by David Schiff
If you heard them against a regular quarter pulse (and snapped your fingers on the eighths) you would feel a rhythm with a family resemblance to, say, Joplin's familiar “Entertainer”:
In distancing himself from jazz, Stravinsky may have been protesting too much. Ragtime arrived in Paris a decade before Stravinsky; he did not have to wait until 1918 to compose a piece with that title, but he did have to find himself removed, as he was by a war and a revolution, from Russia and its traditions. Stravinsky throughout his life was a compositional magpie seizing on whatever musical objects he “loved.” From Histoire du soldat onward, jazz was part of his matières sonores; he would even give the sound of Shorty Rogers's flügelhorn a prominent role in the austere, sacred, and serial setting of Threni.
Richard Taruskin quashed the idea that Stravinsky was influenced by jazz with the perceptive statement, “What makes Stravinsky's rhythm fascinating and delightful…is its metrical ambiguity—that is, the doubts the composer continually and deliberately sows…precisely about what jazz takes for granted.”52 Let's test Taruskin's statement by looking at a bit of prime swing-era Stravinsky, the Concerto in E “Dumbarton Oaks,” composed in 1938.
The concerto is syncretistic in style and rhythmic devices. The first movement pits Bach against ragtime (in the violins at rehearsal number 2). The second movement replaces the back-to-baroque style with a teasing little tune from Verdi's Falstaff and a Rossinian flute solo. The third movement begins like a brisk march, slows down for some “Arabian” music à la Tchaikovsky, and ends like a speeding locomotive. Its opening displays the rhythmic ambiguity Taruskin describes—but more so. There are three simultaneous rhythmic patterns: a six-note theme in the horn, played twice with slightly different rhythmic values; a pulse rhythm ostinato in the bass in groups of three or four quarter notes; and an unheard conducted rhythm of changing meters that coincides with neither of the heard patterns, but which places the two statements of the melody in contrasting relations to the bar lines (an example of augenmusik). The first note of the tune begins on the second beat of a bar as an upbeat but returns as the downbeat of . If we don't watch the score or the conductor it will sound the other way around because we would assume (listening to the bass) that the first note was the downbeat of a bar, but because the theme is eleven beats long, the second statement would sound off the beat. While this diabolically manufactured rhythmic shift would not happen in jazz, its layered structure (tune, pulse, and feel) is a cognate of jazz. The asymmetry of the phrase, one half coinciding with the strong beat, the other bouncing off it, could be thought of as an extended hemiola ( against ), similar to the 5 + 7 division of the West African handbell pattern.
Stravinsky asserted himself as time shaper by cropping the lengths of phrases in either odd or even numbers of beats, the odd beats serving as syncopating irritants and the even patterns as a resolution, though this resolution may be more apparent to the ear than the eye. At the end of the movement Stravinsky built his little tune almost to an anthem, superimposing it on a chugging moto perpetuo figure of four eighth notes in the strings. In the final phrase, a repeated unit forty-six beats long, Stravinsky superimposed three rhythmic ideas: in the winds, the upper strings, and the lower strings, in changing meters that correspond mainly to accents in the wind melody. If instead of following the bar lines you let the steady four eighth-note figure in the violins organize the rhythm (say, by tapping your foot on the first note and snapping a finger on the third), you will notice that the music suddenly takes wing, its irregular chop turned into an infectious bounce. Once you hear the music this way, you will also discover that Stravinsky's notation of the last five notes (ta-ta-ta-ta-TA) misrepresents the joyful groove so apparent to the fingers and toes but hidden from the eye. Keep on snapping and the last five notes become ta-ta-TA-ta-ta, with the last note no longer a plodding downbeat but a ricocheting bounce.
European music, torn loose from its older harmonic moorings, needed to acquire something of the rhythmic backbone of jazz; African American music, evolving from an array of regional folk styles toward a sophisticated form of artistic expression, at times looked to European modernism for inspiration. The cultural exchange is best understood as a trade between equals, not between sophisticates and primitives. We might say that the achievements of European musical modernism challenged jazz musicians in general, and Duke Ellington in particular, to take the modernity of their own music more seriously, to plumb its expressive and representational resources more fully as a cultural and political instrument. Yet, given the many ways in which European music and jazz interacted, any notion of European precedence seems questionable, and even an appearance of influence may be deceptive or at least redundant. Ellington's 1937 “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” sport half-classical titles that accurately mirror their structural designs and that ask us to listen to them formalistically as “modern music”; at the same time these paired pieces exemplify both the blues and swing.53 These paired works, testing the boundaries, are classics of both jazz and modern music. As is “Cotton Tail.”
OUTRO: EXPERIMENTAL RHYTHM
The large literature on American experimental music usually credits rhythmic progress to the vanguard (white) composers whom Virgil Thomson called the “rhythmic research fellows”:54 Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, and, by extension, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Conlon Nancarrow. This alliance, formed in the 1920s, called themselves “ultra-modernists.” Thomson, with slightly more accuracy than he brought to the phenomenon of swing, characterized them by their “arithmetical structures, which are about the only structures available to non-tonal music.”55 Henry Cowell, without reference to any existing style of music, proposed rhythms derived from the fractional structure ( etc.) of the overtone series in his New Musical Resources, published in 1930 as an ultra-modernist bible.56
One of the finest applications of Cowell's rhythmic ideas appeared in the last movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1931 String Quartet, whose structure is a rhythmic numbers game. The first violin plays one note, the remaining trio plays twenty notes, then the first violin plays two notes, the trio, nineteen, and so on, and then they reverse course.57 We might call it a rhythmic diminuendo and crescendo, but the formalistic exercise also sounds like a wicked mad-scientist parody of obsessive compulsion—an experiment that worked.
Beyond the “ultras” Cowell's ear-stretching rhythmic proposals had little influence until the 1940s when composers in Europe and America began to reconsider their rhythmic practice especially under the influence of serialism. Emerging composers like Boulez were dismayed by the apparent discrepancy between Schoenberg's radical method of organizing pitches and his traditional-sounding rhythmic idiom. Applying simple durational algorithms to a pitch series, Messiaen and Boulez “serialized rhythm” in “Modes de valeurs et d'intensité” and Structures I, respectively; Milton Babbitt made a similar move in his Composition for Four Instruments. For about twenty years Cowell-like “arithmetic structures,” often devoid of any feeling of pulse or meter, dominated advanced concert music.
After 1950 John Cage went even further, replacing any traditional notion of rhythm with determinedly “meaningless” clock time, mere temporal data. Cage's antipsychological strategies showed a futuristic understanding of the new recording and broadcasting technologies that were transforming the way music was produced and perceived. In works, like Cage's Williams Mix, of musique concrète, composed through tape manipulation, rhythm was a function of tape length and playback speed: “The score resembles a dressmaker's pattern, from which the tapes were cut to size and shape.”58
Throughout his career, though, Cage either ignored jazz or described it as a naïve folk style.59 Equating the experimental with the conceptual, Cage denied jazz, however free, any conceptual content or experimental capacity; not surprisingly, when the free jazz of Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Don Cherry, Cecil Taylor, and John Coltrane first appeared, some critics assumed, as they had with Ellington's jazz innova
tions, that it was trying to catch up with the advances of classical modernism, especially with Cage. A typical bracketing of Cage and Coleman appears in Frank Tirro's Jazz: A History. Tirro juxtaposes Cage (“I try to arrange my composing means so that I won't have any knowledge of what might happen.…My purpose is to eliminate purpose”) with Coleman (“I don't tell the members of my group what to do. I want them to play what they hear in the piece for themselves. I let everyone express himself just as he wants to. The musicians have complete freedom, and so, of course, our final results depend entirely on the musicianship, emotional make-up, and taste of the individual member”).60 If Coleman was reacting to Cage, he was reacting selectively. Musicianship, emotional makeup, and taste, all forms of purpose, were three factors that Cage systematically excluded from his music.
Despite Cage's virtual silence on the subject of jazz, however, the rhythmic research of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell also reverberated with advanced styles in painting, poetry, and even concert music. Painters like Jackson Pollock played bebop recordings in their studios; poets like Frank O'Hara emulated its spontaneous-sounding phrase shapes; and composers as different as Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, and Stefan Wolpe emulated its high-voltage rhythmic energy.
We might designate all jazz, from Buddy Bolden onward, as rhythmic research, but what were the particular rhythmic innovations of bebop and post-bebop styles? Many of the musicians shared a desire to break the ties with American popular song. Though the two genres were intimately entwined from the time of Louis Armstrong's 1929 rendition of “I Can't Give You Anything But Love” to his chart-topping recording of “Hello Dolly” in 1964, by the late 1940s the marriage was already on the rocks.
Bebop musicians often transformed Broadway material radically, as Charlie Parker did with “Embraceable You,” Miles Davis did with “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” and Coltrane did, on an epic scale, with “My Favorite Things.” By calling attention to the gap between Broadway and Birdland renditions of the same tunes, jazz musicians declared an ironic musical independence. Less ironically, they also developed an alternative jazz songbook to replace the Broadway-born standards, a strategy of Ellington's career from the beginning. Instead of playing Gershwin or Rodgers tunes they performed a copious new jazz songbook composed by Tadd Dameron, Thelonious Monk, Errol Garner, John Lewis, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, or Sonny Rollins. Or they abandoned the thirty-two-bar structure of the pop tune altogether, along with the harmonic role of the rhythm section. The 1959 Ornette Coleman quartet (Coleman on white plastic alto sax, Don Cherry on pocket trumpet, Charlie Haden on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums) was eccentric in a lot of ways, but especially in the absence of a harmony instrument, piano or guitar. The loosened-up texture of their music, though, had precedents in the opening bars of the Parker/Gillespie “Ko-Ko,” and, as we have already heard, in the first phrase of “Cotton Tail.”
Moving away from the pop tune, jazz musicians reconnected with other genres of African American music, like the gospel music heard in many compositions of Charles Mingus or the funk rhythms in Miles Davis's On the Corner. They put their music to school with other traditions of improvisation: Indian music (John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane) or African music (Randy Weston and, in his extended composition for jazz orchestra and Ghanaian musicians, Congo Square, Wynton Marsalis). Or they just went “out.”
Jazz historians trace the birth of the “out” to the atonal sections of Ellington's “Clothed Woman” of 1947, but the impulse was also present around the same time in the music of Lennie Tristano and the futuristic pieces, like “City of Glass,” that Robert Graettinger wrote for Stan Kenton and which Ellington parodied wickedly in his Controversial Suite of 1951, which also took a parting shot at the “Dixieland” revivalists.61 Ornette Coleman's 1959 performances at the Five Spot turned these marginal efforts into a new movement that came to be called, after Coleman's 1960 album, free jazz.62
Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch, recorded in 1964, is an early but classic example of the idiom. Its personnel are: Eric Dolphy, bass clarinet, flute, and alto sax; Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Richard Davis, bass; and Tony Williams, drums. (Astonishingly, Williams was just eighteen years old when the recording was made.) Of all the free jazz musicians, Dolphy had the strongest connections with advanced classical composition. He performed Varèse's flute solo Density 21.5, and he dedicated the third work on this album to Severino Gazzelloni, the Italian avant-garde flautist. Though all five tracks of Out to Lunch repay close study, let's look at the opening number, “Hat and Beard,” an homage (or “tone parallel”) to Thelonious Monk.
“Hat and Beard” is a study in odd-numbered asymmetry. It is in five sections and begins with a nine-beat, nine-pitch ostinato divided into 5 + 4 ( C-B-A-G-F; E-B-G-D). The two melodic units imply the oscillating harmonies of Monk's theme song “Epistrophy.” The opening section states the ostinato in various transformations twenty-two times, lasting about ninety seconds. The closing section also restates the ostinato but reverses the order of variants from the opening and compresses them to sixty seconds (a Bartókian structure and, roughly speaking, proportional relationship). The rhythm of the ostinato is square but goofy, like Monk's “Misterioso.”
The three central sections are solos for Dolphy (bass clarinet), Hubbard, and Hutcherson, with Davis and Williams maintaining the 5 + 4 beat pattern throughout, aided by Hutcherson, when he's not soloing. What might have been a rhythmic straitjacket in lesser hands becomes a marvel of unpredictable cross-accentuation, especially in the “knots and gnarls” of Williams' ceaselessly creative drumming.63 The rhythm section plays “supermelodically” without losing the pulse. Dolphy's solo, a darting series of swirls, wails, and shrieks, defies any simple relation to the pulse; though many of its sounds come from the repertory of “extended technique” cultivated by European avant-garde wind players like Gazzelloni and Heinz Holliger, every sound Dolphy makes stems from the blues. Hubbard develops Dolphy's fragments into longer, sustained lyrical lines that sound in turn like bebop and Arabian music. Hutcherson begins his section sparely, delineating the scalar structures of the ostinato. Instead of building on this, Hutcherson forgoes a star turn and instead weaves a trio with the bass and drums, quietly evoking bells and birdcalls—a little “night music.”
There is not a single moment in “Hat and Beard” where the rhythmic patterns suggest the expected patterns of bebop, let alone swing. Yet it swings. The rhythmic layering and the vocabulary of rhythmic gestures in play all stem from the jazz tradition, and the exquisite timing and phrasing of the five performers sum up generations of rhythmic experiment by musicians predating even Bechet and Armstrong. The loss of pop tune harmonic progressions seems no loss at all; on the contrary, they feel like an unnecessary encumbrance, mere scaffolding. The rhythmic and harmonic implications of the ostinato theme seem more rigorous and apt in their demands on the players. There's life after rhythm changes.
“Out” in “Hat and Beard” is a happy, utopian state. It does not take the listener outside of time, nor, despite the album title, is it in any way crazy. But it does lead us “out” of constraining categories like classical, jazz, and even avant-garde (and it reminds us that all of those categories are constraining). As Ellington put it, the art is not in the categories, but “in the cooking.”64
CHAPTER 3
“Prelude to a Kiss”: Melody
In the advanced industrial countries pop music is defined by standardization; its prototype is the song hit. A popular American textbook on writing and selling such hits confessed that with disarming missionary zeal some thirty years ago. The main difference between a pop song and a serious or—in the beautifully paradoxical language of that manual—“standard” song is said to be that pop melodies and lyrics must stick to an unmercifully rigid pattern while the composer of serious songs is permitted free, autonomous creation. The textbook writers do not hesitate to call popular music
“custom-built,” a predicate usually reserved for automobiles.
—T. W. Adorno
Play a simple melody.
—Irving Berlin
INTRO: THE MELODY BIZ
Melody was a touchy subject for the grandees of modern music. In his 1939 Norton Lectures Stravinsky conceded, grandly, that the public was right about melody and he was wrong: “I am beginning to think, in full agreement with the general public, that melody must keep its place at the summit of the hierarchy of elements that make up music.”1 Once he had bowed to the wisdom of his Harvard audience, however, Stravinsky sternly corrected it: “but that is no reason to be beclouded by melody to the point of losing balance and of forgetting that the art of music speaks to us in many voices at once. Let me once again call your attention to Beethoven, whose greatness derives from a stubborn battle with rebellious melody.”
Schoenberg similarly presented himself as a misunderstood melodist: “It is perhaps necessary to show also some melodies of my later period, especially of the composition with twelve tones, which has earned me the title of constructionist, engineer, mathematician, etc., meaning that these compositions are produced exclusively by the brain without the slightest participation of the heart.”2 Attempting to appear warm and fuzzy, Schoenberg cited as a melodic illustration of “heart” a twelve-tone theme from his Third String Quartet that most listeners would file under “brain.” The rhythm of this theme (from the opening of the Intermezzo movement) has a certain Viennese lilt, but its pitches have all the charm of an atonal ear-training exercise.
Melody, a fighting word, can set the cultured elite against the general public, the brain against the heart, the human against the unhumanly mechanical. In wrestling with the subject, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Adorno, each in his own way, tried to put out a persistent antimodern brush fire. For their opponents the absence of melody, more than any other factor, explained the ever-widening distance between modern music and the concert audience. The decline and fall of melody epitomized the “agony of modern music,” to quote the title of Henry Pleasants's 1955 antimodern, projazz polemic.