The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Milhaud summed up his exotic adventures in the African-chic spectacle The Creation of the World, which the Swedish Ballet presented in Paris in 1923, with a scenario by the Simultaneist poet Blaise Cendrars and sets and costumes by the Cubist innovator Fernand Léger. None of the participants knew anything about Africa, but Milhaud’s score rises above art nègre stereotypes on the strength of its elegant intermingling of Bach and jazz: in the opening passage of the overture, trumpets dance languidly over a saxophone-laced Baroque continuo. On his Latin-American travels, Milhaud had encountered the music of the Cuban danzón composer Antonio María Romeu, who liked to frame syncopated dances in Bachian counterpoint. He may also have heard Villa-Lobos speculating about common ground between Brazilian folk music and the classical canon—an idea that would eventually generate Villa-Lobos’s great sequence of Bachianas Brasileiras. Later, the notion of a pan-historical conversation between Bach and jazz would be taken up by the likes of Bud Powell, John Lewis, Jacques Loussier, and Dave Brubeck, the last of whom studied with Milhaud and drew inspiration from his work. Milhaud became a link in a long chain, connecting centuries of tradition with new popular forms.

  Stravinsky, too, cocked an ear to jazz. His guide was the conductor Ernest Ansermet, who toured America with the Ballets Russes in 1916 and wrote excitedly to Stravinsky about the “unheard-of music” that he was encountering in cafés. ( Just as the Ballets Russes was arriving for its tour, the Creole Band, pioneers and popularizers of New Orleans jazz, was playing at the Winter Garden in New York. Later that year, the jazz historian Lawrence Gushee reveals, both the Ballets Russes and the Creole Band played on the same night in Omaha, Nebraska.) Ansermet brought back to Switzerland a pile of recordings and sheet music, including, possibly, Jelly Roll Morton’s “Jelly Roll Blues.” Stravinsky played some of these for Romain Rolland, calling them “the musical ideal, music spontaneous and ‘useless,’ music that wishes to express nothing.” (“Dance must express nothing,” Cocteau had written to him back in 1914.) If nothingness wasn’t really what Jelly Roll had in mind, it did explain why so many people responded to jazz during the last bloody years of the Great War: it offered a clean slate to a shellshocked culture.

  In 1918, Stravinsky wrote a puppet-theater piece titled Histoire du soldat, or Story of a Soldier, which had a decisive influence on younger composers in France, America, and Germany. It is a down-to-earth Faustian tale of a soldier-fiddler who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for untold riches. Later, Stravinsky would tell the New York press that the instrumentation was copied from jazz ensembles, and, indeed, the combination of violin, cornet, trombone, clarinet, bassoon, double bass, and percussion resembles the makeup of the Creole Band (which had a guitar in place of a bassoon). The first scene of Histoire starts with a simple, plucked, one-two-three-four pulse. The violin breaks up and rearranges this beat, entering on a four, then on a three, then on a two, in a triplet motion, then in phrases of five and three, then in yet more complicated phrases of odd-numbered beats. The interplay between a pulsing bass figure and freewheeling solos suggests a café-band performance, if not of jazz as such.

  As Stravinsky later confessed, Histoire was a Russian émigré’s dream of jazz, rather than a reflection of the real thing. Of course, he had written the Rite the same way, assembling a fantasy world from scraps of evidence.

  By official reckoning, le jazz lasted all of three years. Cocteau called it to a halt in 1920, announcing “the disappearance of the skyscraper” and the “reappearance of the rose.” That same year Auric explained in the pages of the journal Le Coq that his piece Adieu New-York, a fox-trot for piano, was his farewell to jazz, which had served its purpose. Auric’s new slogan was “Bonjour Paris!” By 1927, even Milhaud had lost interest in the mysteries of Harlem. “Already the influence of jazz has passed,” he wrote, “like a beneficial storm that leaves behind a clear sky and stable weather.”

  What next? Lynn Garafola has introduced two useful terms to describe music and dance in the twenties: “period modernism” and “lifestyle modernism.” Period modernism indicates the cultivation of pre-Romantic styles, notably the orderly and stylish Baroque. The trend was already well under way in turn-of-the-century Paris, when Debussy extolled Rameau, Satie revived Gregorian chant, and Reynaldo Hahn, Proust’s lover, wrote neo-Handelian arias. But the retrospective impulse intensified after the war, perhaps as a way of escaping recent history. Diaghilev, not Cocteau, took the lead in promoting period modernism: he had collected tattered scores by the likes of Cimarosa, Scarlatti, and Pergolesi and began editing them for modern performance, hiring favorite composers to do the orchestration. In 1920, Diaghilev asked Stravinsky to arrange ballet music from a sheaf of scores attributed to Pergolesi. Stravinsky did more than arrange: by elongating and truncating notes here and there, by introducing discontinuities, irregularities, angularities, and anomalies, he emerged with Pulcinella, a new type of ultramodish Stravinsky confection.

  A less celebrated guru had already nudged Stravinsky toward the classical past. This was the Princesse de Polignac, née Winnaretta Singer, heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune, whose story is chronicled in Sylvia Kahan’s book Music’s Modern Muse.

  Singer’s early passion was for Wagner, but she later developed a consuming love of Bach. In a turn of phrase that captures the inborn melancholy of period modernism, she wrote that a Bach chorale “reconstitutes the past, and proves to us that we had a reason for living on this rock: to live in the beautiful kingdom of sounds.” At her salons, new works were often paired with Bach’s, and the former began sounding like the latter. Oddly, the Princesse received inspiration from Richard Strauss, whose use of a thirty-six-instrument orchestra in Ariadne auf Naxos gave her the idea that “the days of big orchestras were over.” She promptly asked Stravinsky for a score requiring thirty to thirty-six instruments, even specifying the instrumentation, though she wisely seems not to have mentioned the Strauss angle. (Decades later, Stravinsky snapped to Robert Craft, “I would like to admit all Strauss’s operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant vulgarity.”) Aloof, intellectual, secretly lesbian, Singer had the personality of an artist herself. She sat in a high-backed chair in front of the rest of the audience so that she would not be distracted. Much displeased her, nothing surprised her. When the instruments for Les Noces were delivered to her house on avenue Henri-Martin, a butler announced, in horrified tones, “Madame la Princesse, four pianos have arrived,” to which she replied, “Let them come in.”

  If the Hôtel Singer-Polignac was the clearinghouse of period modernism, the racier salons—those of Étienne de Beaumont, Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, Elisabeth de Clermont-Tonnerre, and the outrageous Natalie Barney—catered to lifestyle modernism, the spirit of high fashion, low culture, and sexual play. The rules of the game were laid down by the Ballets Russes, which in 1922 moved its center of operations to the playboy capital of Monte Carlo and began receiving support from the Société des Bains de Mer. The exemplary lifestyle production was Le Train bleu, which took its name from the train that conveyed the beautiful people from Paris to the Riviera. The action involved a gigolo, his flapper girl, a golfer, and a female tennis champion, all attired in sportswear by Coco Chanel. Milhaud, who wrote the music, was asked to tone down his polytonal harmonies so as not to ruffle the high-society audience. “Le Train bleu is more than a frivolous work,” Cocteau said. “It is a monument to frivolity!” It was also a monument to the beauty of a boy, in the form of Anton Dolin. Diaghilev had long catered to a gay subculture, but he now became rather brazen, outfitting his favorite dancers in tight bathing suits or minuscule Grecian shorts.

  In this giddy ambience, Poulenc came into his own. “What’s good about Poulenc,” Ravel said, “is that he invents his own folklore.” Poulenc, too, was gay, and held a kind of coming-out party in his own Diaghilev ballet, Les Biches. It is easy enough to read between the lines of his subsequent description of the scenario—a “modern fêtes galantes in a larg
e, all-white country drawing room with a huge sofa in Laurencin blue as the only piece of furniture. Twenty charming and flirtatious women frolicked about there with three handsome, strapping young fellows dressed as oarsmen.” Bronislava Nijinska’s original choreography, as Lynn Garafola describes it, made the innuendo fairly explicit: the strapping young fellows spent more time looking at one another than at the women, and the Hostess tried to revalidate her beauty by posing with the boys.

  There must have been a menacing disconnect between Nijinska’s dances of modern narcissism and Poulenc’s aggressively antique genre pieces. Things go musically out of joint right at the start: first come two Stravinskyish signals, with jagged grace notes like catches in the voice; then a clear major third in clarinets and bassoons; and finally the cartwheeling main theme. Poulenc would write more substantial scores—he had the richest, most surprising career of any of Les Six—but Les Biches retains its nasty champagne kick after all these years.

  Stravinsky reached the apex of his hipness. He wrote manifestos, gave inflammatory interviews (“Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and who have never understood music”), took homes on the Côte Basque and the Côte d’Azur, conducted, performed on the piano, met famous people, attended parties. There was a fling with Coco Chanel; there was a long affair with the bohemian émigré Vera Sudeykina, who eventually became his second wife. His premieres were A-list events at which luminaries of art and literature congregated. Joyce and Proust had their only meeting at a dinner following the 1922 debut of Renard, although they had trouble finding anything to talk about. Stravinsky’s life took on a name-dropping Andy Warhol quality, as is evident in the questions that Robert Craft asked in the first of his “conversation books” with the composer:

  You were a friend of D’Annunzio’s at one time, weren’t you?…You knew Rodin, didn’t you?…Wasn’t there also a question of Modigliani doing a portrait of you?…I once heard you describe your meeting Claude Monet…You were with Mayakovsky very often on his famous Paris trip of 1922?…Would you describe your last meeting with Proust?…I often hear you speak of your admiration for Ortega y Gasset. Did you know him well?…How did Giacometti come to make his drawings of you?

  The after-party for Les Noces took place on a barge in the Seine. Stravinsky jumped through a wreath, Picasso created a sculpture out of children’s toys, and Cocteau went around in a captain’s uniform saying, “We’re sinking.”

  All the while, Stravinsky was writing rather little music. His output of major works from 1921 to 1925 consisted of the brief opera Mavra, the Octet, the Concerto for Piano and Winds, the Sonata for piano, and the Serenade for piano—less than ninety minutes in total. The composer seemed to spend as much time explaining his music as he did writing it, and amused himself by adopting the flat-toned, inexpressive jargon of a researcher defending his experiments to fellow experts:

  My Octuor is a musical object. This object has a form and that form is influenced by the musical matter with which it is composed…My Octuor is not an “emotive” work but a musical composition based on objective elements which are sufficient in themselves…My Octuor, as I said before, is an object that has its own form. Like all other objects it has weight and occupies a place in space…

  Stravinsky further claimed that he had never done anything but create “objects” of this kind. “Even in the early days, in the ‘Fire Bird,’” he told an English interviewer in 1921, “I was concerned with a purely musical construction.” Some years later he declared, “I consider music by its very nature powerless to express anything: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state, a natural phenomenon, etc.” This chic formalism echoed Cocteau (“Dance must express nothing”), who probably got it from Oscar Wilde (“Art never expresses anything but itself”). The new objectivity was the old aestheticism.

  Stravinsky had cast aside his old Russian self but had not yet hammered out a new identity. On the one hand, much of his writing in the twenties fell under the rubric of “period modernism.” Mavra is a love letter to nineteenth-century Russian imperial style, especially Tchaikovsky. The Octet bustles through the antiquated arts of sonata form, theme and variation, and modulation through the major and minor keys. The becalmed slow movement of the Piano Concerto unfurls like an aria by Bach or Handel, replete with long, cantabile lines and stately, processional rhythms. Period modernism in music would come to be called neoclassicism, and it would hold sway well into the second half of the century. One early adherent was Manuel de Falla, who set aside his pursuit of flamenco in order to write a Harpsichord Concerto that equaled anything by Stravinsky in severity of method and austerity of tone.

  Yet Stravinsky did not neglect the modern world. Better than almost any composer of his time, he understood how the radio, the gramophone, the player piano, and other media would transform music. When he first heard a pianola, in London in 1914, he was entranced by the thought that he could eliminate the unreliability inherent in human performers. Later, in Paris, he signed a contract with the Pleyel player-piano company to record his works, and for a time he even worked out of a studio in the Pleyel factory. He also tailored a few of his works to the needs of the gramophone. During his first visit to New York, in 1925, he recorded some short piano pieces at the Brunswick Records studio, where, the following year, Duke Ellington would set down “East St. Louis Toodle-oo.” Each movement of the Serenade in A fit on one side of a disc. One advantage of the neo-Baroque aesthetic was that its churning ostinatos and arpeggios readily suggested machines in action. For Stravinsky, as for many other composers, technology became a new kind of folklore, another infusion of the real.

  The Politics of Style

  In 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, Woodrow Wilson gave voice to the dream of a League of Nations—a harmonious new world order of “open covenants openly arrived at.” One year later, at a festival of Gustav Mahler’s music in Amsterdam, an international group of composers issued a manifesto welcoming the opportunity “to shake the hands of our brethren in art, irrespective of nationality and race,” and “to rebuild the broken spiritual bridges between the peoples.” To this end, they hoped for “a great international festival or congress of music…at which every musical nation of the world may present its last and best contributions to the art, and at which the workers in musical aesthetics and criticism may exchange their thoughts and the results of their studies.” The idea of a musical League came to life two years later, with the formation of the International Society for Contemporary Music, or ISCM. The ISCM’s festivals—in Salzburg in 1923, Salzburg and Prague in 1924, Prague and Venice in 1925, Zurich in 1926, and Frankfurt in 1927—were integral to music in the twenties, and the organization still exists today.

  The postwar spirit of comity led to some odd alliances, none odder than the one that flourished briefly between Les Six and the Second Viennese School. “Arnold Schönberg, the six musicians hail you!” wrote Cocteau in 1920. Milhaud conducted part of Pierrot lunaire in December 1921, and presented the entire piece three times during the following year. Schoenberg, for his part, placed works by Debussy and Ravel on his series of “Private Musical Performances” in Vienna. When the two groups met face to face, Schoenberg called Milhaud “a nice person,” while Poulenc pronounced Webern “an exquisite boy.” As might be expected, this strained exchange of pleasantries didn’t last. By the middle of the decade the ISCM was beginning to divide into opposing camps, one arrayed around Schoenberg and another around Stravinsky. The old Franco-German musical war resumed.

  The twenties were years of runaway inflation, rampant stock speculation, and instant fortunes. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book The Age of Extremes, writes that the economic boom was largely illusory, underwritten by a shaky network of international loans and undermined by widespread unemployment. Music, too, seemed trapped in a bubble economy; a composer could make his name with one or two attention-getting gestures but had a harder time sustaining a career. Publicity was guaranteed for a
ny work that combined classical means with modern themes. Honegger proved adept at this trick, writing pieces titled Rugby, Skating-Rink, and the much-played Pacific 231 (a steam locomotive with two front axles, three main axles, and one axle in the back). The young Czech composer Bohuslav Martin produced works depicting a football match (Half-Time), crowds celebrating Lindbergh’s flight (La Bagarre), jazz-dancing kitchen utensils (La Revue de cuisine), Satan as a Negro Cyclist (The Tears of the Knife), and a ballet about music itself (Revolt), in which classical music fights dance hits, gramophones rebel against their masters, critics commit suicide, Stravinsky escapes to a desert island, and a Moravian folk song saves the day.

  The festivals of the twenties were the first great battleground of what the critic Bernard Holland has called the twentieth century’s “politics of style.” Composers weren’t simply engaging in artificial games; they were asking mighty questions about what art meant and how it related to society. Yet, as in the salons of Paris, this discussion about music and modernity took place within an unreal ecosystem that was removed from daily life. The audience at the new-music festivals was a motley gathering of elites—culture-building captains of industry, American heiresses looking to acquire European status, snob aesthetes with no pressing responsibilities, members of the new leisure classes. Ordinary people could not book a hotel for a week in Venice or Zurich. The audience at the average symphony-orchestra subscription concert was more socially diverse; those in the upper galleries made modest wages and came out of a simple love of music. But most preferred to hear Brahms.