The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

by Alex Ross

  The Duke

  The Harlem Renaissance, insofar as W. E. B. Du Bois and others defined it, aspired to create an African-American version of “high culture.” By the early thirties, that mission was becoming more difficult to sustain. A terrible riot in 1935 exposed the misery and rage behind the illusion of an upwardly mobile black culture.

  As Paul Allen Anderson explains in his book Deep River, a split opened between the original leaders of the Renaissance and younger artists such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, who disavowed what Hughes called the “Nordicized Negro intelligentsia” and sought a less status-conscious, less politely affirmative definition of black culture. Du Bois and his colleagues had dreamed, in Anderson’s words, of a “hybridic fusion” of African-American, mainstream-American, and European ideas. Alain Locke, in his musical commentaries, remained suspicious of commercial jazz and saved his highest praise for the symphonies of William Grant Still, William Dawson, and Florence Price. By contrast, the young rebel Hughes—whose great-uncle John Mercer Langston had been a good friend of Will Marion Cook’s father—celebrated the authenticity of “hot” jazz and rural blues. “We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how,” Hughes wrote, in a widely quoted 1926 essay, “and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”

  The split between the Harlem Renaissance elders and the new radical Negroes formed the backdrop for Duke Ellington’s career. Like Gershwin, Ellington had a flair for ambivalence. He partook of Du Bois and Locke’s cosmopolitanism, their rhetoric of uplift and transcendence. Yet he also adopted Hughes’s slogans of resistance and subversion.

  There’s a wonderful scene in a 1944 New Yorker profile in which Ellington is shown deflating the expectations of an Icelandic music student who tries to nudge him toward the “classical,” “genius” category. The student keeps peppering the master with questions about Bach, and, before answering, Ellington makes an elaborate show of unwrapping a pork chop that he has stowed in his pocket. “Bach and myself,” he says, taking a bite from the chop, “both write with individual performers in mind.” With that pork-chop maneuver, Ellington put distance between himself and the European conception of genius, though without rejecting it entirely. Another time he addressed the issue head-on: “To attempt to elevate the status of the jazz musician by forcing the level of his best work into comparisons with classical music is to deny him his rightful share of originality.”

  Black musicians had to work fast and hard to escape appropriation. The great early jazz records, from Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens onward, show an art form developing at blinding speed. As the composer Olly Wilson has said, jazz composers compensated for the limitations of the three-or four-minute track by exploiting a “heterogenous sound ideal”: multiple rhythms, call-and-response patterns, and diverse timbres conspire to create “a high density of musical events within a relatively short musical time frame.” Albert Murray writes in his classic book Stomping the Blues: “The phonograph record has served as the blues musician’s equivalent to the concert hall almost from the outset. It has been in effect his concert hall without walls, his musée imaginaire…” European harmonies were one more ingredient added to the mix.

  Dvoák had assumed that American music would come into its own when it succeeded in importing African-American material into European form, but in the end the opposite thing happened: African-American composers appropriated European material into self-invented forms of blues and jazz.

  When Duke Ellington set about making his name, he went for advice to Will Marion Cook. The grand old man of African-American music would give him informal lessons in the course of extended horse-and-buggy rides around Central Park. “I’d sing a melody in its simplest form,” Ellington recalled, “and he’d stop me and say, ‘Reverse your figures’…Some of the things he used to tell me I never got a chance to use until years later, when I wrote the tone poem Black, Brown, and Beige.” Cook was expounding Brahmsian principles of variation and development: “Reverse your figures” suggests the notes of a theme spelled in inversion or retrograde. Cook also directed Ellington to discover his individual voice: “You know you should go to the conservatory, but since you won’t, I’ll tell you. First you find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it, and let your inner self break through and guide you. Don’t try to be anybody else but yourself.”

  Ellington’s “inner self” is present in his first original recording, “East St. Louis Toodle-oo,” from 1926. The piece is distinctive because it creates a distinctive tension between a blues theme on solo trumpet and a straitlaced accompaniment in the band. The lead tune, written and played by the master trumpeter Bubber Miley, depicts an old man shuffling in wearily from the cornfield. The minor-key accompaniment, Ellington’s work, takes the form of a hypnotic string of closely voiced chords, circling around like a cool crowd of onlookers.

  An improvising soloist was, of course, hardly a novelty in musical history; Mozart’s and Beethoven’s concertos offered spells of cadenza freedom, and opera singers had freely ornamented their parts for centuries. The difference in Ellington’s jazz pieces—as in Armstrong’s and Fletcher Henderson’s—was that the distinction between the composed and the improvised broke down at an almost subatomic level. Players moved in and out of the improvisatory circle, taking their solos. They burst into exhilarating runs that sounded spontaneous but were in many cases intricately rehearsed beforehand. The entire ensemble was in a state of flux. Yet it all came out sounding like Ellington.

  What distinguished Ellington from most of his contemporaries was that he set himself the goal of expanding the time frame of the jazz piece, stretching it well beyond the limits of the 78-rpm side and into the realm of the large-scale classical work. Rhapsody in Blue was the obvious model, a jazz-based work that had grown into symphonic dimensions. In a 1931 article titled “The Duke Steps Out,” Ellington announced that he was writing “a rhapsody unhampered by any musical form in which I intended to portray the experiences of the coloured races in America in the syncopated idiom.” It would be “an authentic record of my race written by a member of it”—the italics are Ellington’s. In the same year he wrote Creole Rhapsody, which required two record sides. Whether or not this is the work described in “The Duke Steps Out,” Creole Rhapsody has clear ties to Rhapsody in Blue, and at one point it alludes directly to Gershwin’s opening flourish—the upward scale that turns into a glissando. In essence, Ellington was declaring that he would follow Gershwin in uniting jazz and classical procedures, but that he would do it his own way.

  Gershwin and Ellington were friendly on a personal level, appreciative of each other’s work. Ellington liked the fact that Gershwin stood around backstage at his shows dressed like a stagehand, as incognito as a celebrity composer could be. Gershwin, for his part, listened intently to Ellington’s records, reportedly filing them separate from the rest of his collection at home. There were, however, moments of tension between the two, as the dispute over Porgy and Bess showed. Ellington flatly rejected the idea that a white composer could be hailed as the composer of a “Negro opera.”

  Right around the time of Porgy’s premiere, Ellington set down initial ideas for his own opera, which was to have been called Boola, and which would presumably have shown how Negro opera should really be done. The title character was imagined as a mythic being who would sum up the entire African-American experience, from his crossing to America on a slave ship, to his experiences as a soldier in the Civil War, to his emancipation and emigration north, and on to his arrival in the renaissance city of Harlem—where, Ellington once reminded the New York Times, churches outnumber cabarets.

  Boola never got past the sketching stage. While Gershwin would happily spend month after month tinkering with his material, Ellington had a fundamentally collaborative temperament, and composition on the operatic scale defeated him. He did use his sketches in two extraordinary instrumental works, both of which mix jazz and classical devices. Ko-Ko,
written in 1939, evokes the drum-and-dance ceremonies that slaves once performed on Sunday afternoons in New Orleans. Anticipating the postwar modal jazz of Miles Davis, it is derived almost entirely from an E-flat-minor Aeolian scale. A driving four-note figure echoes the Morse-code rhythm of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth, as the Ellington scholar Ken Rattenbury points out. Ellington takes a long solo in the middle, dancing between thick Romantic harmonies and Debussyan whole-tone chords. The piece works up to a towering six-note dissonance that sets an F-flat dominant seventh against B-flat, not unlike the “Da-doo-da” chords in Porgy and Bess. But Ellington doesn’t use modernist harmony to connote conflict, crisis, and collapse. Instead, he makes it the deep background from which solos emerge and into which they disappear. It’s the way things are. In an interview, Ellington pointed out a discord in one of his latest compositions. “That’s the Negro’s life,” he said. “Hear that chord!” Ellington played it again. “That’s us. Dissonance is our way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part.”

  The other spin-off from Boola was the forty-five-minute swing symphony Black, Brown, and Beige, first presented at a historic 1943 concert at Carnegie Hall that marked Ellington’s twentieth anniversary as a bandleader. On that night the future that Will Marion Cook had pictured on Lookout Mountain became real: a black composer conquered the haughtiest of concert stages.

  The occasion is palpable in the music. The first movement, Black, begins with drums pounding out a slow, martial pattern. Trumpets and saxophones declaim the opening theme, “Work Song,” while a trio of trombones hold an E-flat-major triad in first inversion. It has a Richard Strauss quality to it—Thus Spake Boola. Yet the fanfare represents, in Ellington’s words, “not a song of great Joy—not a triumphant song—but a song of Burden—a song punctuated by the grunt of Heaving a pick or axe.” The drums might be tom-toms beating in the jungle, warning of invaders. Proud Africa is under threat from the white West. In keeping with symphonic procedure, Ellington presents a contrasting theme, “Come Sunday,” which, in the never-to-be Boola opera, would have depicted slaves congregating, listening, and humming outside the doors of a steepled church. The soaring hymnal melody, as played by Johnny Hodges, is one of Ellington’s finest inspirations, and words were later added for Mahalia Jackson to sing. Throughout Black, these two themes undergo rigorous variation (“Reverse your figures,” as Cook said). The remaining two movements have their lulls—Ellington finished the score in his usual rush, with an assist from Billy Strayhorn—but in the end the work outshines every symphonic jazz piece of the time.

  The reception of Black, Brown, and Beige exposed many of the same anxieties over the mixing of races and genres that had shadowed Porgy and Bess. Aesthetic policemen on both sides of the classical-jazz divide effectively united in casting doubt on this latest attempt at “hybridic fusion.” The composer, critic, and future novelist Paul Bowles, writing in the New York Herald Tribune, called Ellington’s piece “formless and meaningless…a gaudy potpourri of tutti dance passages and solo virtuoso work.” He concluded that “the whole attempt to fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged.” The producer and critic John Hammond, speaking for jazz purists, complained that Ellington had deserted “hot” jazz and fallen under highbrow influence.

  Disappointed by the criticism, Ellington nonetheless persisted in employing extended forms. He and Strayhorn later put together a masterpiece of a film score for Anatomy of a Murder and a commanding series of jazz suites. Such Sweet Thunder, a twelve-movement 1957 work, took its title from some lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and they nicely sum up Ellington’s aesthetic: “I never heard / So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”

  In the 1967 television documentary On the Road with Duke Ellington, the grand old man of jazz was asked why he still toured the country with his band. Sitting in the back of a limousine on the way to the next date, Ellington replied: “Anyone who writes music has got to hear his music…There used to be days years ago when people would come out of conservatory, after investing the greater part of their lives, maybe ten years, and many times more, and…mastered all the devices of the masters and they’ve written symphonies, concertos, rhapsodies, and never got to hear them.” When he said this, Ellington might have been thinking of Will Marion Cook, or of Will Vodery, or of the “ex-colored” composer Maurice Arnold, or of any of the other invisible men. Cook dreamed of a “black Beethoven”; Ellington carved out his own brand of eminence, redefining composition as a collective art. Carnegie Hall was a hoot, but he didn’t need it.

  Once, when the critic Winthrop Sargeant expressed the hope that jazz composers might rise to classical eminence, the Duke issued a gently devastating riposte, saying, in essence, thanks but no thanks: “I was struck by Mr. Sargeant’s concluding statement, that given a chance to study, the Negro will soon turn from boogie woogie to Beethoven. Maybe so, but what a shame!”

  5

  APPARITION FROM THE WOODS

  The Loneliness of Jean Sibelius

  Composing is a difficult business. “Desperately difficult,” says the devil in Doctor Faustus. It is a laborious traversal of an imaginary landscape. What emerges is an artwork in code, which other musicians must be persuaded to unravel. Unlike a novel or a painting, a score gives up its full meaning only when it is performed in front of an audience; it is a child of loneliness that lives off crowds. Nameless terrors creep into the limbo between composition and performance, during which the score sits mutely on the desk. Hans Pfitzner dramatized that moment of panic and doubt in Palestrina, his “musical legend” about the life of the Italian Renaissance composer. The character of Palestrina speaks for colleagues across the centuries when he stops his work to cry, “What is the point of all this? Ach, what is it for? What for?”

  Jean Sibelius may have asked that question once too often. The crisis point of his career arrived in the late 1920s and the early ’30s, when he was being lionized as a new Beethoven in England and America and dismissed as a kitsch composer in the taste-making Austro-German music centers. The contrasts in the reception of his music matched the manic-depressive extremes of his personality—an alcoholic oscillation between grandiosity and self-loathing. Sometimes he believed that he was in direct communication with the Almighty—“For an instant God opens his door,” he wrote in a letter, “and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony”—and sometimes he felt worthless. In 1927, when he was sixty-one years old, he wrote in his diary, “Isolation and loneliness are driving me to despair…In order to survive, I have to have alcohol…Am abused, alone, and all my real friends are dead. My prestige here at present is rock-bottom. Impossible to work. If only there were a way out.”

  Sibelius spent the last part of his life at Ainola, a rustic house outside Helsinki, Finland. On his desk for many years lay the Eighth Symphony, which promised to be his summary masterpiece. He had been working on it since 1924, and had indicated several times that it was almost ready for performance. A copyist transcribed twenty-three pages of the score, and at a later date Sibelius’s publisher may have bound the manuscript in a set of seven volumes. There were reportedly parts for chorus, as in Beethoven’s Ninth. But the Eighth never saw the light of day. The composer finally gave in to the seduction of despair. “I suppose one henceforth takes me as—yes!—a ‘fait accompli,’” he wrote in 1943. “Life is soon over. Others will come and surpass me in the eyes of the world. We are fated to die forgotten. I must start economizing. It can’t go on like this.”

  Aino Sibelius, the composer’s wife, for whom the house was named, recalled what happened next: “In the 1940s there was a great auto da fé at Ainola. My husband collected a number of manuscripts in a laundry basket and burned them on the open fire in the dining room. Parts of the Karelia Suite were destroyed—I later saw remains of the pages which had been torn out—and many other things. I did not have the strength to be present and left the room. I therefore do not know what he threw on to the fire. But after this my
husband became calmer and gradually lighter in mood.”

  Ainola stands much as Sibelius left it. The atmosphere of the house is heavy and musty, as if the composer’s spirit were still pent up inside. But you get a different feeling when you walk into the forest that stretches out on one side of the house. The treetops meet in an endless curving canopy, tendrils of sunlight dangling down. The ground is uncluttered: many paths fork among the trunks. Venturing a little farther into the wood, you lose sight of all human habitation. A profound stillness descends. The light begins to fail, the mists roll in. After a while, you may begin to wonder if you will ever find your way back. Many times in Sibelius’s music the exaltation of natural sublimity gives way to inchoate fear, which has less to do with the outer landscape than with the inner one, the forest of the mind.

  In his 1993 essay collection Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera anatomizes the more peripheral of the European cultures, taking his native Czechoslovakia as a specimen. “The small nations form ‘another Europe,’” the novelist writes. “An observer can be fascinated by the often astonishing intensity of their cultural life. This is the advantage of smallness: the wealth in cultural events is on a ‘human scale’; everyone can encompass that wealth.” Kundera warns, however, that the familial feeling can turn tense and constricting at a moment’s notice. “Within that warm intimacy,” he says, “each envies each, everyone watches everyone.” If an artist ignores the rules, the rejection can be cruel, the loneliness crushing. Even those who rise to fame may experience isolation at the summit—the burden of being a national hero.

  Each of the “small nations”—a category into which Western European music experts have tended to dispose not only Scandinavian and Eastern European countries but also Great Britain, formerly known to Germans as the “land without music”—had its retinue of locally famous composers. A few of them broke out to wider renown, becoming standard-bearers of patriotic feeling. Edvard Grieg, in the late nineteenth century, wrote the “song of Norway.” Karol Szymanowski established a Polish modernist tendency. Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax, and William Walton built up a modern British repertory just as the glory of empire was fading. And Carl Nielsen, in Denmark, wrested music of brilliance and violence from rough-hewn folk melodies. Sibelius, the great composer of the small nation of Finland, set the pace for many others, not only because he forged a vital relationship with his native land but because he succeeded in stamping his own voice on seemingly worn-out, antiquated symphonic forms. Both Bax and Vaughan Williams revered the Finnish master and dedicated works to him; Walton opened his First Symphony with a nod to Sibelius’s Fifth.