This is one of my favorite Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op eds. I hope to be forgiven for posting it again.
The Next Page:
The sound of American music
Sunday,
September 23, 2007
By Rudolph H.
Weingartner
American music: What is it? Who made it?
Where did it come from?
It's a sprawling, contentious question.
But I am talking about the decades that began around the first World War, when
it became meaningful to speak of distinctively American music.
Rudolph H.
Weingartner (rudywein@pitt.edu), a professor emeritus of
philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, is a former board member of the
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. His most recent book is "A Sixty-Year Ride
Through the World of Education" (Hamilton/Rowman & Littlefield).
Of course, the music that was written
then built on its American and European forebears. But the changes introduced
were so powerful that they dominated American music for quite some time. More
correctly, I should say American musics, in the plural, since there is
hardly a single strain.
I leave out the rich world of jazz, since
it would call for more extensive treatment than there is room here. Instead, I
want to focus on three other genres. Going from the bottom up -- speaking as a
snooty member of the cultural elite -- there are what are most simply called
popular songs; then there are the musicals of Broadway; and, finally, the kind
of music played by symphony orchestras, recitalists and ensembles in the likes
of Carnegie Hall, all known by the misleading term of "classical
music."
I've been listening to music for most of
my life -- actually listening, not just hearing. And sometimes I even think
about what I heard. Thinking about these genres, I came to a mildly startling
conclusion, though the facts have been plain to see all my life: Three giants
who dominated the American musical landscape were Jews from Eastern Europe, one
actually born there, the other two in Brooklyn not long after their parents'
passage through Ellis Island.
God bless Irving Berlin
Starting at the "bottom," it is
hard to trump Irving Berlin, although that was not the name he was born with,
in 1888, in the town of Tyumen, just east of the Ural Mountains, arriving here
when he was 5. (Other sources name different towns.) The son of a cantor, he
was then Israel Isadore Baline (that last name an immigration official's
transcription of Beilin), the youngest of a large Yiddish-speaking family.
While I found no record just when Israel
became Irving, the move to Berlin came about through a mistake.
In 1906, the 18-year-old wrote the lyrics for "Marie of Sunny Italy"
to a melody by a fellow entertainer at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. But when
the song was published, the printer put "I. Berlin" on the cover. It
would have brought bad luck to the author not to keep the name that gave him his
first broader recognition.
Most of us know much of the greater
accomplishments that would follow. What we might not know is that at the
beginning of his long career, Irving Berlin succeeded as a wordsmith, and only
when he was prodded did he compose the melody of his next song.
That prod lasted. From "Alexander's
Ragtime Band," Berlin's first big-time success, to "Always,"
"Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better," "How Deep Is the
Ocean" and "White Christmas" (and many, many more), Irving
Berlin wrote both words and music.
It is often noted that Berlin never
learned to read notes and that a special piano was built for him that allowed
him to play melodies in keys that he otherwise couldn't play since he could
play in only one key. But I like to observe another fact: the lyrics and
melodies he wrote could not be more distant from the Yiddish he spoke as a
child and the cantorial and Eastern European tunes on which he was brought up.
For me, the highlight is Berlin's
hymn-like "God Bless America." I empathize with those who want to
make that song our national anthem, as more singable and less belligerent than
our current one. Were that ever to happen, it would be the zenith of the story
of Israel Isadore Beilin that began somewhere in Russia or Belarus.
The rhapsody on George
Gershwin
Our second innovator who influenced the
course of American music managed to steer an unprecedented course between pops
and "classical" music and between musical and opera. Jacob Gershowitz
was born in 1898 in Brooklyn, but his father, who had emigrated from Russia,
soon changed his name to Gershwin; the transformation of Jacob into George
somehow followed.
Like Berlin, George Gershwin got an early
start, writing a commercially successful song when he was 19 and making his
first big hit with "Swanee" when he was 21. The words were by his
brother Ira -- who came to write the words to much of George's lyrical output
-- and the song's success benefited greatly from being sung by superstar Al
Jolson (born in Lithuania as Asa Yoelson).
Gershwin, who died at 38, was prolific,
with a large output of works for the stage and the concert hall. As exemplified
by the work everyone knows, "Rhapsody in Blue" (of 1924), Gershwin
was the first to combine -- perhaps interweave is a better term -- classical
compositional techniques with jazz and pop.
Again, no trace of an Eastern European
heritage in that unique Gershwin mix. An anecdote is told about the
Austrian-born composer Arnold Schoenberg, whom Gershwin was said to have asked
for lessons in composition. "I would only make you a second-rate
Schoenberg, and you are such a good Gershwin already." (The anecdote is
also told with Gershwin seeking instruction from the French composer Maurice
Ravel and receiving the same complimentary refusal. Take your pick.)
It is worth mentioning that the jazz --
which is, after all, perhaps the most American of musics -- on which Gershwin
leaned had also been changing. It became much freer and improvisational than it
had been when still closer to the band music, ragtime, spirituals and religious
music from which it had sprung.
That Gershwin was able to elevate the
musical to new heights is exemplified in two quite different ways. "Of
Thee I Sing," reviewed by Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times as "a
taut and lethal satire ... funnier than the government, and not nearly so
dangerous," was, in 1932, the very first musical comedy to win the
Pulitzer Prize for best American play. I would have liked to have been a fly on
the wall when the august Pulitzer board at Columbia University debated whether
or not to take this radical step toward popular taste.
But "Porgy and Bess" is
Gershwin's crowning achievement. It is the only opera by an American composer
that has received worldwide acclaim. That is not a trivial distinction: a
"selected" list of operas by American composers posted on the US
Opera Web site comes to 359, if I counted correctly. Nor is "Porgy and
Bess" a standard opera, whatever that might be. Gershwin called it a Folk
Opera. It makes copious use of jazzy passages; its cast of characters, almost
entirely African American, consists of ordinary people and not larger-than-life
operatic heroes. American verismo.
The plot moves briskly and the hit tunes
tumble one after the other; if they were sung in Italian, they would be called
arias. An international group of collectors of recordings of
"Summertime" claims to know of at least 20,142 public performances of
that song, of which 13,842 are said to have been recorded.
Fanfare for the uncommon
Aaron Copland
A young man, Morris (probably ne Moishe)
Kaplan was in England, on the way from Lithuania to America, when he anglicized
his name to Copland. Some years later, in 1900, his fifth child, Aaron, was
born in Brooklyn and came to grow up to become the most American of American
composers, a goal he aimed at almost self-consciously.
His music is American, not simply because
he incorporated into it both jazz and blues, making use, as well, of older American
tunes -- though he did all that. Nor is his music American because so much of
it is devoted to American themes: "Appalachian Spring," "Billy
the Kid," "Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson," the opera
"Tender Land." But even though Copland wrote many works that derive
from European sources, including atonal music, the core of his output evinces a
tonal world that became a kind of paradigm of American "classical"
music, strongly influencing a subsequent generation.
While numerous technical analyses have been
put forward of this Copland-American style, I will confine myself to a few
general characteristics. The themes or melodies Copland invents are relatively
simple and concise and when they are more extensive, they are likely to be made
up of smaller units. Copland's rhythms are often distinctly declamatory and
predominantly unhurried.
Perhaps most notably, Copland's harmony
is derived from French rather than German music, most probably by virtue of the
fact that he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the first American composer
to do so. And finally, Copland makes a self-conscious effort to orchestrate
with great clarity, letting each voice be heard with little or no doubling,
making for a more open, less "sophisticated" but also less fuzzy texture.
Arguably, Copland's "Third
Symphony" is the greatest American work in that genre. The first movement
makes copious use of themes of the popular "Fanfare for the Common
Man." Throughout its course, it steadfastly maintains its ability to keep
the listener fastened to the orchestral progression.
The symphony is only one of a great many
of Copland's works -- from chamber music to ballet to operas to scores for
Hollywood films. But it serves as good evidence for the claim that Aaron
Copland was the greatest American composer of the last century-- a century he
spanned, since he died in 1990.
What is the moral of this story about the
modern "origin" of American music?
Early on I said that I was mildly
surprised that a most important trio of American masters consisted of three
Eastern European Jews. Surprised, because that's not what you would expect when
considering American music.
But only mildly surprised, because, after
all, it is a fundamental truth of American history, and one that is in danger
of being forgotten: Our open society liberated the newly arrived and
first-generation Americans, and they harnessed their native talents and
energies to advance the themes and tasks of their new homeland.
A recent study, "What Happened to
the Children Who Fled Nazi Persecution" (for which I filled out a
questionnaire), makes that point. But read the obituary pages of The New York
Times, peruse the list of American recipients of the Nobel Prize or just listen
to the accents of the professors who teach the science courses in our
universities or to those of the physicians that treat our ailments. These are
sufficient reminders of what the United States can accomplish when it honors
its birthright as the land of the free.
First published
on September 23, 2007 at 12:00 am
Copyright ©1997
- 2007 PG Publishing Co., Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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