by David Schiff
Giving the lie to Adorno's charge of “eternal faddishness”, jazz had demonstrated a consciousness of its past as early as James P. Johnson's “Carolina Shout” and Joe Oliver's “Dippermouth Blues”. Barely a quarter century after the first jazz recordings appeared, historically minded critics were debating its “evolution and essence” (to borrow André Hodeir's title) and evaluating new styles like swing and bop either as betrayals of the past or authentic heirs of tradition.3 Even as the jazz imitations of the early 1920s lost their glow, the impact of jazz on concert music as varied as Antheil's Jazz Symphony, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron (where the orgy around the golden calf sounds like a nightmarish parody of a Weimar cabaret), and Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses showed that, far from being ahistorical, the jazz idiom had become a necessary part of historical representation in music. The question that remained on the horizon was whether historical representation in music still required a classical component. In January 1943 Ellington's Black, Brown and Beige answered that question from the stage of the concert world's ground zero, Carnegie Hall.
The role of history in twentieth-century music is a large subject with its own complex history—which I leave to the historians. In this chapter, I focus on two nearly contemporary instances of historical narrative in American music: Black, Brown and Beige, from 1943, and Appalachian Spring, from 1944. Both of these momentous works appeared during an ongoing conflict that raised questions about the meaning of the past and prospects for the future. In wartime, at the cusp of neoclassicism and vanguardism, history itself was up for grabs. Not surprisingly, both works faltered in their original forms as they tried to imagine a resolution. Both were revised after the war ended, downsized to suites, one in a way that critics took as an admission of failure, the other in a way that refashioned music and history in the image of victory.
BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE: GETTING TO CARNEGIE HALL
D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, the most popular and influential film of the silent era, premiered early in 1915 and received a private screening at the White House for the president, his cabinet, and their wives. The film, based to some extent on the historical writings of President Wilson, celebrated the growth of the Ku Klux Klan. Historian Thomas Cripps describes three of its scenes as follows:
1. A scene set in the South Carolina legislature in the early 1870s (introduced with an intertitle that suggests that what is to follow is drawn from “historic incidents”), which depicts newly elected black legislators lolling in their chairs, their feet bare, eating chicken and drinking whiskey, leering at white women in the visitors' gallery.
2. A scene in which one of the film's white southern heroes witnesses a group of white children donning white bed sheets, inadvertently scaring several black children playing nearby, which provides him with “The Inspiration” for the Klan's infamous outfits.
3. A scene of Klansmen, dressed in white sheets and astride horses, dumping the body of the character Gus, an African American whom they had killed for causing Flora, the little sister of the story's southern white protagonists, to hurl herself off a cliff.
After viewing the film a white man in Lafayette, Indiana, shot a teenage African American boy to death. Houston audiences, according to historian David Levering Lewis, “shrieked ‘lynch him!’ during a scene in which a white actor in blackface pursued Lillian Gish”.4 President Wilson reportedly told Griffith that the film was “like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it all is so terribly true”.5 The wild success of the film confirmed a version of American history already accepted by nearly the entire spectrum of white Americans, from Ivy League history professors to Southern lynch mobs. Anticipating the strategies of fascism, the film packaged racism with populism and paranoia, calling “for an alliance of the common folk from the formerly warring sections to overthrow a tyranny based on Northern commercial corruption allied with African Americans”.6 The film made visible the ideological subtext of the Democratic Party's “Southern Strategy”, an alliance of Northern blue collar workers, Southern small farmers, and property owners to which Wilson gave the name “New Freedom” and which the Republican party, no longer the party of Lincoln, would appropriate later in the century. Wilson's strategy fortified the reversal of the Union victory in the Civil War that began with the end of Reconstruction. White Americans imposed second-class citizenship on blacks throughout the country, justifying the denial of rights and the constant threat of violence with the scarifying accounts of Reconstruction that Griffith dramatized using the most advanced artistic technology of the time. Although he claimed to be surprised and even offended by accusations of racism, Griffith was so animated by fear of miscegenation that he forbade “any ‘black blood’ among the players who might have to touch white actresses. Those actors were always whites in blackface”.7
Whatever else it may have done, Birth of a Nation demonstrated as never before the incendiary persuasive power of the film medium. As soon as it came out the NAACP, then led by W. E. B. DuBois, attempted to counter its impact. After the failure of campaigns to cut racist scenes or ban the film altogether, plans were made for a rebuttal film, to be called Birth of Race, that would be based on Booker T. Washington's autobiography, Up from Slavery. Respected and well connected, Washington died before the film could be completed and adequately financed; as Nelson George writes, “The film slipped into the hands of con men, swindlers and incompetents.”8 Its opening was a fiasco. The racist historical narrative of Birth of a Nation would remain unchallenged in the popular media until the appearance of the television series Roots in 1979.
Ellington was sixteen when Birth of a Nation appeared, and the humiliating failure to oppose its version of history may well have motivated his lifelong project of composing a history of African Americans. As Mark Tucker showed, the historical pageants that had already appeared during his school days in Washington, D.C. provided templates for Ellington's historical compositions. In 1911 the Howard Theater presented a musical production called The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song and Story in four sections: Overture, Night of Slavery—Sorrow Songs, Dawn of Freedom, and Day of Opportunity. Even more elaborate was The Star of Ethiopia, produced by DuBois in 1913 and brought to D.C. in October 1915. It covered “ten thousand years of the history of the Negro race” in five scenes—“Gift of Iron”, “Dream of Egypt”, “Glory of Ethiopia”, “Valley of Humiliation”, and “Vision Everlasting”—in a multimedia spectacle with music, lights, and dancing.9
These pageants gave Ellington a model for narrating black history, but their theatrical forms left open the question of whether the story could also be told through instrumental music without words, actors, dancers, and spectacle. Ellington later explored a variety of media, composing music for film, ballet, political revue, musical comedy, and television, and he often spoke of writing an operatic presentation of African American history titled Boola. In 1958 A Drum Is a Woman, a history of jazz told through a fantastic mixture of allegory, music, and dance, appeared on television; in 1963 the historical pageant My People, a theatrical blend of religious service and history lesson that anticipated Leonard Bernstein's Mass, was performed twice a day over a three-week period as part of a Century of Negro Progress exhibition. While Ellington pursued these mixed-media forms he also narrated black history in instrumental compositions. Between 1943 and 1950 he presented what might be termed chapters of an historical epic: Black Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin', Deep South Suite, Liberian Suite, and Harlem. All these works provoked intense critical controversy that continues today. Most critics, however, measured them in terms of their genre (sizing them up either as jazz or symphonic compositions) rather than their content, or they claimed that their form and content were fatally mismatched.
In composing these concert works Ellington took his music into two different contested areas. Black, Brown and Beige and Harlem (a.k.a. A Tone Parallel to Harlem and Harlem Suite) appeared as program music, or tone parallels, as Ellington called them. B
y the 1940s the concert world had come to think of program music as a dated genre that had peaked in the tone poems of Richard Strauss. Most modernist composers rejected the idea of musical storytelling in favor of more abstract designs; the tone poem devolved into such midcult works as Gershwin's An American in Paris or Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite. Many of the narrative techniques of program music also became clichés of movie music and cartoon music. Educated listeners unthinkingly branded most program music as kitsch and assumed that its composers were either naive, provincial, or, in the case of Hollywood composers, willfully exploitative. Predictably, critics accused Ellington's tone parallels of technical ineptitude and narrative pretentiousness, and these charges have clouded the music for years. James Lincoln Collier's biography of the composer, written in 1987, summarily dismissed all of Ellington's extended works.
Ellington risked even greater acrimony in giving musical shape to the African American experience. The black community had long debated the lessons to be drawn from its history. At the turn of the century Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois laid down contrasting goals of self-sufficiency and equality, economic power and civil rights. Their positions evolved as the center of African American life moved from the rural south to northern cities. Older black leaders such as DuBois and Alain Locke encouraged African American artists to seek a new maturity of expression by pursuing European high art standards of “discipline, restraint, austerity and resolution.”10 They were suspicious of jazz and the blues. Younger artists like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, however, embraced the new music and all it represented. Hughes wrote, “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our dark-skinned selves without fear or shame”.11 After the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance and its vision of the “New Negro” in the 1920s, the Depression devastated black communities everywhere. Many black intellectuals and artists, like Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes, joined the Communist Party and at times viewed the Soviet Union as a better friend than the United States. Relations with the party, though, were complex. As Martin Duberman wrote, the party's “aggressively secular scorn for Christian institutions and values, so central to the culture of Afro-Americans, seriously constricted its appeal to the black masses”. As part of its Popular Front stance in the late 1930s, however, the party “threw itself into pronounced support for black arts, helping to sponsor a variety of efforts to encourage black theater, history and music.”12
Once the United States entered the war racial tensions escalated. A segregated army, perpetuating American racism, drafted young black men to fight Nazi racism. While white workers found employment in the burgeoning defense industry, blacks were barred from these jobs; as white America suddenly prospered, the Depression only deepened in Harlem. The Amsterdam Star-News described an “upsurge of rebellion, bordering on open hostility” within its community.13 Meanwhile, the Communist Party (which had already lost much credibility due to the Hitler-Stalin pact) made Russian relief a greater priority than improving conditions for African Americans. Even as black political leaders pressed the administration to increase opportunities for black workers, Harlem erupted in riots. How would Black, Brown and Beige mirror this complex and fast-changing political climate?
BLACK, BROWN AND BEIGE: WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?
Black, Brown and Beige premiered on January 23, 1943, at a benefit concert for Russian War Relief, and thus appeared at the crossroads of two different and competing causes. The audience may have expected to hear something suitably patriotic. Owing to the propaganda power of radio broadcasts, music played an unprecedented wartime role, whether in the classical form of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”), which had been smuggled out of the besieged Soviet Union, or in the popular music of the Andrews Sisters and Glenn Miller. Even before the war, didactic anti-Nazi works like Kurt Weill's Eternal Road and Ballad for Americans by Earl Robinson and John La Touche established a genre of inspirational populist music that would continue with Copland's Lincoln Portrait, Blitzstein's Symphony: The Airborne, and Schoenberg's Survivor from Warsaw. Although Ellington had been contemplating Black, Brown and Beige since the early 1930s, it premiered in the context of these wartime works at a time when, as Ellington said to the audience, the Black, Brown, and Beige would once again fight for the Red, White, and Blue. Given the nature of the occasion he could not say explicitly that he hoped they would be rewarded for their services better than they had been in previous wars, but the message was encoded, perhaps too deeply, in the music.
A sold-out, celebrity-packed house cheered the Ellington band's first Carnegie Hall concert, and it received wide attention in the press. Eleanor Roosevelt was in attendance, and Frank Sinatra greeted Ellington backstage during a break from his own show at the Paramount. (Ellington wrote Sinatra's name, address, and phone number at the top of his first sketch for Black. He had begun composing the new work a month earlier in Hartford, Connecticut, where the band shared the bill with the emerging blue-eyed singer.) Ellington's manager, William Morris, who was also active in the Russian relief movement, had declared January 17-23 National Ellington Week, and midway through the sold-out concert Ellington received a plaque signed by such luminaries of American music as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, Earl Hines, Count Basie, Lena Horne and Paul Whiteman, Leopold Stokowski, Walter Damrosch, Marian Anderson, Paul Robe-son, Roy Harris, Aaron Copland, Kurt Weill, Jerome Kern, and Chico Marx.
The concert reinstated Ellington's place of honor in the jazz world after two years of disruption. Jimmy Blanton's early death in July 1942 and the departures of Cootie Williams, Ivie Anderson, and Barney Bigard threatened to terminate the achievement of the “Blanton/Webster” band of 1940 and 1941. Battles between ASCAP, the musicians' union, and the broadcast and recording industries interrupted the development of repertory and records. Responding to obstacles creatively, Ellington had relocated to Hollywood in January 1941. In addition to the usual schedule of ballroom performances the band made five short films and performed in the musical review Jump for Joy, which ran from July 10 to September 27, 1941. As Michael Denning points out, the show mixed the revue format of Ellington's Cotton Club shows with the edgy political commentary of Pins and Needles, the union-sponsored topical musical that opened in New York in 1937 with its theme “Sing Me a Song with Social Significance”.
By 1941, however, the war had already altered the tone and terms of political protest. Anticipating that the war effort against Nazi racism might finally bring an end to racial discrimination in America, Jump for Joy celebrated (with Paul Webster's lyrics) the imminent death of Uncle Tom, blackface, and the other stereotypes that still reigned in the American theater:
Fare thee well, land of cotton,
Cotton lisle
is out of style,
Honey chile,
Jump for joy.
Jump for Joy took shape just as A. Philip Randolph was planning a march on Washington to protest employment discrimination in the defense industries. Ellington showed his support of the cause on Lincoln's birthday in 1941 in the radio address “We, Too, Sing America”, its title echoing Langston Hughes's poem. Ellington declared, “The Negro is the creative voice of America…. We fought America's wars, provided her labor, gave her music, kept alive her flickering conscience, prodded her on toward the yet unachieved goal, democracy.”14 During the run of the show Ellington also supported such leftist groups as the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, the Hollywood Democratic Committee, and the Independent Citizen's Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions, and along with Herb Jeffries and Ivie Anderson he performed excerpts from the show on NBC's Salute to Labor.
Even though a few of its songs (“I Got It Bad”, “Chocolate Shake”, “Rocks in My Bed”) became popular, Jump for Joy never made it to Broadway; after Pearl Harbor its irreverent tone may have seemed out of line. Protest now had to take a backseat to patriotism. Ellington spent most of 1942 on the road, returning to Hollywood in the fall for two
full-length films, Cabin in the Sky and Reveille with Beverly, and also making recordings for the Armed Forces Radio Service. The January 1943 Carnegie Hall benefit concert was simultaneously a triumphant return to New York and a high point in Ellington's political visibility. The stakes were high.
The live recording demonstrates that the Ellington Orchestra was more than up to the occasion; the critical sniping that ensued may simply illustrate the danger of giving an audience too much of a good thing, though it also exposed the usual cultural prejudices. In the Herald Tribune, Paul Bowles, while noting the vociferous approval of the audience, warned that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged…. One might say they operate on different wave lengths; it is impossible to tune them in simultaneously.”15 Heard today the concert sounds like a peak moment in the history of American music, a nonstop display of virtuosity and creativity (with new works by Ellington, Strayhorn, Mercer Ellington, Juan Tizol, and Mary Lou Williams) compared to which Paul Whiteman's far more celebrated Experiment in Modern Music of 1924 was, with the exception of one piece, Rhapsody in Blue, an overhyped dud. The program opened with “The Star-Spangled Banner” (begun solemnly, but gradually speeding up and ending with a brazen added six chord, which Stravinsky may have imitated at the conclusion of his 1945 Symphony in Three Movements), followed by Ellington's own anthem, “Black and Tan Fantasy”, in its epically slo-mo rearrangement of 1938. Although it featured such chestnuts as “Black Beauty”, “Rockin' in Rhythm”, and “Mood Indigo”, most of the other pieces on the program were of recent vintage.