The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  What are we hearing? Is Ives seriously suggesting that black soldiers in the Civil War sang “Hear dat mournful sound” as they went into battle? Presumably not. As the title indicates, the work is inspired not by the battle itself but by Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture in honor of it. This is Shaw’s regiment, as seen by Saint-Gaudens, as seen again by Ives. We are looking back through the eyes of a turn-of-the-century Yankee who cannot sing as the black soldiers sang. When he thinks “Negro,” Foster tunes come to mind, as well as anachronistic strains of ragtime. Even so, by shattering these trite associations into fragments, Ives draws closer to the source. The movement seems to look ahead to black music of the near or distant future: the jagged country blues of Skip James, the dreaming chords of Ellington’s symphonic jazz, John Coltrane’s “sheets of sound.” Such resemblances may be nothing more than accidents, but Ives’s whole method was to plan accidents. He was incapable of asserting a monolithic point of view; instead, he created a kind of open-ended listening room, a space of limitless echoes.

  The Jazz Age

  Ives wisely waited until 1920 before trying seriously to publicize his modern Transcendentalist style. Ten years earlier, his work would have made little sense to listeners reared on the courtly values of the Gilded Age. But in the period of the Roaring Twenties there emerged what the scholar Carol Oja has called a “marketplace for modernism,” an audience more receptive to disruptive sounds.

  Cawing trombone glissandos defined the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917 track “Livery Stable Blues,” the first jazz record to capture national attention. Around the same time, audiences were cheering the immigrant Ukrainian pianist-composer Leo Ornstein, a.k.a. “Ornstein the Keyboard Terror,” who offered up savage discords and slam-bang virtuosity. Ornstein’s most startling effect, co-invented with the California experimentalist Henry Cowell, was the “cluster chord,” in which three or more adjacent notes are struck with the hand, the fist, or the forearm. Somehow, Ornstein succeeded in generating an early form of the mass hysteria that would later greet Benny Goodman, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. One crowd was said to have “mobbed the lobbies, marched at intervals to the stage, and long clung there to walls, to organ-pipes, pedal-base, stairs, or any niche offering a view.”

  American music had grown from a well-behaved Eurocentric childhood into a rambunctious adolescence. Oja, in her book Making Music Modern, compares several leading composers of the period to “commuters who emerge baffled from the subway, peering in all directions to ground their location.” Some adopted the strategy of avant-garde assault, firing off dissonances and percussive timbres that outdid the most unusual sound combinations of Stravinsky and the Viennese. They were dubbed the “ultra-moderns.” Others aimed to ingratiate themselves with the concertgoing public, garnishing opera and symphony with dollops of jazz. On the other side of the shaky popular-classical divide, young Broadway masters like Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin copped devices from grand opera and modern music, on their way to creating a new type of through-composed music theater. They, too, were part of Manhattan’s “modernist marketplace,” as Oja calls it. Meanwhile, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, and Paul Whiteman, among others, were determining the fundamentals of the art of jazz. Almost all the above-named were born in the years just before or just after 1900, and they would dominate American music for decades to come.

  Edgard Varèse, chieftain of the ultra-moderns, later recalled: “I became a sort of diabolic Parsifal, searching not for the Holy Grail but the bomb that would make the musical world explode and thereby let in all sounds, sounds which up to now—and even today—have been called noises.”

  Varèse, born in 1883, came to New York from the Paris avant-garde, where he patronized some of the same occult Rosicrucian gatherings that had intrigued Debussy and Satie. After writing for a time in a style that evidently fell somewhere between Debussy and Strauss—his early scores were subsequently destroyed in a fire—Varèse took an interest in Italian Futurism and its “art of noise.” In 1915, having been released from the French army on medical grounds, he decided to try his fortunes in New York City. There, he fell in with a cosmopolitan group of artists, both native and expatriate, who were forging a distinctively American avant-garde, visceral in impact and exuberant in tone. Among them were Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who made art from everyday objects and eroticized the machine. The American critic Paul Rosenfeld, an orotund advocate of avant-garde music in the twenties and thirties, identified these artists as avatars of “skyscraper mysticism,” by which he meant a “feeling of the unity of life through the forms and expression of industrial civilization, its fierce lights, piercing noises, compact and synthetic textures; a feeling of its immense tension, dynamism, ferocity, and also its fabulous delicacy and precision.”

  Varèse’s music owes much to the cruel harmonies and stimulating rhythms of the Rite, but any trace of folklore or popular melody has been surgically excised. His first major American work was, appropriately, Amériques, or Americas, a gargantuan orchestral movement composed between 1919 and 1922. It echoed the sounds and rhythms of New York along the Hudson River and around the Brooklyn Bridge—the noise of traffic, the wail of sirens, the moaning of foghorns. The orchestra consisted of twenty-two winds, twenty-nine brass, sixty-six strings, and a vast battery of percussion requiring nine or ten players. Like Schoenberg in his early atonal period, Varèse broke down language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses, and brightly screaming chords have no emotional cords tied to them, no history, no future.

  An unexpected thing happened when Varèse offered his ultraviolent music to the public: the public liked it. Or at least was diverted by it. Leopold Stokowski, a conductor of insatiable curiosity and impeccable showmanship, presented Amériques with his deluxe Philadelphia Orchestra in 1926, and the following year he programmed the equally formidable Arcana. Those concerts took place at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia and at Carnegie Hall. There was much delighted press coverage of the New York Fire Department siren that appeared in the percussion section of Amériques. Cartoonists had a field day. Varèse acquired a patina of society glamour, becoming, in Oja’s phrase, the “matinee idol of modernism.” In fact, in a delightful twist of fate, the moodily handsome composer had already been cast in bit parts in several silent movies, including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which he plays a nobleman who kills his wife with a poisoned ring.

  Even bigger headlines greeted George Antheil, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, who made it his mission to become the next Stravinsky, or failing that, the next Ornstein. Antheil first won fame in postwar Paris, presenting works with such titles as Airplane Sonata and Sonata Sauvage. Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and other modernist writers admired him, although Stravinsky was unimpressed. One concert occasioned a Rite-style riot at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, although it turned out that the brouhaha had been staged for the benefit of the film director Marcel L’Herbier, who needed a wild crowd scene for his thriller L’Inhumaine.

  In 1927 Antheil brought his act to Carnegie Hall, offering a program that managed to be jazzy and ultra-modern in equal measure: first, W. C. Handy’s orchestra played A Jazz Symphony in front of a painting of a Negro couple dancing the Charleston, the man grabbing the woman’s buttocks; then ten pianos, industrial-size electric fans, a siren, and assorted other noisemakers were rolled onstage for the Ballet mécanique, which aped Les Noces. Halfway through the latter piece, the composer-critic Deems Taylor caused universal merriment when he attached a handkerchief to the top of his cane and waved it in a gesture of surrender. “Expected Riots Peter Out at George Antheil Concert—Sensation Fails to Materialize” was the headline in one paper the next day. Antheil ended up making a living in Hollywood, writing scores for, among other films, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Plainsman and The Buccaneer.


  A gap had opened up between the ideal of modernism as the antithesis of mass culture and the reality of America as a marketplace in which absolutely anything could be bought and sold. Carl Ruggles, the most severe of the ultra-moderns, was tormented by that contradiction. He produced a limited number of works, each of them having the hardness and coarseness of granitic rock. His orchestral masterpiece, Sun-Treader, is one of the most tautly argued atonal works in the literature, as propulsive as Beethoven’s Fifth. If Varèse is like early Stravinsky with the folk motifs removed, Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes.

  Ruggles and Varèse joined ranks in founding the International Composers’ Guild, which aimed to present difficult music without commercial restrictions. When someone happily observed that one of the concerts had drawn a full house, Ruggles accused his own organization of “catering to the public.” As so often in the modernist saga, revolutionary impulses went hand in hand with intolerance and resentment. Ruggles and Varèse muttered between themselves about the consumerism and vulgarity that were ruining American culture, for which they tended to blame the Jews and the Negroes.

  Notwithstanding the obnoxious racial views of the founders, the International Composers’ Guild did make possible a rare breakthrough for a black composer. William Grant Still, a native of Mississippi who moved back and forth between classical activities and a day job at Okeh Records, studied for a time with Varèse, and his song cycle Levee Land appeared on an ICG program in 1926. Designed as a vehicle for the Harlem musical-theater star Florence Mills, Levee Land unfolds on two distinct but ingeniously coordinated tiers of activity: while the singer delivers vocal lines in classic blues style, the orchestra surrounds her with a seething, discordant harmonic field, including polytonal chords similar to those that Ives used in Three Places in New England. Five years later, Still’s Afro-American Symphony had its premiere at the Rochester Philharmonic, and a black composer finally found a place of respect in classical America.

  Virgil Thomson was a movement unto himself. A fastidious Harvard graduate with a Kansas City background, he moved through diverse spheres of modern music without becoming beholden to any of them. From 1925 until 1940 he was based in Paris, where he absorbed lessons from Stravinsky, Les Six, and, especially, Erik Satie. Thomson’s destiny was to produce the American counterpart to Satie’s deceptive naïveté. Where Satie used cabaret melodies and vaudeville dances, Thomson filled his scores with stock Americana—Sunday-school hymns, village-square marches, lazy waltzes suitable for a bandstand on a summer evening.

  Thomson’s aesthetic had something in common with that of Ives, but it lacked the chaotic, visionary element; America passed by at a dreamy distance. In Paris, the gregarious young composer befriended several leading modernist artists, and in 1927 he began collaborating with Gertrude Stein, another refugee from the heartland. Something lovely happened when Thomson’s calculatedly simplified music was joined to Stein’s calculatedly obscure images. Each half of the equation drew out unexpected qualities in the other—sensual strangeness in the music, elegiac warmth in the words.

  In the Stein-Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, there is no plot as such, only a succession of tableaux depicting in borderline-incomprehensible language the lives of Spanish saints:

  To know to know to love her so

  Four saints prepare for saints.

  It makes it well fish.

  Four saints it makes it well fish…

  In Thomson’s settings, such riddles become disarmingly concrete and everyday, as if they have been sung by schoolchildren for time out of mind. The harmonies are straight out of a basic textbook—John Cage, in a study of Thomson’s music, counted 111 tonic-dominant progressions—but they are treated with an intellectual detachment that recalls Cubist sculpture and surrealist collage.

  Four Saints had its first extended production in 1934, not in a salon or an opera house but on Broadway. What got everyone’s attention on opening night was that the cast was entirely African-American. Thomson didn’t conceive the score with black performers in mind; only in 1933, after seeing the black entertainer Jimmy Daniels perform at a Harlem club, did he decided to give his work a “Negro” veneer. Perhaps because of its exotic racial allure, Four Saints turned out to be a surprise hit, running for sixty performances. Sophisticated city dwellers went around singing such improbable tunes as “Pigeons on the Grass Alas.” In The New Yorker, James Thurber penned a deadpan critique: “Pigeons are definitely not alas. They have nothing to do with alas and they have nothing to do with hooray (not even when you tie red, white, and blue ribbons on them and let them loose at band concerts); they have nothing to do with mercy me or isn’t that fine, either.” Yet, like Antheil before him, Thomson discovered that a spasm of press coverage was insufficient to launch a career. Once the Four Saints fad was over, he found to his dismay that he couldn’t even get the score published. As a last resort he started writing music criticism to keep his name in front of the public.

  In retrospect, Thomson’s decision to use an all-black cast seems more a commercial calculation than a musical necessity. Some of the composer’s explanatory comments were condescending, bordering on racist. “Negroes objectify themselves very easily,” he later explained. “They live on the surface of their consciousness.” African-American singers could make sense of Stein’s nonsensical texts, Thomson stated, because they did not understand that they made no sense. Anthony Tommasini, Thomson’s biographer, writes: “Thomson gave black artists an unprecedented opportunity to topple stereotypes and portray Spanish saints in what would be an elegant and historic production. However, the fact of their color was used to sully, in a sense, the rarefied white world of opera.” No wonder Four Saints failed to resonate more deeply with a public that was falling seriously in love with African-American music. Perhaps Thomson was the one living on the surface of his consciousness.

  “Jazz is not America,” Varèse said in 1928. “It’s a negro product, exploited by the Jews.” Racist animus aside, the claim is not far off the mark: much of the music that white audiences of the twenties would have considered “jazz” came from the pens of Jewish composers. Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Richard Rodgers all came from Central European, Eastern European, and Russian Jewish backgrounds, and all made prolific use of African-American material. Scholars have tracked the surprising ways in which the modes and syncopations of Eastern European klezmer music and of African-American music overlap. Pace Varèse, the music of Kern and Gershwin was American precisely because it mixed cultures—and genres—in a creatively indiscriminate way.

  Jewish Americans’ identification with black music might have had something to do with inherited memories of European suffering. Old Testament metaphors appear all through the African-American spirituals: “Tell ole Pharaoh / Let my people go,” “Ezekiel saw de wheel of time / Wheel in de middle of a wheel,” “Deep river, my home is over Jordan.” The composer Constant Lambert, in his 1934 book Music Ho!, was among the first to discuss what he called a “link between the exiled and persecuted Jews and the exiled and persecuted Negroes.” Such racial essentialism easily turns ugly: Lambert goes on to say that the Jews had “stolen the Negroes’ thunder,” that they had robbed African-American material of its pure, primitive energy and endowed it with fake sophistication. African-Americans sometimes implied the same thing: Scott Joplin persisted in thinking that Irving Berlin had stolen “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” from Treemonisha, and William Grant Still accused Gershwin of plagiarism. But these squabbles obscure the reality of the New York scene in the twenties and thirties—that Jewish, African-American, and even Caucasian composers were working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas, borrowing themes, plundering the past, and feeding off the present.

  When Kern’s Show Boat opened at Ziegfeld’s opulent new theater in New York, in December 1927, the audience was stunned into silence by the opening chorus, which was perilously far removed from the dancing girls and witty repartee for which Ziegfeld shows we
re famed. As the curtain rises, the showboat Cotton Blossom is stage left; stage right, black stevedores are loading bales of hay and singing, “Niggers all work on de Mississippi / Niggers all work while de white man play.” If, as Marva Griffin Carter says, Will Marion Cook’s musicals made “confrontational jabs” at white listeners back at the turn of the century, Kern and his librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II, delivered a slap in the face.

  Even riskier is a sequence set at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. A group of threateningly attired black singers perform a deepest-Africa number called “In Dahomey”—the very name of Will Marion Cook’s pioneering musical—and then reveal that they hail from Avenue A in New York. Frederick Douglass had complained that the organizers of the exposition imported African performers to “act the monkey”; Hammerstein’s libretto spells out clearly how black culture was being used to satisfy white audiences’ thirst for the exotic.

  If these themes had been fleshed out more fully, Show Boat might have become a masterwork of social satire as well as a bewitching piece of theater. But, as the scholar Raymond Knapp points out, the creators could hardly address such an incendiary subject while they were keeping their black characters in subsidiary roles, on the margins of the drama. African-American suffering becomes a sort of background decor, an ambience of heartbreak.

  Whatever its failings as a study in race relations, Show Boat provided a grand aerial view of the American musical scene. The first thing you hear is a blaring, minatory minor chord out of Verdi or Puccini. That operatic gesture quickly fades away into a rapid montage of popular styles: Tin Pan Alley melody, mass-market blues, banjo strummings, Gilbert and Sullivan ditties, Sousa marches, vaudeville patter, and hoochie-coochie music. The one song from Show Boat that everyone knows is, of course, “Ol’ Man River,” and they know it because of the way Paul Robeson sang it. Show Boat was not only the first major American musical but the first musical in which black performers were given showstopping moments. Robeson became, in effect, the co-composer of the song, transforming a resigned, melancholy number into a vessel of spiritual might. In later years he changed the lyric “Ah’m tired of livin’ an’ scared of dyin’” to “I must keep fightin’ until I’m dyin’.”