by Alex Ross
“‘stylized’ noise”: Béla Bartók Essays, p. 456.
“Peacock Melody”: This resemblance was pointed out by members of the Hungarian folk-music group Muzsikás, which played Hungarian songs and dances alongside Bartók’s Fourth Quarter at a concert by the Takács Quartet at Zankel Hall in New York on Feb. 13, 2004.
“fascinating exchange”: Documenta Bartókiana, vol. 3, p. 122. First meeting on Jan. 10, 1925, second on Oct. 16, 1927.
opened the wrong door: Zemanová, Janácček, pp. 201–2.
“Lord have mercy”: Janácček’s Uncollected Essays on Music, pp. 111–13.
Janácček dreamed of being a forester: Zemanová, Janácček, p. 20.
“Good and evil”: John Tyrrell, Janácček’s Operas: A Documentary Account (Princeton UP, 1992), p. 296.
“You must play this”: Zemanová, Janácček, p. 191; and Zdenka Janácčková, My Life with Janácček, ed. and trans. John Tyrrell (Faber, 1998), p. 238.
“the demon that lurked”: SWS1, p. 489.
abscess was gone: Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Little, Brown, 1955), p. 200.
“out of extreme mental”: SWS1, p. 431.
“crisis of the concept”: Jacques Rivière, “La Crise du concept de littérature,” Nouvelle Revue Française 125 (Feb. 1924), pp. 159–70.
“well made”: Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans. Joseph W. Evans (University of Notre Dame Press, 1974), p. 104. For “art for nothing,” see p. 92.
“The choice”: Stravinsky, Autobiography, p. 125.
“The swing of the pendulum”: Stravinsky, Autobiography, p. 136.118 “Logically”: Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, p. 140.
private chapel: SWS1, p. 499.
“called to our mind”: Paul Rosenfeld, Discoveries of a Music Critic (Vienna House, 1972), p. 196.
“Do I adore Stravinsky”: Ned Rorem, “Stravinsky at 100,” in Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary (Limelight, 1984), p. 191.
“Here is the real core”: William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (Penguin, 1958), p. 149.
4: Invisible Men
“the true grandfathers”: Carl Van Vechten, “The Great American Composer: His Grandfathers Are the Present Writers of Our Popular Ragtime Songs,” Vanity Fair, April 1917, pp. 75 and 140.
“primitive birthright”: Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (University of Illinois Press, 2000), p. 89.
“I am now satisfied”: “Real Value of Negro Melodies,” New York Herald, May 21, 1893. This article was ghostwritten by James Creelman, as Michael Beckerman has established; see Beckerman, New Worlds of Dvorčák: Searching in America for the Composer’s Inner Life (Norton, 2003), pp. 100–106. But the sentiments in the article must have been Dvorčák’s own, for Creelman later distanced himself from them. In June 1894 he wrote that the composer’s enthusiasm for Negro music was “almost pathetic” and that Negroes were nothing more than “hewers of wood and carries of water to the white race, originating melodies which can be transformed in other hands”; see Creelman, “Dvorčák’s Negro Symphony,” in Dvorčák and His World, ed. Michael Beckerman (Princeton UP, 1993), p. 180. The phrase “hewers of wood and carriers of water” comes from the book of Joshua and was a favorite of slavery apologists. W. E. B. Du Bois makes ironic use of it in The Souls of Black Folk; see Three Negro Classics (Avon, 1965), p. 215.
Paris, Texas: Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom Fradin, Ida B. Wells: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement (Clarion, 2000), pp. 63–65.
promoted blacks themselves: John C. Tibbetts, ed., Dvorčák in America, 1892–1895 (Amadeus, 1993), p. 377.
a paper titled: Leonard Bernstein, “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music,” in Findings (Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 36–99, esp. 38–39.
“The limited resources”: Paul Lopes, The Rise of a Jazz Art World (Cambridge UP, 2002), p. 40.
“I like Louis Armstrong”: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Penguin, 1965), p. 11.
Wallingford Riegger: Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius ( John Wiley, 2002), pp. 172–73.
Copland…pointed out: ACR, p. xvi.
Harry Lawrence Freeman: On Freeman, see Elise K. Kirk, American Opera (University of Illinois Press, 2001), pp. 186–88.
“the most promising”: Thomas L. Riis, “Dvorčák and His Black Students,” in Rethinking Dvorčák: Views from Five Countries, ed. David R. Beveridge (Clarendon, 1996), p. 270.
Humoresque: Maurice Peress, Dvorčák to Duke Ellington: A Conductor Explores America’s Music and Its African-American Roots (Oxford UP, 2004), pp. 46–47; and Maurice Peress, “Arnold, Maurice,” in International Dictionary of Black Composers, ed. Samuel A. Floyd Jr. (Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999), pp. 43–45.
“I would…remain”: Will Marion Cook, “Autobiography,” transcribed in Marva Griffin Carter, “The Life and Music of Will Marion Cook” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988), pp. 395–96. For “You are a stranger,” see p. 418.
“felt exceptionally free”: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (Holt, 1993), pp. 132 and 138.
“A deep longing”: Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, pp. 369 and 215.
“musical phenomenon”: New York Age, Nov. 30, 1889.
William Marion Cook Orchestra: See New York Age, Sept. 27, 1890.
Colored People’s Day: Carter, “Life and Music of Will Marion Cook,” pp. 27–30; and William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (Norton, 1991), pp. 370–71.
letter of introduction: Beckerman, Dvorčák and His World, pp. 198–99.
free of charge: “Real Value of Negro Melodies.”
“the world’s greatest Negro violinist”: Duke Ellington, Music Is My Mistress (Doubleday, 1973), p. 97. For the review, see Carter, “Life and Music of Will Marion Cook,” pp. 176–77; but see Peress, Dvorčák to Duke Ellington, p. 212, for a possible sighting of the review in question.
“confrontational jabs”: Marva Griffin Carter, “Removing the ‘Minstrel Mask’ in the Musicals of Will Marion Cook,” Musical Quarterly 84:1 (Spring 2000), p. 209.
A Negro composer: Will Marion Cook, “Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk,” in Readings in Black American Music, ed. Eileen Southern (Norton, 1983), p. 228.
“All you white folks”: Thomas L. Riis, ed., The Music and Scripts of “In Dahomey,” Recent Researches in American Music, vol. 25 (A-R Editions, 1996), pp. 118–19.
“Developed Negro music”: “Will Marion Cook on Negro Music,” New York Age, Sept. 21, 1918.
“a new musical school”: “Dvorčák’s Theory of Negro Music,” New York Herald, May 28, 1893.
“a genius,” “a highway”: Ernest Ansermet, “Sur un orchestre nègre,” in Écrits sur la musique (Baconnière, 1970), pp. 173–78.
Will Vodery: See Mark Tucker, “In Search of Will Vodery,” Black Music Research Journal 16:1 (Spring 1996), pp. 123–82.
Fletcher Henderson: See Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development (Oxford UP, 1968), p. 253; and Jeffrey Magee, The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz (Oxford UP, 2005), p. 24.
Billy Strayhorn: Magee, Uncrowned King of Swing, p. 31; David Hajdu, Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), pp. 16–7; Walter van de Leur, Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Oxford UP, 2002), pp. 6–7.
“black Beethoven”: Maurice Peress, “My Life with Black, Brown, and Beige,” Black Music Research Journal 13:2 (Fall 1993), p. 147.
Ives’s family: Charles E. Ives: Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (Norton, 1972), p. 245; Frank R. Rossiter, Charles Ives and His America (Liveright, 1975), pp 9–10.
eyewitness testimony: Vivian Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History (Yale UP, 1974), p. 16; and David Eiseman, “George Ives as Theorist: Some Unpublished Documents,” Perspectives of New Music 14:1 (Fall–Winter 1975), p. 141.
“Old Folks at Home”: Ives: Memos, p. 115. Ives calls it “The Swan
ee River” (alternate title).
organist since his teens: See J. Peter Burkholder, “The Organist in Ives,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55:2 (Summer 2002), pp. 255–310.
“spirited and melodious”: J. Peter Burkholder, ed., Charles Ives and His World (Princeton UP, 1996), pp. 275–77.
“Damn rot”: Jan Swafford, Charles Ives: A Life with Music (Norton, 1996), p. 161.
“emasculated art”: Ives: Memos, pp. 130–31.
“pussies”: Swafford, Charles Ives, p. 334. For sissies and pansies, see Burkholder, Charles Ives and His World, p. 237.
“simple enough”: Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (Norton, 1970), p. 240.
“knock some BIG”: Henry Cowell and Sidney Cowell, Charles Ives and His Music (Oxford UP, 1969), p. 59.
“Music may be yet”: Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, p. 88.
“one of those exceptional”: Swafford, Charles Ives, pp. 411–12 (part of review reproduced).
“There is a great Man”: Dorothy Lamb Crawford, Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 (University of California Press, 1995), p. 125.
Solomon, Sherwood: Maynard Solomon, “Charles Ives: Some Questions of Veracity,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40:3 (Fall 1987), pp. 443–70, detects a “systematic pattern of falsification” in Ives’s datings of his compositions (p. 463). Gayle Sherwood, in “Questions and Veracities: Reassessing the Chronology of Ives’s Choral Works,” Musical Quarterly 78:3 (Fall 1994), pp. 429–47, concludes that Ives’s dates for early experimental choral works such as Psalm 67, Psalm 25, and Psalm 24 are more or less correct. Sherwood’s revised dates are cited by J. Peter Burkholder in his All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (Yale UP, 1995). Still, questions remain about the dates and markings on Ives’s scores. For example, on the first page of the full manuscript of the “St. Gaudens” movement is written: “Return to Chas. E. Ives, 70 W 11.” Ives lived on West Eleventh Street in New York from 1908 to 1911, but Sherwood says that the manuscript paper dates from between 1919 and 1923.
“Why tonality as such”: Swafford, Charles Ives, p. 338.
J. Peter Burkholder: Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, throughout. For the Second Symphony, see pp. 102–36.
“cumulative form”: Ibid., pp. 137–215.
“exaggerated”: Ives: Memos, p. 53.
“does not ‘represent the American nation’…tomato ketchup”: Ives, Essays Before a Sonata, p. 94.
“fervently, transcendentally”: Ibid., p. 80.
“an African soul”: Ibid., p. 79.
Anderson Brooks: Ives: Memos, p. 53, and app. 14, pp. 250–52.
Colored Peoples’ Day: Swafford, Charles Ives, pp. 73–76.
spirituals on the piano: Perlis, Charles Ives Remembered, p. 82.
The Abolitionists: James B. Sinclair, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives (Yale UP, 1992), p. 613.
tune in “St. Gaudens”: Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, pp. 317–22.
“Black March”: Ives: Memos, p. 87.
Von Glahn has described: Denise Von Glahn, “New Sources for ‘The “St. Gaudens” in Boston Common (Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and His Colored Regiment),’” Musical Quarterly 81:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 13–50.
“mobbed the lobbies”: “Throng Hears Ornstein,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1918.
“commuters”: Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 176.
“I became a sort”: Malcolm MacDonald, Varèse: Astronomer in Sound (Kahn and Averill, 2003), p. 56.
“skyscraper mysticism”: Paul Rosenfeld, Discoveries of a Music Critic (Vienna House, 1972), p. 260.
“matinee idol”: Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 26.
L’Herbier: See George Antheil, Bad Boy of Music (Samuel French, 1990), pp. 131–37; and Lynn Garafola, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (Da Capo, 1998), p. 354. The riot scene from L’Inhumaine can be seen at music mavericks. publicradio.org/features/inter view_lehrman.html (accessed May 1, 2007).
A Jazz Symphony: Daniel Albright, Un-twisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 234–35.
“Expected Riots Peter Out”: Oja, Making Music Modern, p. 93. See also Antheil, Bad Boy of Music, pp. 187–97.
“catering to the public”: Claire R. Reis, Composers, Conductors, and Critics (Detroit Reprints in Music, 1974), p. 7. For more on Ruggles, see Marilyn J. Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, and Storyteller (University of Illinois Press, 1994).
tonic-dominant: Kathleen Hoover and John Cage, Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music (Sagamore, 1959), p. 157.
Jimmy Daniels: Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (Dutton, 1985), p. 217.
“Pigeons are definitely not alas”: James Thurber, “There’s an Owl in My Room,” New Yorker, Nov. 17, 1934, p. 19.
“Negroes objectify”: Steven Watson, Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism (Random House, 1998), p. 202.
“Thomson gave black artists”: Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (Norton, 1997), p. 227.
“Jazz is not America”: Olivia Mattis, “Edgard Varèse’s ‘Progressive’ Nationalism: Amériques Meets Américanisme,” in Edgard Varèse: Die Befreiung des Klangs, ed. Helge de la Motte-Haber (Wolke, 1992), p. 167.
Scholars have tracked: See, for example, Jack Gottlieb, Funny, It Doesn’t Sound Jewish: How Yiddish Songs and Synagogue Melodies Influenced Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood (SUNY Press, 2004), p. 218; and Andrea Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Harvard UP, 2004).
“link between the exiled”: Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (Ho-garth, 1985), p. 185.
the creators could hardly: See Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton UP, 2005), pp. 185–94.
“I frequently hear music”: Isaac Goldberg, George Gershwin: A Study in American Music (Ungar, 1958), p. 139.
Dvorčák’s Humoresque: Ibid., p. 58.
favorite pianists and composers: See Gershwin’s scrapbooks in GGLC.
Hambitzer: David Ewen, A Journey to Greatness: The Life and Music of George Gershwin (Holt, 1956), pp. 47 and 61.
Kilenyi…better chance of winning: Ibid., p. 63. For Kilenyi and Harmonielehre, see Howard Pollack, George Gershwin: His Life and Work (University of California Press, 2006), p. 30.
Gershwin regularly attended: Vernon Duke, Passport to Paris (Little, Brown, 1955), p. 90.
accompanying Gauthier: “Jazz Throws Down the Gage to the ‘Classicists,’ Invading New York’s Strongholds of Serious Music,” Musical America, Feb. 2, 1924.
Whiteman: Don Rayno, Paul Whiteman: Pioneer in American Music, Vol. 1: 1890–1930 (Scarecrow, 2003), p. 19.
“the tremendous strides”: Goldberg, George Gershwin, pp. 144–45.
“out of the kitchen”: Deems Taylor, “Words and Music,” New York World, Feb. 17, 1924.
glissando: On this effect, see Goldberg, George Gershwin, p. 71. Interestingly, when Duke Ellington recorded the Rhapsody in 1960, he removed the glissando, returning to Gershwin’s original sketch. See David Schiff, Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Blue” (Cambridge UP, 1997), p. 69.
such classical celebrities: Ewen, Journey to Greatness, p. 162.
more high-level admirers: Pollack, George Gershwin, pp. 139–45.
Lyric Suite: Alban Berg, Letters to His Wife, ed. and trans. Bernard Grun (St. Martin’s, 1971), p. 363. For the Berg photo, see Edward Jablonski and Lawrence D. Stewart, The Gershwin Years (Doubleday, 1958), p. 197.
“I should study with you”: Edward Jablonski, Gershwin (Da Capo, 1998), p. 168. For the story featuring Ravel, see Oscar Levant, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (Bantam, 1965), pp. 116–17.
Pollack shows: See Pollack, George Gershwin, pp. 118–35.
Gershwin’s notebooks: GGLC.
“jazz grand opera”: New
York Evening Mail, Nov. 18, 1924, clipping at GGLC.
only by a black cast: Henrietta Malkiel, “Awaiting the Great American Opera: How Composers Are Paving the Way,” Musical America, April 25, 1925.
“appeal to the many”: George Gershwin, “Rhapsody in Catfish Row,” New York Times, Oct. 20, 1935.
“Summertime”: Allen Forte, “Reflections upon the Gershwin-Berg Connection,” Musical Quarterly 83:2 (Summer 1999), p. 154, also proposes a connection between Marie’s lullaby and “Summertime,” but he chooses the more dissimilar chords that appear beneath “Mädel, was fangst Du jetzt an?”
“Melodic. Nothing neutral”: Jablonski and Stewart, Gershwin Years, p. 233.
Gershwin and Bubbles: Jablonski, Gershwin, p. 286.
“not a very serious”: Virgil Thomson, “George Gershwin,” Modern Music 13:1 (Nov.–Dec. 1935) pp. 16–17.
“Abraham Lincoln of Negro music”: Pollack, George Gershwin, pp. 597–98.
“Grand music”: Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (Oxford UP, 1993), p. 115.
“Folk-lore subjects…I don’t mind”: Thomson, “George Gershwin,” p. 17.
“I don’t feel I’ve really scratched”: Interview with Frances Gershwin Godowsky, included on companion CD to Vivien Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington (Yale UP 2005).
Anderson explains: Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought (Duke UP, 2001), p. 177. For “hybridic fusion,” see p. 163.
in his musical commentaries: See Alain Locke, The Negro and His Music (Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936), p. 86; and Alain Locke, “Toward a Critique of Negro Music,” Opportunity, Nov. 1934, pp. 328–30.
“We build our temples”: Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” ( June 1926), in The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (Penguin, 1994), p. 95.
“Bach and myself”: Richard O. Boyer, “The Hot Bach,” pt. 1, New Yorker, June 24, 1944, p. 30.
“To attempt to elevate”: Tucker, Duke Ellington Reader, p. 247.
“heterogenous sound ideal”: Olly Wilson, “The Heterogeneous Sound Ideal in African-American Music,” in New Perspectives on Music: Essays in Honor of Eileen Southern, ed. Josephine Wright (Harmonie Park Press, 1992), pp. 328–29.