Red/The Great American Composer

by Carl Van Vechten

The Great American Composer

When, a hundred years hence, some curious investigator searches through the available archives in an attempt to discover what was the state of American music at the beginning of the twentieth century, do you fancy that he will take the trouble to exhume and dig into the ponderous scores of Henry Hadley, Arthur Foote, Ernest Schelling, George W. Chadwick, Horatio W. Parker, and the rest of the crew who are regarded with respect by contemporary critics? Will he hesitate ten minutes to peruse the scores of Mona, the Four Seasons Symphony, or The Pipe of Desire? A plethora of books and papers will cause him to wonder why so much pother was made about Edward MacDowell, and he will even shake his head a trifle wearily over the saccharine delights of The Rosary and Narcissus. But if he be lucky enough to come upon copies of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee, Alexander's Ragtime Band, or Hello Frisco, which are generally regarded with horror by the music critics of our day, his face will light up and he will feel an emotion akin to that which Yvette Guilbert must have felt when she unearthed Le cycle du vin, or Le lien serré, or C'est le mai, and he will attempt to find out, probably in vain, something about the composers, Lewis F. Muir, Irving Berlin, and Louis A. Hirsch, the true grandfathers of the great American composer of the year 2001.

There will be difficulties in his way. Nothing disappears so soon from the face of the earth as a very popular song. The music shops sell hundreds of thousands of copies before the demand suddenly ceases. Then, when no more copies are ordered from the publisher, he is likely to lose interest in a song which may occupy space that might be allotted to a newer tune, and he causes the destruction of the plates. As for the purchasers, on every moving day they consign their old popular songs to the dustheap. After the Ball makes way for Two Little Girls in Blue (or vice-versa; I really cannot be expected to remember that far back). Try to buy After the Ball now and see if you can. Advertise for a copy and see if you can secure one. You will find it difficult, I imagine, and yet it was only as far back as 1892, or 1893, that everybody was singing this melancholy tale of the misadventures of a little girl in a big city. No doubt, at that period, kind old ladies stopped on the street to pat bleached blondes on the cheeks, with the reflection. She may be somebody's daughter.

Music of that variety will not be sought after by collectors and prized and sung again, except to satisfy curiosity, or to "furnish innocent merriment." There will be those, no doubt, impelled to form a collection of the sentimentalities of the late nineteenth century, including therein the drawings of Howard Chandler Christy, which, in the year 2000, will be as rare as black hawthorn vases are today, and the novels of George Barr McCutcheon, a single copy of whose Nedra or Graustark may fetch the tidy sum of forty dollars in gold at some twenty-first century auction.

The American sentimental song, however, has been largely obliterated by the best new music of the twentieth century, into which a new quality has crept, a quality which may serve to keep it alive, just as the coon songs which preceded it in the nineteenth century have been kept alive. Dixie and such solemn tunes as were created by Stephen C. Foster are not to be scoffed at. They are not scoffed at, as we very well know. They are sung and played at the concerts given by sopranos and violinists like the folksongs of other nations. They are known all over the world. They have found their way into serious compositions by celebrated composers. Even the cakewalks of a later date, The Georgia Campmeeting,^[1] Whistling Rufus, Hello, Ma Baby, and the works of Williams and Walker (curiously enough, the best ragtime has not been written by Negroes, although Under the Bamboo Tree and the extraordinary At the Ball are the creations of black men) have their value, but ragtime, as it exists today, had not been invented in the nineties. The apotheosis of syncopation had not begun. Not that syncopation is new in music. Nearly the whole of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is based on it. Schumann scarcely wrote two consecutive bars which are not syncopated. But ragtime syncopation is different. Louis A. Hirsch once pointed out to me what he considered its distinctive feature. "The melody and harmony are syncopated separately,"^[2] was his explanation and it will have to suffice, in spite of the fact that the same thing is true of the prelude to Parsifal, in which the conductor is forced to beat 6–4 time with one hand and 4–4 with the other, and of certain Spanish dances, in which singer, guitarist, dancer, and public vie with one another to produce a bewildering complexity of rhythm. There is abundance of syncopation and the most esoteric rhythmic intricacy in Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps (on certain pages of this ballet the time-signature changes with every bar), but ragtime is not the word to describe that vivid score, nor is it likely that any one can find much resemblance between Everybody's Doing It or Ragging the Scale and the jota or the prelude to Parsifal.

Regard, for example, the form of Waiting for the Robert E. Lee. A writer in the London Times calls attention to the fact that, although for convenience it is written out in a rhythm of 8, it is really a rhythm of 3, followed by a rhythm of 5, proceeding without warning, occasionally, into the normal rhythm of 8. It is impossible for many trained singers to read ragtime at all.^[3] They can decipher the notes, but they do not understand the conventions observed by the composers in setting these notes on paper, conventions which are the A B C's of every cabaret performer.

There is current an absurd theory to the effect that the test of good music is whether you tire of it or not. If I were to be permitted to apply this test I would say frankly that I no longer consider Die Walküre and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony good music. It is just as well to remember that if we heard the "classic" composers exploited by every street organ and cabaret pianist their music would soon become as intolerable as Pretty Baby has become during the summer just past. Probably a great many people are weary of listening to Die Wacht am Rhein, but that does not prove that it is not a good tune.

The creations of our best composers have been highly appreciated abroad. Stravinsky collects examples of them with assiduity and intends to use them in some of his forthcoming works,^[4] just as he has utilized French and Russian popular songs in The Firebird and Petrouchka. Popular songs, indeed, form as good a basis for a serious composer to work upon as folksongs. This is a remark I have been intending to make for some time and it will do no harm to make it emphatically. Examine, for example, the songs in the repertory of Yvette Guilbert; some are folksongs and some are not. I defy any one outside of Julien Tiersot, Professor Jean Beck, H. E. Krehbiel, and one or two others, to tell you which is which. These men, being tolerably familiar with the available collections of French folksongs, take it for granted, when they hear Mme. Guilbert sing a melody strange to them, that it must have had a composer. There seems to be no other known method for distinguishing between a folksong and a popular tune of the same epoch. A folksong, according to some authorities, is a song which has no composer; it just grows. Some one sings it one day in the fields, some one else adds to it, and, finally, there it is before your ears, a song known all over the country-side, but no one knows who started it rolling.^[5] Swing low, sweet chariot is alleged to be such a folksong; it is an extremely good example of a tune without a known composer, and it has been quoted with effect in Dvořák's symphony, From the New World. Finiculi' Funicula' is not a folksong.^[6] It is a popular Neapolitan song, composed by Denza to celebrate the funicular railway at Naples. Nevertheless, Richard Strauss himself quoted it bodily in his symphonic fantasia, Aus italien, although, to be sure, he laboured under the impression at the time that it was a folksong. In a similar fashion an American tune, It looks to me like a big night tonight, found its way into Elektra. This may have been unconscious assimilation on the part of Strauss; at any rate it is interesting to note how a vulgar air has been transformed into the beautiful theme—one of the most expressive in this music drama—of the Children of Agamemnon. When Paul Dukas's lyric drama, Ariane et Barbe-Bleue, was produced at the Metropolitan Opera House, the reviewers, almost to a man, referred to the song of the wives, which floats out of the cellar of the castle when Ariane opens the forbidden door in the first act, as a Brittany folksong. So it may very well be; I believe, indeed, that Dukas has said that it was. However, I am informed on excellent authority that he composed it himself! It has, to be sure, a folksong air, and it is interesting to catch its resemblance to the Berceuse of the Princess of the Sea in Rimsky-Korsakoff's opera, Sadko, and to the old Spanish tune, known to us as Flee as a Bird. La jambe de bois, borrowed by Stravinsky for an effect in the first scene of Petrouchka, might be a folksong, but it is not. It is a popular French air. "When Elgar used a genuine Welsh folksong in his Introduction and Allegro for Strings, a well-known London critic, a prominent member of the Folksong Society, declared it to be a poor imitation of the folk-style," writes Ernest Newman. "When the legend got about that a certain melody in in the South was an Italian folksong, the same critic recognized the genuine folk-quality in it, and it was distinctly unfortunate for him that the melody happened to be Elgar's own invention from first to last."

Thus it happens that while many composers, even such celebrated men, in their day, as Raff, Rubinstein, Gade, and Mendelssohn, swiftly drop into oblivion, the composer of a good popular song is assured of immortality, as such things go. His song may be sung a century, indeed, after his name is forgotten. Sometimes, by a strange fatality, even his name may be remembered, along with his music. It must be apparent to any one that The Old Folks at Home, Dixie, My Old Kentucky Home, and Old Black Joe are better known and more admired today than the operas of Meyerbeer.

It is my opinion that the best contemporary American composers (I am still referring to Irving Berlin, Louis Hirsch, and others of their kind)^[7] have brought a new quality into music, a spirit analogous to that to be found in the best folk-dances of Spain, in Gipsy, Hungarian and Russian popular music, and an entirely novel form. They have, to be sure, been working for a livelihood, but in that respect they have only followed the excellent precedent established by Offenbach, Richard Strauss, and Puccini. Bernard Shaw has probably made a great deal more money than Henry Arthur Jones, but no one thinks of calling him less of an artist than Mr. Jones for that reason. Zuloaga sells his portraits at very high rates; is he therefore to be considered less seriously than a portrait-painter in Greenwich Village who gives his canvases away? There does not appear to exist, indeed, any particular reason why an artist should not be permitted to make money if he be able to do so. It is the nature of some artists to shy at the annoyances and complications of business. The work of others, Stéphane Mallarmé, Monticelli, Robert Franz, is antipathetic to the crowd and always will be. Many of the greatest artists, however, have made the widest appeal (I might mention Beethoven, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Tolstoy), and some few men of this stamp have been able to transform their inspirations into gold. In the circumstances, it seems unfair to speak derogatively of Irving Berlin merely because he happens to make money.

The most obvious point of superiority of our ragtime composers, overlooking, for the moment, the fact that their music is pleasanter to listen to, over Messrs. Parker, Chadwick, and Hadley, is that they are expressing the very soul of a nation and an epoch, while their more serious confrères are struggling to pour into the forms of the past the thoughts of the past, rearranged, to be sure, but without notable inspiration. They have nothing new to say, and no particular reason for saying it. Louis Hirsch once told me of a conversation he had overheard at Rafael Joseffy's: A new pupil entered and proceeded to play for the master. Joseffy interrupted her. "You are not playing the right notes," he said. "I'm sure that I am," she replied. "Begin once more." She did so. Joseffy interrupted her again: "That's wrong. It isn't written like that." "But it is. Won't you look at it, please?" After examining the score the master apologized: "O, it's something of MacDowell's. I thought you were trying to play a transcription of the Tristan prelude." "I have remarked," writes Turgeniev, in one of his letters to Pauline Viardot, "that in imitative work the most spirituelles are precisely the most detestable when they take themselves seriously. A sot copies servilely; a man of spirit without talent imitates pretentiously and with an effort, with the worst of all efforts, with that of wishing to be original."

It is only through the trenchant pens of our new composers that the complicated vigour of American life has been expressed in tone. It is the only music created in America today which is worth the paper on which it is written. It is the only American music which is enjoyed by the nation (even lovers of Mozart and Debussy prefer ragtime to the inert and saponaceous classicism of our more serious-minded composers); it is the only American music which is heard abroad (and it is heard everywhere, in the trenches by way of the victrola, in the Café de Paris at Monte Carlo, in Cairo, in India, and in Australia); and it is the only music on which the musicians of our land can build in the future. If it be urged against it that it is a hybrid product, depending upon Negro and Spanish rhythms, at least the same objection can be urged against Spanish music itself, which has emerged from the music of the Moors and the Arabs; Havelock Ellis even detects Greek and Egyptian influences.

If the American composers with (what they consider) more serious aims, instead of writing symphonies or other tattered and exhausted forms which belong to another age of composition, would strive to put into their music the rhythms and tunes that dominate the hearts of the people, a new form would evolve which might prove to be the child of the Great American Composer we have all been waiting for so long and so anxiously.^[8] I do not mean to suggest that Edgar Stillman Kelley should write variations on the theme of O, You Beautiful Doll! or that Arthur Farwell should compose a symphony utilizing The Gaby Glide for the first subject of the allegro and Everybody's Doing It for the second, with the adagio based on Pretty Baby in a minor key. It is not my intention to encourage some one to write a tone-poem called New York, in which all these songs and ten or fifteen more should be thematically bundled together and finally wrapped in the profundities of a fugue. But if a composer, bearing the spirit and rhythm and dynamics and clang-tints of this music in mind, will permit his inspiration to run riot, it will be quite unnecessary for him to quote or to pour his thought into the mould of the symphony or the string quartet or any other defunct form. The idea, manifestly based though it may be on the work of Irving Berlin and Louis Hirsch, will express itself in some new way. Percy Aldridge Grainger, Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie are all working along these lines, to express modernity in tone, allowing the forms to create themselves, but, alas, none of these men is an American.

Americans are inclined to look everywhere but under their noses for art. It never occurs to them that any object which has any relation with their every-day life has anything to do with beauty. Probably the Athenians behaved in a similar fashion. When some stranger admired the classic pile on the Acropolis, the Greeks, it is safe to guess, turned up their noses with the scornful remark, "O, that old thing! That's the Parthenon; it's been there for ages." It will be remembered that Mytyl and Tyltyl, in. The Bluebird, spent considerable time and covered a good deal of ground in their search for that rare ornithological symbol, only to discover that it had existed all the time at home, the last place in the world they had thought to look for it. Our Woolworth and Flatiron Buildings we are likely to ignore, while we bow the knee before the Château district of Fifth Avenue and our ridiculous Public Library. Châteaux are all very well on the Loire, but imitations of them have no place in New York. As for that absurd Roman Library! The present building, years in course of construction, has already practically outgrown its space, and it is not yet a decade since it was first opened to the public. Acres have been wasted in the corridors alone. Of course, a library in New York should shoot up forty storeys towards the sky. Speeding elevators should hoist the student in a jiffy to whatever mental stimulation he requires. R. J. Coady, in an amusing magazine called The Soil,^[9] has sung the praises of American machinery, and his illustrations exhibit these steel works of art, of the best kind since they are also utilitarian. One day Mina Loy picked up one of those paste-board folders to which matches are attached, which are given away at all cigar counters for the use of patrons. "Some day," she said, "these will be very rare and then they will be considered beautiful." She was quite right. A few years after we discover how to light our cigarettes with our personal magnetism, or perhaps stop smoking altogether, such a contrivance will naturally—assume an interest for curious collectors and thereby become automatically as diverting an object for a cabinet as a Japanese scent-bottle or a specimen of Capo di Monte porcelain. The Baron de Meyer has found it amusing to decorate rooms with Victorian atrocities, such as baskets of shells and antimacassars, the sort of thing that went with black-walnut whatnots, knitted fire-screens, and Rogers groups in the days, not so long ago, when Godey's Lady's Book reposed on the centre table near the family Bible.

In his essay on The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson found occasion to remark: "We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away." The poet, the novelist, in America, since Emerson's time, are at last aware of the value of this contemporary material. The musician, aside from the popular composer, is not, and we have not learned to appreciate the popular composer. It is apparently impossible to consider anything art which is constantly buzzing in our ears. It would be absurd, we think, to consider it as art, because it is so commonplace. One might as easily consider the Woolworth Building or the Manhattan Bridge or the Pennsylvania Station works of art, and how could any one possibly do that? Just the same, I am inclined to believe that the Pennsylvania Station, the Manhattan Bridge, and that "roaring, epic ragtime tune," Waiting for the Robert E. Lee are among the first twenty-four beautiful things created in America. It is no more use to imitate French or German music than it is to imitate French or German architecture. The sooner we realize this the better for all of us.

January 23, 1917.

1. Which obviously inspired Debussy's Golliwogg's Cakewalk.
2. He added, further: "In ragtime the syncopation may occur at a different beat in each bar. It is unexpected." It should also be stated that there is usually a curiously exact relationship between the syncopation in the music and that in the words. Modern jazz, a later development of this type of music, has further added a novel colour interest.
3. European orchestras find the same difficulty. It is seldom that any tune of this character is ever properly performed as regards rhythm and tone-colour by any band in London, Paris, or Berlin, unless that band be American. This is partly due to the fact, doubtless, that ragtime and jazz composers are seldom trained musicians, so that their ideas created at the piano are incorrectly transcribed by alien pens, but more, perhaps, to the fact that there are certain subtleties inherent in the authentic performance of this music which cannot be set down in any current form of notation.
4. In 1919 Stravinsky composed his Piano Ragtime and his Ragtime for orchestra (violins, viola, double-bass, flute, clarinet, horn, cornet, trombone, percussion instruments and cymbalo. This work was performed in London, under the direction of Arthur Bliss, in 1920.
5. I may be permitted to state that I do not subscribe to this absurd theory, which, dictated and thundered forth by certain academicians, was allowed for a time to pass unchallenged. Later authorities do not accept this view. Note, for example, what J. S. Curwen has to say in his preface to Folksongs of Many Lands: "I have waded through a great many prefaces to collections of French, German, Scandinavian, and other folksongs, but have never found a statement of the 'evolved' origin of the folksong such is upheld at the present time (1911) by some collectors in England. . . . Of one thing I am sure. The charming melodies in this book, full of formal beauty, of daintily--- curved tonal lines, of haunting rhythms and cadences that carry forward the interest, are the work of men and women, who, whether they knew the fact or not, were artists. These tunes were composed for the people, not by the people. The idea that from an amorphous condition these melodies were gradually moulded into shape by being handed from one untutored singer to another is to me unthinkable. Popular use deteriorates melodies; it does not shape them." For an extended discussion of the whole matter from this point of view, see Francis Clarke's paper: Beastly Tunes; The London Mercury; III, 510. My own definition of a folksong would be that it is a popular song, of which the name of the composer has been forgotten.
6. Most popular Neapolitan songs, such as O Sole Mio, Santa Lucia, and Maria, Marì, are not folksongs in the academic sense of the word.
7. These names seem almost classic now. Many new names should be added; among others, certainly that of George Gershwin, whose I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, obviously inspired by the manner of Negro spirituals, I must consider the most perfect piece of jazz yet written; Zez Confrey, with his diverting and ingenious Kitten on the Keys; Abel Baer, with his Mama Loves Papa; Walter Donaldson, with Carolina in the Morning. On November 1, 1923, at a concert in Æolian Hall, New York, Eva Gauthier sang a group of these songs. Their position on the program stood between a group by Bela Bartok and Paul Hindemuth and an air from Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. The group included Irving Berlin's masterpiece, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Jerome Kern's The Siren's Song, Walter Donaldson's Carolina in the Morning, and George Gershwin's I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Swanee, and Innocent Ingenue Baby. For an encore, Mme. Gauthier added Gershwin's Do It Again. Gershwin himself played very brilliant accompaniments for these songs. I think, speaking historically, that this was the first time in America that a singer had included modern jazz numbers in a serious recital program. It is possible, however, that it had been done before in Paris. Paul Whiteman, too, has made a serious effort to glorify jazz. He was one of the first to perceive the advantage of arranging these numbers with symphonic scoring, making the most, as well, of effects peculiar to the jazz orchestra, such as covering the bell of a cornet with a hat, or augmenting the sound of a trumpet with a megaphone. Whiteman's orchestra, unlike most jazz bands, plays from score and does not depend on improvisation for its results. Even the paltriest tune, orchestrated by Ferdie Grofé, with infinite ingenuity and a profusion of novel colour and harmonic effects, and performed with the precision and beautiful tone quality possessed by this band, and with the fire put into it by their inspired leader, becomes important enough to listen to with pleasure. The brasses and woodwinds in this band are superior to those in any other orchestra with which I am acquainted, and the ability of several of its members to play a variety of instruments makes it possible to obtain a profusion of varied colour combinations with a modest personnel. The unusually gifted Ross Gorman alone is equally proficient on E flat and B flat soprano saxophones, E flat alto saxophone, oboe and bass oboe, heckelphone, E flat and B flat alto and bass clarinets, and octavion. Others in the band are nearly as versatile. The skilful employment of piano and banjo in these orchestrations is also to be noted.
8. Henry F. Gilbert has composed a set of American Dances in ragtime rhythm, besides his ballet, The Dance in Place Congo, Humoresque on Negro Minstrel Tunes, Negro Rhapsody, and Comedy Overture on Negro Themes. For such of this music as I have heard I can confess to no warm regard. John Powell's Rhapsodie Nègre for piano and orchestra and John Alden Carpenter's Krazy Kat jazz pantomime are better, but since hearing George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, performed by the composer for the first time at Paul Whiteman's concert of American music at Æolian Hall on February 12, 1924, I am convinced that the best serious music along these lines will be written by the jazz composers themselves. Gershwin is a composer of popular hits, but unlike the greater number of his confrères, he is also an expert musician. The Rhapsody in Blue, constructed on the formula of a Liszt piano concerto, is not novel in form, but it is entirely novel in content. Gershwin has built up the entire composition, even to the adagio and the cadenzas, on jazz themes, treated symphonically, with working-out sections, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the sonata form. The themes are both highly original and highly typical. At least two of them are as good as any that Richard Strauss ever thought of. The orchestration (indicated by the composer but carried out by Ferdie Grofé) utilizes all the novel and beautiful tonal effects that have been invented by jazz bands. To my mind, indeed, this composition (I have heard it four times) is the best serious work yet created by an American musician, and, aside from its form, it is, indubitably, thoroughly American. It is now available on a phonograph record.
9. Now defunct. Five numbers were published in 1916-17.