The Ellington Century

by David Schiff

  The climactic moment in “Jeux de vagues” feels simultaneously like a moment of sensual bliss and as a fleeting revelation—but of what? Here love, or at least sex, is no redemptive Liebestod, but, in the words of Cole Porter, just one of those things.

  Debussy exhibited an aversion bordering on phobia about discussing his musical technique; Berg's obsession with form, by contrast, resembles the compulsive behavior of one of his operatic characters. His Byzantine, overdetermined formal schemes pushed the music over the edge of rationality, and nowhere more clearly than in the Lyric Suite. The six-movement structure of the quartet is unusual for Berg in its avoidance of odd-number symmetry. In many of Berg's compositions a dramatic central moment serves as a defining point. In the Lyric Suite, as in the later Violin Concerto, however, the central event is a silent pause between movements, a sounding silence during which the action of the music up to that point takes a fatal turn.

  The erotic action of the Lyric Suite appears in its third and fourth movements, marked “Allegro misterioso” (with an episode marked “Trio estatico”) and “Adagio appassionato,” respectively. The introduction to the score points out the “developmental character” of the Adagio, and most scholars hear it as a development of the Trio estatico since it quotes most of its material. Schoenberg, as Berg noted in his analysis of his teacher's Kammersinfonie, had similarly placed the development section after an intervening scherzo. The Lyric Suite may be less the “latent opera” that Adorno took it to be (all of Berg's instrumental works have that character) than a fragmented one-movement symphony portraying an off-kilter wild ride from musical certainty to the abyss.

  The published score of the Lyric Suite exposed, however obliquely, the double nature of its vertiginous downward journey. The movement titles and the overt citations of Alexander von Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde pointed to an erotic subtext. The Zemlinsky quote would not be obscure to anyone who has heard his Lyric Symphony; sung to the words “Du bist mein Eigen” (You are my only one), it's the most memorable theme. Zemlinsky's seven-movement song-symphony, based on poems by Tagore, traced a love affair from tentative beginnings to explosive passion to dissolution. Berg borrowed its trajectory as well as its love theme.

  The alternating presence and absence of the twelve-tone method, also duly noted in the introduction, suggested a musical conflict alongside the erotic one. Only two of the six movements (the first and last) employ the method throughout. The movements and sections with the strongest romantic character (Andante amoroso, Trio estatico, Adagio appassionato, and Presto delirando) were composed “freely.” The serial sections of the piece, by contrast, progress from jovial to desolate, becoming ever more menacing as the piece goes on. Berg clearly differentiated the expressive character of free and serial passages throughout the work. As the music unfolds the serial method becomes associated with mechanical, relentless, antihuman sounds. The free/serial conflict meshes with the erotic drama. The alternation of serial and free sections also corresponds to masculine and feminine stereotypes. Through its apparent inconsistency of technique the work pursues a complex dialectic about gender and music, mastery and submission, freedom and order.

  Methodologically Berg, who had published an analysis of Schoenberg's tone poem Pelleas und Melisande and had quoted its Melisande theme in his own Kammerkonzert, played the treacherous role of Pelleas to his teacher's Golaud. Berg proudly informed Schoenberg of his initial use of serialism in the Lyric Suite in his letter of July 13, 1926, but he may have poisoned the pill by pointing out that the series he employed was an all-interval set discovered by his student Fritz Heinrich Klein.

  Most of the serial devices derived from Klein occur in the first movement of the suite; its jovial character can be heard as a friendly parody of Schoenberg's newly achieved twelve-tone normality. In its ordered form Klein's series (F-E-C-A-G-D-A-D E-G-B-B) contained all eleven intervals; both Klein and Berg mistakenly thought it was unique in this aspect. Berg, however, also pointed out its nonordered properties. The pitches of each of its hexachords could be presented as a cycle of fourths (E-A-D-G-C-F/E-A-D-G-B) or as a diatonic hexachord (C-D-E-F-G-A/G-A-B-B-D-E). In unordered form the second hexachord just transposed the first up an augmented fourth; this meant (as AB did not point out to AS) that rows beginning on the pitches B and F were equivalent. These hexachords could mimic the scales of C and G and also produce triadic harmonies like the G major and minor triads heard in bars 5 and 6. The series, properly manipulated, could produce the sounds of tonality, polytonality, or atonality; given the liberties that Berg took—reorderings, selective verticalizations, superimpositions to create triads—virtually any row might produce these effects. No wonder Berg felt jovial.

  To mark the lucidity of the work's harmonic technique Berg wrote the movement in the so-called sonatina form, an exposition and recapitulation without the mature gravitas of a development section. Actually, though, the movement is anything but simple. The exposition contains four thematic groups. The recapitulation feels like an inverted, transposed restatement, mirroring the structure of the row, though it is actually a developed variation, different in every detail. According to Willi Reich, Berg exhorted his students to “develop, do not write sequences, and intensify,”44 just as he had learned from his teacher. Fluently serial and emotionally well adjusted, the movement presents Alban Berg as a very good boy indeed.

  If the first movement depicts a happy composer and his new toy, the second, as the annotated score revealed, portrays a happy Hausfrau mit Kinder. Stein says the movement is in rondo form, but it sounds like a Mahler scherzo (ABA'CA'') with contrasting trios in a variety of dance rhythms, including minuet, furiant, and waltz. (Berg admired Mahler's Sixth Symphony, whose rhythmic complexities supposedly represented his own two children at play.) Reich claims that the movement is based on an altered row (A-G-E-A-B-F-C-E-F#-B-C#-D) in which the pitches A and C have exchanged places. This mutation deprives the row of all its Kleinian properties, making it more like a Schoenberg series. Had Reich written out the row a step higher, another reason for the exchange of pitches would have become obvious; the first four notes would then be B-A-F-B, or, in German, B-A-F-H. It is difficult, however, to find much trace of the row in the movement, which more conspicuously uses whole-tone and half-diminished harmonies familiar from Berg's Seven Early Songs, op. 1 Sonata and op. 2 Songs. Perhaps the row is only present as an irritant, because the movement becomes increasingly agitated as it progresses. The final appearance of the main section of the piece twice becomes wildly animated, as if a childish game had gotten out of hand and Mama had to intervene—a forecast of a greater loss of control just around the corner.

  We have almost reached the sexy bits, but first let's note how Berg's story differs from “Jeux de vagues.” Debussy began with undifferentiated eros, slowly moving toward a sense of form. Berg began with difference, with the opposition of male and female, serial and free, in a presexual state of children's games, a gemütlich middle-class Eden before the fall. Gender differentiation appears in the “immature” forms of sonatina and rondo and in a contrast of highly rational and apparently improvised idioms. It also appears in the most clearly articulated cyclical theme of the quartet, scalar patterns harmonized as three- or four-note chords. We hear their ascending, masculine form at the two structural cadences of the first movement, and the descending, feminine form at the cadences of the three A sections of the second movement.

  The onset of the third movement changes everything. Perle reported that the annotated score was prefaced by the date “20.5.25,” five days after Berg's arrival chez Fuchs and a day after he had written his wife that he hoped she was on her way to join him in Prague (perhaps hoping to confirm she was not). The music is almost inaudible, barely musical; bowed on the bridge, the instruments produce more scratchy noise than pitch. If we could hear the pitches we might notice that their sequence was strictly serial, but the music sounds like the diary of a plague of flies, or a muted hubbu
b of whispers (Berg's annotation is “wie geflüstert”)45 that might fill a Viennese café during one of Berg's favorite activities, Jause, afternoon gossip. And what is all the buzzing about? The cello makes the subject (or at least the pitches) clear in bar 6 by plucking the strings rather than scratching them; it plays three different orderings of the pitches (in German) B-A-F-H. Rumors seem to be flying ahead of actual (or imagined) events.

  The buzzing texture Berg created out of the various series harkens back to Schoenberg's expressionist period, in particular to the thirteenth movement, “Enhauptung” (Decapitation), from Pierrot Lunaire, especially bars 10-16.46 Berg, whose literary sophistication surpassed even his teacher's, would have appreciated the subtext of castration anxiety in Schoenberg's lurid vignette.

  Berg excelled in expanding lightning-flash moments of Schoenberg's music into sustained structures. Here he inflated Schoenberg's seven-bar phrase into a sixty-nine-bar paragraph followed by its forty-six-bar retrograde, played pianissimo throughout. To make the retrograde audible he structured the initial section as a succession of contrasting textures and timbres: murmurando imitation played on the bridge, pizzicato statements of rows hocketing (alternating) between instruments, tremolando homorhythm, double canon in augmentation using harmonics in rhythms based on seven beats, repeated notes played by striking the string with the wooden side of the bow (col legno), and an imitative stretto mixing notes bowed and struck col legno, with a final codetta based on the ascending chromatic scale from F to B. The memorable timbre of each of these phrases keeps them recognizable even when played backward.

  Out of this superorganized nonmusic the Trio estatico erupts, “plötzlich ausbrechend,” in two loud gasps, as if music itself, like a nearly drowned swimmer, was struggling for breath. In bars 76 and 77 Berg reprised and conjoined the gendered rising and falling scale patterns as an arch, but he also reshaped the scales according to the “master array” of intervals, Berg's contribution to atonal theory. The brief section unfolds in waves, a veritable jeu de vagues, plummeting and rising again. Although there are plenty of A-B-H-F sightings, the peaks, notably the motive in the violins at 86, do not state that tetrad either horizontally or vertically but instead state a new idea, a falling major third followed by a rising major third one half step lower. Berg will bring this new motive (which is imitated upside down by the viola and cello) back at the climax of the fourth movement, but here it appears as an epitome of the warm third-based harmonies that suffuse the entire trio and keep it on the verge of tonality. Had Berg presented the motive with the pitches A-F-E-G# we might recognize it as the first four notes of Tristan, an association strengthened by the four-note chromatic countermelody, which, when inverted, as it is by the cello, announces the “Yearning” theme. (Berg presents both ideas at their correct pitches in the final movement, zu spät.) Before desire or tonality have much of a chance to expose themselves the buzzing music returns, almost as if a broadcast of Tristan suddenly emerged from and disappeared back into a sea of static; Berg often remarked on the quality of radio transmission in his letters. Aberrant electronics drown out human voices.

  The Trio estatico figures love as the dissolution of self, both anagrammatically and texturally. The Adagio appassionato, which Berg annotated as “the next day,” presents itself as both a symphonic development and a love scene, but what do these genres have in common? In the classical sonata form the development prolongs the structure by postponing recapitulation; a love scene, like that of act 2 in Tristan (which Berg would parody in Lulu), attempts to prolong the moment of bliss and postpone the inevitable, which, in Wagner, entails both sexual climax and death. In romantic musical aesthetics the development section was also synonymous with freedom. A subtle example of developmental freedom is the new motive that appears in the viola on the upbeat to bar eight. This figure expands the two-note oscillation that opens the movement in ever-widening intervals: D-C#-E-C-E-B-F, from a half step to a diminished fifth. We might say that Berg has turned his “worm” motive into an aroused “screw” motive, which, aptly enough, he will bring back (in bar 51) to generate the final climax at bar 57, a coincidence of mathematics, implicitly lewd sexual imagery, and dramatic overkill that suggests that Berg and perhaps Mrs. Fuchs shared an objective sense of humor about their affair. At the climactic moment, heralded by tremolandos on A-B-H-F in the violins, Berg transformed the “screw” motive into a rhythmic idea, with a rhythmic series of thrusts that diminish in number (4, 3, 2, 1) as they increase (by a Fibonacci series) in density (two notes, three, five, eight). A second rhythmic series follows with a six-note spasm on A-B-H-F, receding to five notes and then to four. In different performances this passage sounds either like a nearly simultaneous double orgasm or like a death rattle. The coda that follows, the most tender moment of the entire score, muted throughout, sounds like a ghostly aubade from beyond the grave.

  I leave to the reader the pleasures of reading the remaining two movements; in short, it's downhill, romantically but not musically, all the way. I hope that I have already demonstrated how the Lyric Suite, like La Mer, is no sordid snapshot but a richly textured contemplation of matters of life and death or, perhaps, even civilization and its discontents, to borrow the title from Berg's Viennese neighbor. I also leave to the reader to pursue an aspect of erotic representation not present in this chapter. All of the composers discussed here—Ellington, Strayhorn, Debussy, and Berg—were men. The forms and materials they created to represent erotic experience, complex and varied as they are, nevertheless represent a partial view, as does my analysis as well. The idea that meaning resides in form may be a male prejudice. What would be its female counterpart?

  CHAPTER 6

  Black, Brown and Beige: History

  The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

  —T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,”, he cried. “At the request of Mr. Gatsby we are going to play for you Mr. Vladimir Tostoff's latest work, which attracted so much attention at Carnegie Hall last May. If you read the papers, you know there was a big sensation”. He smiled with jovial condescension, and added: “Some sensations!” Whereupon everybody laughed.

  “The piece is known”, he concluded lustily, “as Vladimir Tostoff's Jazz History of the World”.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  History is only his story. You haven't heard my story yet.

  —Sun Ra

  INTRO: CONTROVERSIAL SUITES

  Almost as soon as they had thrown off the shackles of convention to represent the “century of aeroplanes” modernist composers retreated back to the past, or back to the future; neoclassicism and futurism were two sides of the same coin that showed a different side up every decade. After the First World War many composers, acting either as high-minded custodians of tradition or “bad boy” musical grave robbers, practiced neoclassicism, buttressing their musical innovations with audible reminders of Bach or Haydn or Beethoven. The post-World War II avant-garde rereversed the flow of history forward with a renovated vanguardism, back-to-Busoni, or what I term “neomodernism”. Both of these strategies betray a certain anxiety about the present, often viewed as the worst of all possible worlds filled with the worst of all possible music. This catastrophic view shaped T. W. Adorno's essay “Perennial Fashion—Jazz”.1 More a projection of cultural paranoia than music criticism, it painted jazz as the negation of history. As his title indicated, Adorno placed jazz in a logically contradictory historical state: “For almost fifty years the productions of jazz have remained as ephemeral as seasonal styles”. In other words, jazz was transitory and, even worse, permanent. Adorno's rant, which does not cite a single piece of music, shed little light on jazz but evinced a deep-seated frustration from within modernist music at its own failure to connect with the everyday present, a sphere in which European concert music sat commandingly throughout the nineteenth century.

>   Jazz, virtually on arrival, became synonymous with the present moment. European music of the 1920s, Gebrauchsmusik or Zeitoper or Les Six-ism, summoned up the sound of “today” with the saccharine buzz of an alto saxophone or, as in Erik Satie's Parade, a half-remembered Irving Berlin tune while alienating these allusions with modernist dissonances. Figuring a return to the everyday by putting “jazz” in quotations, these modernist styles distanced themselves from it. Works like Milhaud's La création du monde or Hindemith's Suite 1922 treated the new vernacular as an amusing foreign language. More radically the Brecht/Weill Mahagonny presented jazz as the musical jargon of hell.

  Euro-jazz, at least in its most overt forms, was short-lived. By the late 1920s modernists replaced pop references with conspicuous displays of historical authority. Modern music, as Hindemith said, was no longer a laughing matter. Bach, famous for being unappreciated during his own time, now served as an emblem of belated historical justice. Composers spelled out the letters of his name by their pitch equivalents like a seal of approval (or a cry for help). BACH appeared to guarantee the value of Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra, or Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, or Webern's String Quartet. By implication, these claims of impeccable lineage and high seriousness consigned popular music to a state of ahistorical moon/June/spoon mindlessness. While Adorno cleverly placed all popular music on a metaphorical runway of fashion (as if its appeal were limited to the chic rich), the concert world's prejudice against jazz often bared its racism more brazenly. In 1943 Winthrop Sargent, later the music critic for The New Yorker, wrote that “jazz is graphic and colorful, but, in poetic resources, it is about as rich as pidgin English.”2