviar: a shockingly expensive commodity from an endangered species, accessible to a very privileged few but an inconceivable luxury to the rest.

  The knee-jerk reaction of many classical music commentators to this flight from opera is to find causes in changing social habits, in education, in broadcasting priorities and the grip of the marketplace, but this conceals one important reality: composers themselves were drifting towards alternatives to long-established musical forms and traditions. Audiences may well have flocked to new, younger Puccinis, had they come along, but composers didn’t want to be new Puccinis any more.

  A bracing example of how the landscape was changing can be seen in the unfolding career of the classically trained son of an orthodox Jewish cantor, Kurt Weill. Weill’s early exposure to music would have been envied by many classical composers: his parents actively encouraged interest and funded formal studies in music, and he received training both at his local opera house in Dessau and at music academies in Berlin. His early compositions place him squarely in the post-Mahler European classical tradition, a skilfully constructed first symphony of 1921 and his first full-length opera Der Protagonist showing him to be not so very different from his contemporaries: Samuel Barber in the USA, Shostakovich in Russia, Arthur Bliss in the UK or Paul Hindemith in Germany. Then he made a stylistic leap that dramatically transformed his career and the course of music history with it.

  As Germany’s vulnerable but well-meaning Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early ’30s grappled with hyper-inflation, unpayable war reparations, rioting and the rise of extremism to left and right, a remarkable cultural scene emerged in Berlin. It was, to some extent, the European equivalent of what Gershwin was doing in America: finding a hybrid style that existed in the no-man’s-land between jazz and classical, a no-man’s-land that was ultimately to become everyman’s-land, though its protagonists didn’t know it at the time. Unlike the frivolous goings-on in Paris or New York, though, the cabaret style of Weimar Berlin had a deadly serious undertow.

  In the cultural soup that was Weimar Germany, Kurt Weill teamed up with Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht in the making of a piece of musical theatre that was neither strictly speaking an opera, a play with songs nor a musical, though it contained elements of all of these. Its vocal ranges were operatic, its naturalistic acting style more like that of a play, its structure of spoken plot-carrying scenes interspersed with verse-chorus-designed songs akin to those in musicals. The Threepenny Opera was the Berlin stage hit of 1928.

  The Threepenny Opera wasn’t intended just as escapist fun in hard times, but also as a piece of biting Marxist satire critiquing the corruption of capitalism. It was based on John Gay’s eighteenth-century mock-opera The Beggar’s Opera, which had, in 1920, been revived to great acclaim at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, a production known to Brecht, Weill and their translator Elisabeth Hauptmann. Its musical texture deliberately mined the sleazy Berlin cabaret style of the moment, as it did popular dance idioms like the foxtrot and tango, but it was written with a knowing wink towards operetta and sentimental romanticism – especially in Weill’s setting of words of hard-hearted irony. Macheath (Mack the Knife) and prostitute Jenny, for example, share a genteel duet, the tango-spirited ‘Zuhälterballade’, about their previous times together, he the abusive pimp, she the put-upon sex worker who, while going along with the mock nostalgia of the song, betrays him to the police. The most memorable song of the show, ‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’, acts as a prelude to the unfolding fable, a laconic but immediately catchy melody that, were it not for the lyrics, could be mistaken for a Berlin tea-dance song, with a piano accompaniment that becomes increasingly like something from a 1920s Shanghai opium den. The lyrics, by deliberate, sharp contrast, speak graphically of Mackie Messer’s appalling catalogue of crimes.

  In Depression-era Europe, The Threepenny Opera clearly struck a chord: by the time Weill left Germany for the USA in 1933 it had been translated into eighteen languages and performed several thousand times. It was one of three collaborations Weill put together with Brecht, alongside Happy End and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a triptych whose tone is a world away from the wacky tomfoolery of Satie’s Parade and Prokofiev’s Chout of the previous decade.

  All three Brecht-Weill pieces address the social inequalities of the day head-on, in a deliberately non-arty, low-budget way. The Threepenny Opera was a kind of Trainspotting for the late 1920s, presenting the middle classes with a grimy warts-and-all vision of the alienated, nihilistic underclass. Some measure of the political sensitivity and topicality of the Brecht-Weill musicals is apparent when compared with Stravinsky’s notoriously controversial Rite of Spring. While the latter had had a few people in black tie and tails heckling its first performance in 1913 in Paris, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’s first night, in Leipzig in 1930, was invaded by brown-shirted Nazi thugs who intimidated audiences so much that the show was pulled after a few days.

  At a time when the inventor of serialism, Arnold Schoenberg, was pompously describing his music as ‘produced on German soil, without foreign influences’ and therefore ‘able most effectively to oppose Latin and Slav hopes of hegemony’, Weill was deliberately mixing and matching a range of styles and trends that were around in the 1920s and 1930s. He added little touches of whatever took his fancy, from a chorus that sounded like a German Lutheran hymn (‘Schluss-Choral’) to a quick-stepping Dixieland rag (‘Ballade vom angenehmen Leben’ – The Ballad of Good Living). Musically speaking, The Threepenny Opera would have sounded to people of the time like a distorted jukebox of contemporary sounds, filtered by the razor-sharp mind of a man who had already composed an opera and a symphony. It was nevertheless a style that found immediate favour with the theatre-going and record-buying public, and its jerky, broken-glass catchiness was to insinuate itself into two or three generations of music theatre composers’ work, from Marc Blitzstein’s controversial 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock to his friend Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), thence to Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979), Kander and Ebb’s Flora the Red Menace (1965) and Cabaret (1966), and even, dare I venture, my own 1984 collaboration with Melvyn Bragg, The Hired Man. Weill and Brecht’s theatre songs further cast their spell on later artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Sting, Lou Reed, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Waits, Dagmar Krause and Martha and Rufus Wainwright, all of whom produced cover versions. What binds these cover versions (except for the unrhythmical braggadocio of Sinatra, imitated more recently by Robbie Williams, and the loose, growling swing style of Satchmo) is a quality of acerbic detachment, a serrated edge that could strip one’s emotional defences, or wallpaper.

  The Threepenny Opera ends with Mack the Knife, a low-life criminal absolutely devoid of morality and remorse, about to be hanged, when Queen Victoria instead grants him a pardon, a title, a castle and a pension. The absurdity of this reversal of fortune may not have struck millions in the industrialised world after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 as all that implausible. Life had become unpredictable and harsh. As the world descended into anxiety, paranoia and financial meltdown, not to mention Fascism and Stalinism, increasingly it was composers embracing popular forms who became the voice of conscience. This subterranean shift could not have been anticipated at the start of the century. Nor were the fruits of the voice of conscience without controversy and complication, particularly where questions of race came into play.

  Take the 1935 ‘American folk opera’ Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira and playwright DuBose Heyward. Set in a poverty- and drug-stricken African-American fishing community in the South, Porgy and Bess was notable for its sympathetic but clear-eyed portrayal of underclass life.

  The fact that three white men wrote Porgy and Bess caused unease
at the time and has stirred a certain amount of discomfort ever since. That the characters in the opera, which was based on an earlier play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, may be unflattering racial stereotypes that ‘ghettoise’ African-Americans is a legitimate subject for debate, even if Porgy and Bess has paradoxically only attracted this criticism because it has, on account of its great quality, outlived the many other artistic portrayals of earlier, less enlightened times. Its genius and consequent longevity have in effect caused it to be penalised, whereas a once popular parlour song like Ernest Hogan’s ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me – A Darkie Misunderstanding’ (1896) has quite rightly been forgotten by most. Porgy and Bess suffers from much the same problem as Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice or Wagner’s Parsifal, both of which arouse discussion of perceived anti-Semitism because they are both still performed today. Whether it is fair to charge the Gershwin brothers simply because they were white Jews writing about African-Americans per se is a much less clear-cut accusation. What has never been contested is the beauty and timeless power of the songs the Gershwins created for Porgy and Bess and which have been covered uncomplainingly by most of the great African-American recording artists of the twentieth century, including Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Miles Davis and Aretha Franklin.

  In tackling the inequalities and injustices of the Great Depression, popular song of the 1930s proved it was already light years ahead of ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’, even if groundbreaking songs that provoked serious thought were still rare. In the frothy 1930 Broadway revue The New Yorkers, Cole Porter made his well-to-do audience sit uneasily through a sympathetic portrayal of a prostitute in the piercingly sultry song ‘Love for Sale’ – though initial resistance by censors was relaxed when the character was changed from white to black: race relations were still lagging shamefully behind gender politics. Even relatively liberal-minded Porter, though, could not match the devastating impact of the Abel Meeropol song ‘Strange Fruit’, recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939. The song, which began as a poem, is thought to have been prompted by the shocking – and sadly iconic – newspaper photograph by Lawrence Beitler of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, in August 1930. Despite the undoubted inspiration it provided for the leaders of the subsequent Civil Rights movement in the United States, the birth of ‘Strange Fruit’ was by no means easy: Holiday’s usual record company, Columbia, refused to release it and a small independent label had to take it on instead. Radio stations likewise gave it a wide berth. Some concert venues objected so much to this signature song being included in Holiday’s set that white staff would deliberately create noise with the cash tills or bottle crates while she was singing it.