In more recent years, a reluctant consensus has emerged among musicians that Leningrad may not be Shostakovich’s best symphony, despite its iconic status. But its third movement, Adagio, is its highlight from a purely musical point of view, bringing together influences as diverse as Stravinsky and Bach in a lament that switches between unsettling block woodwind chords and wrought, isolated violins. This symphony too, in the understandably heightened temperature of war, was scrutinised for ‘meaning’ to within an inch of its life, Time magazine’s preview for the US première summarising the first movement thus:
The deceptively simple opening melody, suggestive of peace, work, hope, is interrupted by the theme of war, senseless, implacable and brutal. For this martial theme Shostakovich resorts to a musical trick: the violins, tapping the backs of their bows, introduce a tune that might have come from a puppet show. This tiny drumming, at first almost inaudible, mounts and swells, is repeated twelve times in a continuous twelve-minute crescendo. The theme is not developed but simply grows in volume like Ravel’s Boléro; it is succeeded by a slow melodic passage that suggests a chant for the war’s dead.
Whatever its meaning, its musical flaws or merits, Leningrad certainly succeeded in its patriotic purpose. In June 1942, a few weeks after its première, a score of Shostakovich’s symphony was dropped overnight by plane into the city of Kuibyshev (present-day Samara), well behind Russian lines, and hastily assembled into orchestral parts. In Leningrad itself, in early August, a scratch orchestra of any musician still alive was put together for a performance that was relayed on PA systems throughout the city and out towards the German lines, which had been bombarded comprehensively beforehand to ensure some respite. The gesture of defiance and survival that the broadcast sought to express reverberated around the world. There can be no performance of a piece of music that has had so powerfully symbolic an impact as on that night in August 1942 in Leningrad. The symphony was performed repeatedly in Allied countries in the months that followed.
The Siege of Leningrad did not end until January 1944, almost two years after the première of the symphony dedicated to it. It remains to this day the most deadly battle in human history, in terms of lives lost: over a million civilians and a million Red Army soldiers, with a further two and a half million wounded. So desperate were conditions in the besieged city that, in the winter of 1941–2, police had to form a special unit to combat gangs involved in cannibalism. These were appalling scenes, compounded in January 1944 by the retreating German armies looting and destroying the historic galleries, mansions and palaces of the tsars. A huge haul of art treasure was taken back to Nazi Germany, but there was one cultural item that could never be stolen from Leningrad: Shostakovich’s seventh symphony.
In Britain, some classical composers joined the war effort by composing scores for patriotic films, such as William Walton’s stirring accompaniment for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, but it is fair to say that the orchestral music that most bucked up ordinary people on the home front was Eric Coates’s ‘Calling All Workers’, the theme tune of BBC radio’s Music While You Work. Benjamin Britten enjoyed an extended holiday in America, while Michael Tippett, a conscientious objector, produced an eloquent and moving wartime plea for unfashionable pacifism in his oratorio A Child of Our Time.
A Child of Our Time reflects upon real events from 1938: the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a seventeen-year-old Jewish refugee, Herschel Grynszpan, enraged at the deportation of his family and twelve thousand other German Jews. The assassination led to the Kristallnacht pogroms across Germany and Austria. A Child of Our Time intersperses quasi-operatic narrative passages with arrangements of African-American spirituals, as Bach had done with Lutheran hymn-chorales in his oratorios on the passion and crucifixion of Jesus Christ. A Child of Our Time may be classical music’s most heartfelt answer, during the 1940s, to the challenge of Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ – to confront the anxieties of the age in a language that could still communicate to the community at large.
For other mid-twentieth-century composers, however, it seemed increasingly as if being complicated and uncompromising was more important than producing something beautiful, entertaining or simply enjoyable. Few of the contemporaries of American composer Aaron Copland heeded his open-hearted declaration in his Appalachian Spring of 1944 that ‘’tis a gift to be simple’.
Like Stravinsky’s Firebird, Rite of Spring and Les Noces, Debussy’s Jeux, Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé and Boléro, Copland’s Pulitzer-prize-winning Appalachian Spring was composed as a ballet score. It is hard to imagine what twentieth-century classical music would have done without ballet. It was as if the distraction of telling a story, of reaching a different audience, or of submitting to the structure of another art form, liberated composers from having to deal with the question ‘whither music?’. It was a question that ran like an unstable, life-threatening electrical current through the century that followed 1910, the year that had confidently yielded Stravinsky’s Firebird, Elgar’s violin concerto, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony, Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé, Parry’s fourth symphony, Puccini’s The Girl of the Golden West, Scriabin’s Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, Debussy’s First Book of Preludes, the première of Mahler’s eighth symphony and the completion of his ninth. Such confidence was inconceivable thirty years later.
Audiences adored Copland’s Appalachian Spring, though, with its touching innocence and optimism, as if America’s victory in the Second World War really would usher in a better age, all reflected in the sincerity and uncynical values of the pioneer rural communities it celebrates. (The phrase ‘’tis a gift to be simple’ comes from the Shaker spiritual song, ‘Simple Gifts’, the melody of which, composed by Joseph Brackett, a member of the Shaker community at Gorham, Maine, is widely quoted in the ballet score.) It is worth noting, though, that Aaron Copland – left-wing, gay and Jewish – might have approached the same commission very differently had it come his way after the liberation of the Nazi death camps, or Hiroshima, or during the McCarthyist witch-hunts. Unlike much else composed in the 1940s, it is still popular and regularly performed both in the theatre and on the concert stage today.
Nevertheless, the concert hall success of Copland’s Appalachian Spring, as with Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Shostakovich’s symphonies, Stravinsky’s ballets and Orff’s lusty secular oratorios, should be seen as the ‘high end’ of public engagement with the arts, belonging to a classical tradition that, by and large, maintained a separate, parallel path from any of the key popular genres. You don’t expect to hear rock and roll guitar in Shostakovich or a bluesy sax solo in Bartók, even though these composers would have heard both, often, during their working lives.
But ballet was not the only medium that allowed classical composers to hang on to their distinctive orchestral idiom and appeal directly to a broad audience, freeing them from writing over-complicated, abstract music that a listener might need a PhD to appreciate. Dance certainly had a huge influence on music in the twentieth century, but classical music would surely have continued sleepwalking on the path to oblivion after the war had it not been for another knight in shining, or perhaps silver, armour: cinema.
Following Alexander Nevsky, Prokofiev’s groundbreaking collaboration with fellow Russian film-maker Sergei Eisenstein in 1938, it was clear that large-scale orchestral music was going to be a powerful component in making films more exciting, more frightening and more emotional. To this day, millions of people who might never set foot in a classical concert hall thrill to the symphonic sound of film scores that are often made up entirely of classical orchestral styles and techniques. If anyone tells you classical music is dead in the twenty-first century, all it means is that they don’t go to the cinema.
When European composers fled Nazism in the 1930s, they usually ended up in Hollywood hoping to make a living from film, an opportunity the directors, producers and writers, w
ho were themselves either émigrés or the children of émigrés, were happy to provide. Some, like Erich Korngold, leapt enthusiastically into this new, populist role with skill and seriousness, widening the scope and capability of the film orchestra in the process. His scores for Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood only seem like clichés to us now because their swashbuckling grandeur has been so comprehensively imitated for so long by so many others.
The truth is, though, that from the 1940s until the 1990s, film composers tended to be a different breed from concert hall composers. Few classical composers made headway in film and many viewed it suspiciously or with condescension, as something only good enough for the paying of bills. How shallow that criticism now seems, with some of the best purely orchestral music from the past half-century being written for film: whether the thrilling, scary power of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo and Psycho or Miklós Rózsa’s Spellbound, the haunting melancholy of Ennio Morricone’s The Mission, Nino Rota’s Godfather or Gabriel Yared’s The English Patient, the expansive drama of John Barry’s Goldfinger, Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia, or Hans Zimmer and Lisa Bourke’s Gladiator, the sweeping adventure of Dmitri Tiomkin’s High Noon or Danny Elfman’s Batman, the sensuality of Jerry Goldmsith’s Chinatown or Thomas Newman’s American Beauty, or the heartbreaking grace of Dario Marianelli’s Atonement and John Williams’s Schindler’s List. What is remarkable about this tiny, tip-of-an-iceberg roll-call of great scores is that, as I write them down, I know that many of you will be able instantly to recall the mood and themes of these scores in your minds. They are part of a shared cultural inheritance of the past half-century. Of how many other classical works since the Second World War is it possible to make that statement?
For all the scepticism of film music among ‘serious’ composers, cinema was a lifesaver for classical music. It not only gave the genre a new relevance in the modern age, but also brought it into the lives of people who would never have thought themselves interested in it. And indeed, introducing classical music to the masses became something of a mission for post-war governments. The governments of Third Reich Germany, Fascist Italy, Roosevelt’s America, Stalin’s USSR and Blitzkrieg Britain had viewed classical music not – like comedy, film and popular music – as a comfort and distraction in grim times, but rather as a way of defining cultural identity among their populations, of saying ‘this is what we might lose if the barbaric enemy wins’. After the war they all determined to bring ‘high art’, as it was deemed to be, to the people, setting up various publicly funded and privately sponsored institutions to make this a reality. The great American conductor and champion of new music Serge Koussevitsky for example, commissioned Benjamin Britten’s gloomily magnificent opera Peter Grimes, which, miraculously, was produced at Sadler’s Wells Theatre in a bombed-out London just four weeks after VE Day.
Despite the cast of Peter Grimes’s first production complaining that the music was difficult, modernist and impenetrable, it presented no such obstacle to opera-goers in the UK and around the world, both at the time and in the decades to follow. This, surely, was because what Britten had written was essentially an old-fashioned, nineteenth-century music drama such as Verdi, or even at a pinch Wagner in Flying Dutchman mode, might have concocted – which brings us to one of the (perhaps unexpected) trends that emerged from the post-war promotion of music.
Undeniably the instinct to support the arts went – and still goes – hand in hand with a desire to reach out to larger numbers of people, but the two aims were often contradictory. Orchestras and opera houses, for instance, tended to be presided over by powerful patrons who might well have paid lip service to the notion of introducing ordinary folk to the new and unfamiliar, but who were just as concerned with getting the state to subsidise an expensive minority taste. The fact that the ‘new’ was narrowly defined as ‘contemporary classical’ rather than, say, bebop is indicative of this. Public subsidy allowed formats that had become financially unviable – such as the nineteenth-century symphony orchestra – to prosper somewhat artificially in the twentieth century, justified by the preservation of heritage. In previous centuries, forms had come and gone as the ‘market’ (or aristocratic fashion) changed; nobody, after all, had tried to keep Louis XIV’s lavish opera-ballet spectacles going after he lost his head.
But what subsidy and philanthropic patronage of classical music in the post-war years made possible were two somewhat paradoxical outcomes: the preservation of a musical idiom that was obstinately fixed in the mentality of the nineteenth-century opera house and concert hall, and the blossoming, as we shall see shortly, of carefree, unedited experiment that was occasionally creative, often quite mad and always mind-bogglingly self-indulgent.
It would be a while before new classical music set the pace of change. Meanwhile, the war had brought about whirlwind developments in technology, some of which, such as the invention of magnetic tape for recording, would have a direct effect on music; others, like high-speed cars, planes and rockets found their giddy velocity reflected in music of revived, exhilarating energy. However threatened classical composers might have been by the inexorable rise of popular song in the jazz and swing era, it had been a light summer shower compared to the hurricane coming their way in the 1950s. And it was a hurricane with one unavoidable exhortation: Roll over, Beethoven…
8
The Popular Age II
1945–2012
THE YEARS 1939–45 will for ever be remembered as a turbulent turning point in world history. But at the same time, thanks in large part to the unprecedented movement and displacement of populations during this period, to American military presence in Europe and the Pacific, and to the United States emerging from the conflict as the economic and cultural dynamo of the world, American musical styles established themselves as the focus of change and growth in the decades following the war.
The war years signalled a watershed in music, as the swing variant of jazz gave birth to a new form, one that would sweep the planet like no other musical phenomenon before it: rock and roll.
The genesis of rock and roll can be traced back to a swing recording made in 1939 by the Benny Goodman Sextet, ‘Seven Come Eleven’. On the surface of it, ‘Seven Come Eleven’ fits the mould of the classic swing number: energetic, well-organised, with symmetrical phrases, a predictable, reassuring, chugging-along rhythm generated by brushes on the snare drum, and distinct moments set aside for Benny Goodman’s crystal-clear clarinet solos. Then, out of this run-of-the-mill swing exuberance, something emerges that is new in its sound, new in its execution and new in its improvisatory style. It is an electric guitar – an instrument invented in 1931 – played by a twenty-three-year-old African-American from Oklahoma, Charlie Christian, who co-wrote the song with Goodman. If you’ve never heard of him, now is the time to make up for the omission. His musical efflorescence was tragically brief, but this is the man who turned the chord-strumming, jobbing electric guitar into a high-wire, virtuoso lead instrument, from also-ran to star turn. If you were young in the 1940s, this Christian was your Messiah.
To our jaded twenty-first-century ears, Charlie Christian’s solo on ‘Seven Come Eleven’ may not seem all that earth-shattering, but to musicians of the 1940s it was a green light. Jazz musicians took from it a fast, free-flowing, unpredictable stream of consciousness in sound, inspired by Christian giving emphasis (accent) to beats that would not normally have been strong and allowing the tune to stray like a river bursting its banks across open countryside, meandering across chords to which it was never intended to fit. Christian bends the strings as he solos, tweaking the notes above and below their standard tunings, not something one could notate very accurately – nor, indeed, would he have wanted to, as he attempted to give the guitar the cutting-edge energy of a tenor saxophone.
This frantic, somersaulting style turned within a few years into bebop, the elite modern jazz of the late 1940s and ’50s. In bebop, whole tracks were devoted to helter-ske
ltering instruments, sometimes solo, sometimes in coordinated groups, tumbling across notes at high speed, wilfully oblivious of the harmonies to which they once belonged. If death-defying, off-piste skiing at high altitude down near vertical slopes had a musical equivalent, bebop would be it.
Bebop took a basic song shape, with its chord sequence and the ghostly outline of its tune lurking somewhere in the background, and used this as the oft-repeated foundation for an improvised solo from each member of the band in turn. Before bebop, the solos bore some resemblance – at least as they began – to the song’s original melody and they also adhered to its key-family and chordal logic. Bebop defied these conventions on several layers: solos increasingly drifted away from the chord sequence and even the key-family of the original song, and they habitually veered off from the given song melody, too. Soon bebop musicians began dispensing with the blueprints of the standard songs and instead invented their own chord sequences and melodies – highly complex ones at that, sometimes derived from the note combinations of unusual chords.
Though the ethos of post-war jazz, with its celebration of freakishly talented individual skills, its infatuation with complicated chords and its ambitiously long, stamina-testing pieces, was always closer to that of classical music than of happy-go-lucky pop, the actual sound of bebop was about as far from what was going on in 1950s classical music as it was possible to be. Classical music in the mid-twentieth century was mostly about the brain and the intellect: the conceptual theory behind a composition had become more important than the sensory effect of the music. Bebop, though, was too fast, too instinctual, too trance-like to allow for much conceptualising or theorising. It was all about intuition, the moment, the feeling, the trip.
The Story of Music: From Babylon to the Beatles: How Music Has Shaped Civilization Page 32