The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  Help for what? Stravinsky’s biography provides plentiful fodder for speculation, but the underlying impetus may have been a growing discomfort with modernity itself—panic in the face of the speed and noise. Reality, into which so many artists yearned to plunge, turned out to be an engulfing medium. Young aesthetes went off to the trenches of the Great War hoping to acquire a manly finish; the survivors were shattered rather than invigorated by the ordeal. Perhaps for this reason, those who had earlier attempted to escape the temple of “pure music” now tried to find their way back in. In the end, the Germanic philosophy of musical universalism, according to which a few set forms and procedures would serve the composers of all nations, once more functioned as a bulwark against an increasingly indifferent culture. As in Yeats’s poem, European composers embraced the sublimity of artifice, “to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”

  4

  INVISIBLE MEN

  American Composers from Ives to Ellington

  To understand the cultural unease that gripped composers in the Roaring Twenties, you need only read the work of Carl Van Vechten, the American critic, novelist, and social gadfly who, in the 1920s, more or less defected from classical music to jazz and blues. The writer started out as a second-string music critic at the New York Times, dutifully chronicling the city’s concert life in the years before the First World War. During an extended stay in Paris, he warmed to the European moderns and witnessed the riot of the Rite in the company of Gertrude Stein. By the end of the war, though, Van Vechten was getting his kicks chiefly from popular music, and in a 1917 essay he predicted that Irving Berlin and other Tin Pan Alley songwriters would be considered “the true grandfathers of the Great American Composer of the year 2001.” Finally, he pledged his allegiance to African-American culture, writing off concert music as a spent force. In the controversial 1926 novel Nigger Heaven, he observed that black artists were in complete possession of the “primitive birthright…that all the civilized races were struggling to get back to—this fact explained the art of a Picasso or a Stravinsky.”

  The writings of Van Vechten, Gilbert Seldes, and other rebellious young American intellectuals of the twenties show a paradigm shift under way. They depict popular artists not as entertainers but as major artists, modernists from the social margins. In the twenties, for the first time in history, classical composers lacked assurance that they were the sole guardians of the grail of progress. Other innovators and progenitors were emerging. They were American. They often lacked the polish of a conservatory education. And, increasingly, they were black.

  One nineteenth-century composer saw this change coming, or at least sensed it. In 1892, the Czech master Antonín Dvoák, whose feeling for his native culture had inspired the young Janáček, went to New York to teach at the newly instituted National Conservatory. A man of rural peasant origins, Dvoák had few prejudices about the social background or skin color of prospective talent. In Manhattan he befriended the young black singer and composer Harry T. Burleigh, who introduced him to the African-American spirituals. Dvoák decided that this music held the key to America’s musical future. He began plotting a new symphonic work that would draw on African-American and Native American material: the mighty Ninth Symphony, subtitled “From the New World.” With the help of a ghostwriter, Dvoák also aired his views in public, in an article titled “Real Value of Negro Melodies,” which appeared in the New York Herald on May 21, 1893:

  I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States…All of the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people. Beethoven’s most charming scherzo is based upon what might now be considered a skillfully handled negro melody…In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music. They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will. It is music that suits itself to any mood or any purpose. There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.

  At a time when lynching was a social sport in the South, and in a year when excursion trains brought ten thousand people to Paris, Texas, so that they could watch a black man being paraded through town, tortured, and burned at the stake, Dvoák’s embrace of African-American spirituals was a notable gesture. The visiting celebrity didn’t just urge white composers to make use of black material; he promoted blacks themselves as composers. Most provocative of all was his imputation of a “Negro” strain in Beethoven—a heresy against the Aryan philosophies that were gaining ground in Europe.

  Black music is so intertwined with the wider history of American music that the story of the one is to a great extent the story of the other. Everything runs along the color line, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk. Still, it’s worth asking why the music of 10 percent of the population should have had such influence.

  In 1939, a Harvard undergraduate named Leonard Bernstein tried to give an answer, in a paper titled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music.” Great music in the European tradition, young Bernstein declared, had grown organically from national sources, both in a “material” sense (folk tunes serving as sources for composition) and in a “spiritual” sense (folkish music speaking for the ethos of a place). Bernstein’s two-tiered conception, which acknowledges in equal measure music’s autonomy and its social function, makes a good stab at explaining why black music conquered the more open-minded precincts of white America. First, it made a phenomenal sound. The characteristic devices of African-American musicking—the bending and breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound—opened new dimensions in musical space, a realm beyond the written notes. Second, black music compelled attention as a document of spiritual crisis and renewal. It memorialized the wound at the heart of the national experience—the crime of slavery—and it transcended that suffering with acts of individual self-expression and collective affirmation. Thus, black music fulfilled Bernstein’s demand for a “common American musical material.”

  What Dvoák did not foresee, and what even the cooler-than-thou Bernstein had trouble grasping, was that the “great and noble school of music” would consist not of classical compositions but of ragtime, jazz, blues, swing, R & B, rock ’n’ roll, funk, soul, hip-hop, and whatever’s next. Many pioneers of black music might have had major classical careers if the stage door of Carnegie Hall had been open to them, but, with few exceptions, it was not. As the scholar Paul Lopes writes, “The limited resources and opportunities for black artists to perform and create cultivated music for either black or white audiences…forced them into a more immediate relationship with the American vernacular.” Soon, jazz had its own canon of masters, its own dialectic of establishment and avant-garde: Armstrong the originator, Ellington the classicist, Charlie Parker the revolutionary, and so on. A young Mahler of Harlem had little to gain by going downtown.

  Separateness became a source of power; there were other ways to get the message out, other lines of transmission. Black musicians were quick to appropriate technologies that classical music adopted only fitfully. The protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s epochal novel Invisible Man sits in his basement with his record player, listening to “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue.” He says, “Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible.” The invisible man broadcasts on the “lower frequencies” to which society has consigned him. Incidentally, Ellison once thought of becoming a composer. He took a few lessons from Wallingford Riegger, an early American admirer of Schoenberg. Then, like so many others, he stopped.

  To tell the story of American composition in the early twentieth century is to circle around an absent center
. The great African-American orchestral works that Dvoák prophesied are mostly absent, their promise transmuted into jazz. Nonetheless, the landscape teems with interesting life. White composers faced another, far milder kind of prejudice; their very existence was deemed inessential by the Beethoven-besotted concertgoers of the urban centers. They tried many routes around the intractable fact of audience apathy, embracing radical dissonance (Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles), radical simplicity (Virgil Thomson), a black-and-white, classical-popular fusion (George Gershwin). For the most part, the identity of the American composer was a kind of nonidentity, an ethnicity of solitude.

  Aaron Copland, whose story will be told in later chapters, once pointed out that the job of being an American artist often consists simply in making art possible—which is to say, visible. Every generation has to do the work all over again. Composers perennially lack state support; they lack a broad audience; they lack a centuries-old tradition. For some, this isolation is debilitating, but for others it is liberating; the absence of tradition means freedom from tradition. One way or another, all American composers are invisible men.

  Will Marion Cook

  The early history of African-American composition, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, is full of sorrowful tales. Scott Joplin, the composer of “Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” spent his last years in a futile effort to stage his opera Treemonisha, which vibrantly blended bel canto melody and rag rhythm. Syphilis invaded Joplin’s brain, and he died insane in 1917. Harry Lawrence Freeman, the founder of the Negro Grand Opera Company in Harlem, wrote two Wagnerian tetralogies with black characters, only one part of which was ever staged. Saddest of all, perhaps, was the case of Maurice Arnold Strothotte, whom Dvoák singled out as “the most promising and gifted” of his American pupils. Arnold’s American Plantation Dances was played at a National Conservatory concert in 1894 to much applause. The conductor-scholar Maurice Peress has shown that Dvoák’s familiar Humoresque borrowed from an episode in Arnold’s work. The conservatory concert was, unfortunately, the high-water mark of the young man’s career. He continued writing music—an opera titled The Merry Benedicts, music for silent films, an American Rhapsody, a Symphony in F Minor—but performances were few. Instead, he made a living conducting operetta and teaching violin. Like the hero of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, he apparently stopped identifying as black, living out his final years in the heavily German neighborhood of Yorkville. Oblivion engulfed him all the same.

  Other stories had happier endings. The little-known life of the violinist, composer, conductor, and teacher Will Marion Cook serves as a useful case study in the development of African-American music from 1900 to 1930. If this charismatic, obstinate personality ultimately failed in his quest to conquer the classical realm, he did experience moments of triumph, and blazed a separate trail for many black artists who followed him. Among other things, he forms a direct link between Dvoák and Duke Ellington.

  Cook’s biography, sketchily documented, has been pieced together by the scholar Marva Griffin Carter. Born in 1869, Cook grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of middle-class parents. When his father died, he went to live with his grandparents in Chattanooga, where his arrogance created the sorts of disciplinary problems that are often noted in youngsters of unusual talent. He used to go to the top of Lookout Mountain, outside Chattanooga, to plot his future fame. In his unpublished autobiography, he wrote: “I would…remain there till late at night, planning my whole life, how I would study, become a great musician, and do something about race prejudice…Somehow I felt that such music might be the lever by which my people could raise their status. All my life I’ve dreamed dreams, but never more wonderful or more grandiose dreams than those inspired by Lookout Mountain.”

  Cook was then accepted into Oberlin, one of very few American colleges where black students could study alongside whites. A professor noticed his skill as a violinist and advised him to study with Joseph Joachim, who headed the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. With some assistance from the slave-turned-orator Frederick Douglass, who belonged to Mrs. Cook’s social circle, the boy gained admittance to Joachim’s academy.

  The Kaiser’s Berlin proved surprisingly welcoming. According to the autobiography, titled Hell of a Life, Joachim took the young African-American under his wing, expressing a liking for his passionate playing and his untamed personality. “You are a stranger in a strange land,” the violinist supposedly said. “We are going to become friends. Come to my house for lunch Sunday.” At Joachim’s gatherings Cook could have met or glimpsed many of the leading personalities of German music, including Hans von Bülow and the young Richard Strauss. In the winter of 1889, none other than Johannes Brahms came to the Hochschule to celebrate Joachim’s fiftieth anniversary as a performer. In all, Cook seems to have enjoyed his time in Germany; the sight of a black violinist was apparently too exotic to arouse racial fears.

  Compare the experiences of W. E. B. Du Bois, who began studying economics and history in Berlin just as Cook left. According to David Levering Lewis’s biography, Du Bois “felt exceptionally free” during his Berlin sojourn—“more liberated…than he would ever feel again.” On a train ride to Lübeck, Du Bois sang Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—“All men will be brothers”—and dreamed of a better world. The young philosopher also became enamored of the Wagner operas, gaining from them an appreciation of how art could inflame national and racial spirit. In his story “Of the Coming of John,” which appeared in The Souls of Black Folk, a Southern youth named John Jones attends a performance of Lohengrin and feels in it the contours of a better life: “A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled. If he could only live up in the free air where birds sang and setting suns had no touch of blood!” Then—here Du Bois reveals his “double-consciousness,” his awareness of how even the most “cultured” black man is perceived—an usher taps John on the shoulder and asks him to leave.

  That tap on the shoulder, metaphorical or not, Will Marion Cook came to know well when he returned to America. He tried to make his name as a violinist, advertising himself improbably as a “musical phenomenon performing some of the masterpieces upon his violin with one hand.” Making little headway, he then formed the William Marion Cook Orchestra, with Frederick Douglass as honorary president. At around the same time, Cook wrote, or began writing, an opera based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Most significantly, in 1893, he went to Chicago to participate in the World’s Columbian Exposition, a momentous event at which America declared its new status as a world power. In an effort to counteract the stereotypes of black savagery that figured in some of the fair’s displays—crowds flocked to watch and hear the African drummers of Dahomey Village—Douglass organized a Colored People’s Day, which aimed to affirm the nobility of the black American experience. Newspapers mocked Douglass by speculating that watermelons would be sold in bulk.

  Colored People’s Day was to have featured excerpts from Cook’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the singer Sissieretta Jones failed to receive the travel advance that she needed to make the trip, and the performance was canceled. Yet the exposition wasn’t a total waste for Cook. He obtained a letter of introduction to Dvoák, who evidently invited him to study at the National Conservatory. (Jeannette Thurber, the founder of the conservatory, had a policy of admitting Negro students free of charge.) There is little record of what Cook did during his first years in New York, but circumstantial evidence suggests that racism put a quick end to his dreams. One anecdote is cited in Duke Ellington’s memoir, Music Is My Mistress. Cook makes his Carnegie Hall debut, and a critic hails him as “the world’s greatest Negro violinist.” Cook barges in on the critic and smashes his violin on the man’s desk. “I am not the world’s greatest Negro violinist,” he shouts. “I am the greatest violinist in the world!” Marva Griffin C
arter finds no evidence that such an incident took place, but yelling matches probably ensued as the temperamental Cook made the rounds of the concert halls.

  Barred from the classical world, Cook got work where he could find it. In 1898 he collaborated with the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar on a musical revue titled Clorindy; or, The Origin of the Cakewalk, which opened on Broadway with an all-black cast. This was, at first glance, yet another self-denigrating minstrel show full of talk of “coons” and “darkeys.” But, as Carter points out, the lyrics often have a hidden sting, making “confrontational jabs” at white listeners. The hit number “Darktown Is Out Tonight” delivers a prophecy of the coming sovereignty of black music:

  For the time

  Comin’ mighty soon,

  When the best,