Up the Mississippi

            Early jazz was fundamentally connected to the blues and ragtime traditions that immediately preceded it. The forced removals in New Orleans starting in 1894 paved the way for a period of immense cultural creolization, wherein the many poorer nonwhite racial and ethnic groups of the city found themselves living, working, and creating together. Even if this new intercultural community was distinctly lower class, it was socially integrated and provided a fertile breeding ground for a vibrant and inventive music scene. The famously diverse brass bands of New Orleans began to experiment with “head music,” i.e. improvised music which sometimes found its way onto the page (in contrast to traditionally-composed music, which starts on the page and may later be embellished and interpreted by the performer). Over time, this head music became more and more frequently and elaborately embellished, setting a standard for improvisation that held true in early jazz.

The deep emotional vocabulary of blues music also found a natural home in jazz. Since blues was at the turn of the century a predominantly black genre of music and since the post-Reconstruction world of the United States at the time was particularly turbulent for black Americans, especially in the South, its subject matter ranged from relationship and work problems to oppression, gender politics, and extreme poverty. These continued to be popular and enduring topics in early jazz. The vocal/instrumental call and response tradition so indicative of blues was also retained to an extent in jazz. A common motive in early jazz (and in modern jazz) is that same call and response mechanism, with a vocal line answered by a (usually improvised) solo instrument.

Call and response is one of several big flashy signifiers of blues music, along with the twelve-bar format and common stanzaic patterns (often AAB or AB refrain). However, even as modern popular music moves further and further away from these traditional structures, the “blues sensibility” remains important. The evolution of blues into jazz and all the way up to contemporary pop music started with the racial, ethnic, and cultural blend unique to early-1900s America. Early blues could not have happened without the centuries of Western oppression of African slaves or without the problem of Reconstruction after the Civil War or without the casual, day-to-day racism that pervaded white American culture through the Civil Rights Movement, and which in many ways continues to pervade white America today. The enormous emotional range of blues coupled with its appeal to and traditions borrowed from diverse cultures made it a music that is deeply defined by its identity and place, and to this day, blues and its modern descendants rely heavily on a similar sense of identity, even if specific place has lost some of its importance. Popular music can be subversive and ethically charged. Today, many of the specific tropes common to blues (such as relationship troubles and gender politics) are still some of the most widespread topics dealt with in popular music, and when popular music does not deal with one of those old subjects, it is often politically motivated in some other way.

Blues, ragtime, and jazz are prime examples of music that is defined by place. They could not have happened anywhere but in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The conflict of institutionalized discrimination with extremely high levels of cultural diversity was a problem unique to post-Civil War American cities, and nowhere was that conflict more predominant than at the western edge of “old America” along the Mississippi River. Blues came from traditional African and slave music in the rural South, ragtime came from the 1983 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and found a home in St. Louis and New Orleans, and jazz came from the diverse red-light districts of New Orleans and spread up the Mississippi Delta into the rest of the country.

This idea of place as a powerful factor in musical culture is common throughout music history. The introduction of “primitivism” at the Paris Exposition allowed composers like Debussy to experiment with compositional tools they would otherwise never have had access to, and the ethnographic work of Bartok and the Realists created a musical environment that allowed Stravinsky to incorporate Russian folk music throughout Rite of Spring, which itself could only have created the massive uproar it did in Paris, thanks to the prevailing attitudes of the French upper class, the dynamics of the Parisian classical music and ballet scene, and the artistic reputation of Paris on a larger scale. In the same way, the Second Viennese School could not have happened outside of Vienna, a more conservative city than Paris that had trouble branching out and necessitated extreme measures on the part of the Secessionist artists – extreme measures which manifest themselves visually and aurally in the jarring, unfamiliar tradition of Secessionist art.

Thinking about music through the lens of “place” is less helpful today than it was in the days before modern globalization. There are still some exceptions – country music, for one, is monumentally less popular in New York or London than in Nashville – but in general, there is less place-specific creation happening worldwide now than there was a century ago. In my own musical life, however, place does hold some inherent value. We talk all the time in Luther choirs about the “Lutheran choral sound,” the meticulously-crafted and controlled sound associated with Lutheran college and high-level church choirs in the Upper Midwest. This tradition is deeply tied to Scandinavian immigrants to Minnesota, Iowa, the Dakotas, and Wisconsin and the ways they chose to worship. Still, the choral world too is becoming increasingly homogenous, and regional “sounds” are less common.

Wozzeck what's that?

            One of the things that has surprised me most in this week’s study of Wozzeck and the Secessionist art movement in Vienna is the extent to which recognizable artistic tropes and traditions were used. I am used to hearing about Schoenberg mainly in connection to the “emancipation of tonality” and all his radical ideas about music theory and serialism. Partially this is probably because I have been exposed to quite a lot more serial and otherwise unconventional music since three years ago and my ear is growing used to it, but the chronological proximity of the Secessionists to late Romantic composers like Brahms stood out more than it has for me in the past.

Schoenberg was already in his mid-twenties when Brahms died, and Berg and Webern were teenagers. I was surprised to learn that Schoenberg’s view of Brahms was largely positive. Even though Brahms was well-known for his more traditional approach to composition, observes Schoenberg in Brahms the Progressive, he often uses traditional idioms in forward-thinking ways. There is a direct link between Brahms’s use of falling thirds in his Intermezzo and the basics of early atonal music. This idea of using old methods to accomplish new goals is one of the most important principles of the Secessionist movement. It crops up all over. Otto Wagner’s architecture is ornate enough to resemble architecture from a century or more previously. Picasso and Schoenberg himself both famously use Shakespearean commedia dell’arte stock characters, Picasso in many of his works and Schoenberg most notably in Pierrot Lunaire, a song cycle which includes a passacaglia, a fugue, and a number of other classical forms.

Berg’s Wozzeck also uses many time-honored musical traditions to help accomplish its 20^th-century goals. The orchestration is full and often very beautiful, especially during the interludes, where Berg gives the music room to grow into recognizable high and low points, even if there is little doubling of voice parts or musical cues for the singers during the action of the opera. Berg also frequently includes brief passages of tonally-centered music, such as the arrival in a comfortable A minor at the end of Marie’s cradle song. Many of the characters are identified via musical motifs that announce their presence or influence throughout the opera. The cradle song in Act One resembles alternatively a lullaby (during its 3/4 sections) and a driving German Lied (during its 6/8 sections). When the piece is in 3/4, the orchestra moves slowly from chord to chord and the voice arpeggiates triads on legato quarter notes. The 6/8 sections are much more rhythmically and harmonically active in both orchestra and voice. These are all pretty traditional moves, and illustrate not just Wozzeck’s connection to the Secessionist movement, but also the Secessionist movements ties to all the music that came before it.

Stravinsky and the Realists

            I am struck in my study of the fin de siècle, Stravinsky, and the realist composers by the shift in musical focus from context to detail. Alex Ross describes this transition in The Rest is Noise as one from a “theater of the mind” to a “music of the body” (Ross 83). For most of the history of music, the primary approach to expressing place and meaning in composition has involved the creation of atmosphere and exciting moments full of direction and motion, with varying degrees of definition. Even as recently as Debussy, the atmosphere of each moment in the context of the overall meaning and emotion of the piece is the central musical characteristic. While Debussy tended to paint everything but the specific details in his music, Stravinsky (at least in his Russian period) and the realists painted specific details primarily.

            What Ross means by “theater of the mind” and “music of the body” is that post-Debussy, music became visceral and primal. Debussy creates an indistinct, ambiguous texture in his Brouillards to evoke the uneasy feeling associated with heavy fog, but little attention is given to any literal bodily reaction to that situation. The realism movement was in many ways a direct response to this. Though the realists tended to stay within vaguely recognizable key areas and melodic constructs, they also worked to capture the chaotic specificity of nature and of traditionally “nonmusical” noise. Bartok’s transcriptions of world folk music are unbelievably detailed – down to semitones and tiny fractions of beats. Janáček experimented with notating human speech patterns. Ross summarizes, “Such minute differences … could engender a new operatic naturalism; [the realists] could show an ‘entire being in a photographic instant’” (Ross 86). These composers were much more interested in evoking emotion by capturing specific natural impulses and quirks than by recreating atmospheric ideas and moments.

            Stravinsky was also more prone to this “music of the body” than his predecessors. Rite of Spring is forceful, visceral, and immediate rather than metaphorical and representative. There is clear evidence of Stravinsky’s effort to notate the chaos of the natural world (and of western ideas about pagan Russia). Shortly after the opening of the piece, the orchestra dissolves into what sounds essentially like unmetered improvisation (rehearsal ten). It’s rhythmically near impossible to follow and essentially devoid of any key or musical structure at all. Later, in The Augurs of Spring, we see Stravinsky’s famous Sacre chord (EM on top of Eb7) repeated as a driving beat by the strings, punctuated at varying intervals by dynamic accents. Both these strategies give the piece that same sensation of chaotic specificity favored by the realist composers and serve as a major connection between Stravinsky and his peers.

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