The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex Ross
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 decide 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 stereo types 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 suspected 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 were 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.
What ever 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’.”
Humbly putting his music in the service of such august voices, Kern let white Americans know that there was more to black music than bouncing syncopation. Coursing under the zesty surface of Show Boat is the power of the blues.
Gershwin
“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise,” George Gershwin said, explaining the origins of Rhapsody in Blue. Epitomizing the Jazz Age in every pore of his suave being, Gershwin was the ultimate phenomenon in early-twentieth-century American music, the man in whom all the discordant tendencies of the era achieved sweet harmony.
Gershwin grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, that superheated melting pot where Russian, Eastern European, Yiddish, African-American, and mainstream American cultures intermingled. He experienced what he called his “flashing revelation” in the schoolyard of P.S. 25; in the middle of playing ball with other kids, he was stopped cold by the sound of a fellow student playing Dvořák’s Humoresque. There is a poignant historical symmetry here, because Dvořák had based his Humoresque on the American Plantation Dances of his young student Maurice Arnold, one of those would-be black composers who had dropped from sight.
Life on the Lower