Yeah…CW: Racist language that are quite uncomfortable

For today’s blog post, I want to talk about two primary sources that I find interesting. This week, we talked about the origin of African American folk music, and I was thinking to myself, where exactly did the music go? Some of them, as we already know, were adapted by minstrel shows. I came across a short article in a hundred-year-old newspaper, which talks about minstrelsy in an interesting way. Based on that, I went in and looked for other sources related to minstrelsy and found some parallels and differences between the two. 

Here is the first article.

This article stood out to me because it seems to be critical of minstrelsy in the first half, but then it quickly shifts to glamourising this “new” form of minstrel shows, which I think is such an interestingly complicated idea. This article was published on April 12, 1902, in the newspaper Portland New Age. The author of this article is unknown so I can’t do that much of a deep dive on them. For the first half of this article, the author states that the death of past minstrel actors signifies the death of the old minstrel shows. At this point, I thought this article is serving some fresh, woke ideas. 

Then, it shifted into sort of an advertisement for this new age minstrel show, and the author said that the old minstrel shows “represent no class and their programs are a hotch potch of absurdly sentimental drivel and eccentric vaudeville specialties.” The author introduces the new minstrel shows by stating the type of dance, music and instruments that will be there, “The dances were… The instruments were the banjo, the fiddle, the bones and the tambourine. The songs were the racy plantation melodies, the jubilee, hymns, … ” all of these were elements of African American folksongs. 

This is not even the worst part (since they were just being mean to their predecessors), the author went on and said that the old minstrel shows “was to represent the plantation negro in his native humor and with all his racial peculiarities.” This answers the question I posed earlier: where did the African American folksongs go? The person writing this article as well as those who performed in the shows are the ones answering my question without speaking a word– obviously they appropriated it. It is just nuts to me how they think his new and improved version of minstrelsy is good and worth advertising. But oh wait, it probably has a market. 

This is a poster for a show. 

This other source is simply a poster of an “old” school minstrel show, since it was posted in 1860, and it shows some names of minstrel actors, programs, as well as the price for entering the theater. On the top of the poster, it shows a bust drawing of an African American person juggling a banjo, a fiddle and a tambourine, which happens to be the instruments mentioned in the article. The poster also referred to the minstrel actors as the “great stars,” which rubs me the wrong way. The two sources combined tell a story, a story of appropriation, a story of tears and cries viewed as mockery, and a story of the bloody past in the camouflage of music.

Works Cited

“Topics Of The Times.” Portland New Age, 12 Apr. 1902, p. 2. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B7C68FA2F14448%40EANAAA-12BC5D125B711DB0%402415852-12BA072FF6189A30%401-12E65727248D96F8%40Topics%2BOf%2BThe%2BTimes. Accessed 2 Nov. 2021.

https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=I5CV5ASPMTYzNDA1MjczMTYxNToxOjEzOjE5OS45MS4xODAuOTI&p_action=doc&p_queryname=12&p_docnum=2&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-154E9B16141D3F08@S245-@1

Mary Barnard Horne [1845-1931] was one of the first female authors of minstrelsy scripts. She wrote various musicals, school productions, adapted others’ performances for the stage and of course, minstrel shows. Interestingly, she dealt with the social and political status of women during this time in America where voting rights for black men and white women were similar. Here is one of her shows, entitled, “Jolly Joe’s Lady Minstrels.” The text is highly racist yet also is one of the first shows in which women were cast on stage. It contains a phrase in the introduction reading,

"Until recently the field of Amateur Minstrelsy has been open solely
   to the male sex. It was, however, only necessary for the weaker sex
   to turn its attention to burnt cork, to eccentric costumes, to
   negro songs, and to fun generally, to draw upon it the attention of
   the public and the verdict that, in this field as in many others,
   it could hold its own."1

Given that Horne’s plays were often performed for the white middle class, I was curious about the reception of a play which appeased one pillar of white male power but subverts the other. A quick search on newspapers.com reveals this 1913 review from a Brooklyn newspaper.

Clipping from The Chat, Brooklyn, New York. 22 November 1913.²

The subheading reads, “Up-to-date minstrel performance with some modern improvements given by clever members of the Church of the Evangel.” The performance was apparently put on by the leader of the women’s association at the named church. I find it fascinating that ‘modern improvements’ seem to refer to women’s rights but there is no consideration of the racism which the play contains. This is, as it turns out, quite a surface level observation of the fight for civil rights at the time. For context, Black men were granted the right to vote in 1870 whereas women were not granted the right to vote until 1920. During this time period, though, feminism took on many forms. Abolition-feminism equated the bondage of slavery to the bondage of women in order to fight for civil rights, yet the way this often played out privileged white women only. Clare Midgley writes, “In the United States, the fear of anti-slavery women was that their meetings would be disrupted by racist mobs.”³ Given this intersection, we can see how white women might take on the ‘modern’ cause for women’s rights without any concern for Black rights. 

This little snippet from a seemingly niche subject, women in minstrelsy, is an example of a much broader trend in U.S. history, that is, white women weaponizing their status to further Black oppression. Zooming out now, we see the same trend continuing today, in the very same cities that minstrel shows were being performed. You may recall white woman Amy Cooper calling 911 on a Black man who asked her to leash her dog in Central Park, New York. In falsely accusing him of harassing her, she pandered to the cause of women while simultaneously posturing her white status. Can we blame her if she is just a product of our history? Yes, and we should look inward to change our own racist habits too.

References

There is something inherently dissonant about perceptions of blackness in the artistic community before the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s, 60s and 70s. In certain circles, white musicians and writers  seemed to have collective understanding and appreciation for African-American music.

In an interview published as far back as 1893, renowned European musician Antonin Dvorak openly claimed that “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.” The article from the Cleveland Gazette  is boldly titled, Negro Melodies: Must be the Foundation of Any Serious and Original School of Composition. The obvious placement of value on Black music seems at odds with the events going on in the late 1800s and early 1900s- during the time of Jim Crow and the height of the anti-lynching movement. 

It seems at once that Dvorak’s opinion was both common among Eastern Europeans in America and, as the piece describes, “radical”- however, in the context of other articles sharing the sentiment, it is rather ordinary: fellow musician Giacomo Minkowsky was interviewed for the Portland New Age in an article titled, GIACOMO MINKOWSKY: Says the Negro Songs Is the Cradle of Our Music.

The two pieces share something in common apart from the explicit theme and school of thought: an undertone of dissonant attitudes and ideas regarding blackness. 

For instance, Minkowsky is quoted in the interview saying, “I have come to the conclusion that the cradle of American music lay below Mason and Dixon’s line, and that it is the Negro to whom we owe the series of melodies comprising our national music.” Later in the article, he claims, “It is the Negro who is the innovator in this country in “syncopated” meter.”  

Only a few paragraphs later, he goes on to berate his contemporaries, many of whom were Black, and state that the merit of “these [Black] melodies” is their originality, and “primitiveness”: “….I cannot say that our composers in their treatment of these melodies have in any way improved them. In their primitive state they had, as I said before, the merit of originality, a merit which they lost on account of unskilled treatment.” 

The article closes with Minkowsky calling ragtime music “mutilated forms of it [original negro melodies].” “If asked today whether these ‘ragtime’ songs actually represented American music, I would answer: No; they are but the mutilated forms of it; for the genuine popular music you must go back to the old Negro melodies. We have abandoned our sources merely to go back to them again.” One might take this to mean that the “Negro songs” and “melodies” mentioned throughout the article, as being the foundation of American music, are only those he deems of value and artistic merit. 

While Dvorak does not go on to rebuke his Black contemporaries, this might be only because he does not comment on Black performances, or Black music as played by Black people. He praises the importance of “Negro melodies”; “I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies.” Only to later divulge, “When the Negro minstrels are here again I intend to take my young composers with me and have them comment on the melodies.” Minstrel shows were inherently racist and anti-black from their conception. The entire premise is humor in the form of ridiculing Black people, while wearing blackface. 

These two articles exhibit a classic form of American racism:  disenfranchising and expropriating the art and music of Black people, to conceptually separate Black people from Black art.

Citations

“Giacomo Minkowsky Says the Negro Songs Is the Cradle of Our Music.” Portland New Age, 10 Nov. 1900, p. 4. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B7C68FA2F14448%40EANAAA-12BC5CC0ACA9F1D8%402415334-12BA072FAAA39E70%403-12E6461F412C4718%40Giacomo%2BMinkowsky%2BSays%2Bthe%2BNegro%2BSongs%2BIs%2Bthe%2BCradle%2Bof%2BOur%2BMusic. 

“Negro Melodies. Must be the Foundation of Any Serious and Original School of Composition To.” Cleveland Gazette, 3 June 1893, p. 1. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B716FE88B82998%40EANAAA-12C2B6D224650FF8%402412618-12C106450C0AD708%400-12DAC74DEEC5D8B0%40Negro%2BMelodies.%2BMust%2Bbe%2Bthe%2BFoundation%2Bof%2BAny%2BSerious%2Band%2BOriginal%2BSchool%2Bof%2BComposition%2BTo.

Antonín Dvořák

As we attempt to answer the question “What is American Music?” one perspective to take is that of an outsider. Antonín Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” is a work that showcases an outsider’s perspective on American music and culture — this music and culture being undoubtedly shaped at least in part by African-American spirituals. 

In speaking of this composition, Dvořák went so far as to claim that “The future of this country must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.” Obviously problematic, this statement essentially tells white Americans that it is in their best interest to continue to take advantage of the people they have violently enslaved and oppressed to further their musical mark. 

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When working through the designated databases this week, I found many articles and scores pertaining to blackface minstrelsy, like a lot of my fellow classmates. However, I found many glowing reviews with advertisements for future performances of many different troupes. I was surprised, to say the least. The language was light, enthusiastic, and endearing to this particular group of performers — Christy’s Minstrels. 

Therefore, in today’s installment of American Music discourse, Taylor Wesseln grapples with how the perception of the morality and ethics of human creation change over time. In other words, how could someone write a warm advertisement for a group whose mission and success came from the tried and true racism of all members involved? These thoughts  could also boil down to this simple question: “why the h*ck was minstrelsy popular at all?”

“Christy’s Minstrels.” New Orleans Daily Creole (New Orleans, Louisiana), October 2, 1856: 2. Readex: African American Newspapers.

After days of sitting with this blurb from the New Orleans Daily Creole, I still have no answer. Here, the author describes the unique talent of the Christy Minstrels, because “[n]o minstrelsy of Nature’s choristers can give greater pleasure to the ear that is attuned to music than their artistic warbling.” This group appears to have the ability to “beautiful[ly] execut[e] the native melodies of [the] black population” in New Orleans. When looking at one of the songs they would have performed, “Julia Green,” one can see right away that the music is hokey with a simple arpeggiating accompaniment and singer’s imitative dialect of what they think African Americans sound like.  

 Basically, this advertisement ensures that attending this performance will guarantee an excellent night of entertainment, complete with “innocent recreation” and “phlegm-dispersing laugh[ter]” for about 50 to 75 cents a person. Golly.

Reading about Christy Minstrels this weekend felt like a difficult but necessary introduction to minstrelsy for me. I wanted to skip to the end and see when black performers began performing themselves, taking back their narrative one millimeter at a time. However, history does not work in this fashion. 

Christy’s Minstrels were instrumental in the spreading popularity of minstrel shows and music. Not only did they assist in solidifying the format of these shows into three acts, they also created a household name when touring around the country and even across the pond. Audiences, particularly white audiences,  near and far enjoyed their work– as evident by the above newspaper clipping.  Without creating this foundational following, who knows if African American performers would have ever been included in this crazy mix of performance art that is minstrelsy.

References

“Christy’s Minstrels.” New Orleans Daily Creole (New Orleans, Louisiana), October 2, 1856: 2. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A11B849020C1891B3%40EANAAA-11B95E00EDA564F0%402399225-11B86D14B34C04E0%401-11FAA6DDA80DA6D3%40Christy%2527s%2BMinstrels.

“Julia Green” sung by the Christy Minstrels ; written & composed by Frank Spencer. Date of Publication: 1848 Afro-Americana Imprints From LCP, no. S2171.

Stevenson, Robert. “Christy, Edwin Pearce.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 10 Oct. 2021. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000005717.

Lott, et al. “Blackface Minstrelsy.” Public Broadcasting Station. Accessed on 11 October 2021.  https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/foster-blackface-minstrelsy/ 

Welcome back to another installment of everyone’s favorite series Cohen Quest. This week, we’re diving deep into Cohen’s early years, his family, and the beginnings of his musical career. Who knows what we’ll find out about our guy!

Based on census records, a draft registration card, and various indexes, we know that Cecil Cohen was born on April 27, 1894 in Chicago, Illinois, and lived there for the first 10 years of his life with his parents John and Flora. After his father died in 1906 he and his mother moved in with his cousin Julia where he stayed until he left to attend Fisk University and Oberlin College. I know, that’s a lot of hyperlinks. What I’m most interested in, however, are the multiple announcements and advertisements for a recital given by a Miss Maude J Roberts, “Chicago’s sweetest soprano singer”.

Chicago’s soprano song bird Miss Maude J. Roberts in recital at 8:15 pm on February 4, 1915, at the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago (now the Carruthers Center).

Tons of hype was generated for this particular concert that was early on in both Cohen and Roberts’ careers; of course, the hype was relegated to the local African-American newspapers The Broad Axe, The Chicago Defender, and The Indianapolis Freeman. Sylvester Russell, a music critic for The Freeman, had some harsh words for the young performers, although admittedly it’s difficult to parse out the early 1900s syntax and tone. He writes,”[Cohen] has a good technic but the warmth of his artistic temperament was distracted by nervousness”; I would be nervous too, if I was playing for a large portion of my community at a major center of social and artistic life.

It might be worthy to note that each composer represented on the recital program was white and, besides Amy Beach, a European man. At a time when blackface minstrelsy was still embarrassingly popular, black classical musicians were still performing music by white composers.¹ It seems as though it wasn’t until composers like HT Burleigh and Florence Price came along that African-American Art Song started coalescing as a distinct genre of classical art music, paving the way for people like Cecil Cohen to produce their own music that stays within the style, or pushes on the boundaries.

While researching in the Afro-Americana Imprints database, I came across the cover for sheet music dedicated to musician Richard Willis, which included music written by Francis Johnson. Immediately, I was interested in the identity of these men, particularly Francis Johnson. Initially, I found that he was born in 1792 either in Philadelphia or Martinique (A Caribbean Island), and that there’s not much known about his personal life, other than that he was a free black man who lived in Philadelphia.

Upon further investigation, I found that Frank has the most impressive resume. It was rumored that he played all instruments, taught black and white students, toured the US and Europe, composed hundreds of pieces, and was gifted a silver trumpet from Queen Victoria her

self! This is especially impressive, given that during his lifetime, slavery was still thriving in the South. But this information is all from secondary sources, namely the African American Registry website, and the University of Pennsylvania archives website. I was interested in finding first-hand accounts of Francis and his music, yet it seems like there’s almost no primary source material available. 

I tried searching the Frank Johnson Musical Association, band, players, groups, etc., to no avail. Almost everything was either irrelevant or about another Francis Johnson. I was only able to find one writing that mentioned the accomplishments of Francis Johnson the musician. It’s titled “Music and Drama,” published in the People’s Advocate, published in 1880. It reads:

“[He] could play on every instrument then known, In 1839 he visited Europe with a portion of his band and was rumored to play the silver six-keyed bugle… was a tutor on the bugle of Willis…  was a composer of no mean celebrity”

Upon further examination, I found that this was a republication of an article from a newspaper called the Elevator (which took a lot of sleuthing to figure out), which was most likely written by a woman named Jennie Carter. Still, I don’t know who that is or if she is reliable.

This has all made me ask: Why is it so hard to find information about this man who seemed to be so successful? Perhaps not much was written about him, but to me, it seems more likely that not much was saved about him. Although the white newspapers and print were getting archived and filed away, did black people have these resources? Once again I’m seeing how my view of black Americans is so hugely shaped by racist history and the fact that white people have always been in control. I find myself wondering if we can ever uncover the true history of black Americans. 

Citations:

“The Death of Willis.” Flot, Meigan & Co. (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), 1837: Readex: Afro-Americana Imprints. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/Evans/?p_product=EAIX&p_theme=eai&p_nbid=T5FA5DYSMTYzMzk5NjYzNy40NDg2NDE6MToxNDoxOTkuOTEuMTgwLjE0OA&p_action=doc&p_queryname=16&p_docref=v2:13D59FCC0F7F54B8@EAIX-154E9B11D0F03650@S2316-@1-160CC4A8734732F2&f_mode=printCitation

“Music And The Drama.” People’s Advocate (Washington (DC), District of Columbia), May 1, 1880: 1. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A1314AA70AC23F712%40EANAAA-1318B7EB28CCA808%402407837-1317FCEBA03D18F8%400-138B6D055378A841%40Music%2BAnd%2BThe%2BDrama.

“Frank (Francis) Johnson, Musician, and Teacher Born.” African American Registry, June 16, 2021. https://aaregistry.org/story/frank-johnson-a-first-for-black-music/.

“Broad Ax” Chicago, May 23, 1903

Content Warning: Racist representation of Black Americans.

As I was doing my research, I came across this column in a 1903 edition of the Broad Ax. Entitled “Montana Society Note: Characteristic Description of a Brilliant Social Function in the Cow Country.” This article provides some intriguing insight into the perception of minstrel shows throughout history. Upon an initial skim, one might think that this is a genuine recount of an evening of entertainment at a minstrel troupe performance. Language like “roaring success” and “It was one of the most brilliant heel-and-toe stampedes ever held in this settlement” initially hint towards the success and ingenuity of a performance like this. A little bit of further exploration of the paper and its author reveals a different perspective.

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As evident in Southern’s book, The Music of Black Americans, music-making has always been an important part of African American culture in the United States. One aspect of Southern’s writing that I found particularly interesting was her use of newspaper articles to highlight the values of a certain time, and how they related to music. During the time of slavery in the United States, most of the newspaper ads were written from a white enslaver’s perspective, however, after the Civil War and the onset of African American-based newspapers, black American perspectives began to shine through. 

I chose to investigate a music advertisement from the Cleveland Gazette, published in 1883, that highlights this change in perspective. Bold letters that capture the audience’s attention read:

Lovers of music, secure at once a copy of the new edition of “Bright Eyes”.

Written by Cleveland Gazette editor Harry C. Smith, “Be True Bright Eyes” was a song for piano (or organ) with voice, and includes a score for four-part harmony. This push to buy piano and vocal music, in conjunction with other music related ads found in the Cleveland Gazette, such as the piano ad below, demonstrate the different types of music-making that black Americans participated in during this time period.

We have seen in Southern’s reading through newspaper ads that fiddle, banjo, and horn playing were popular instruments, and now through an African American lens, we also see the importance of piano playing with a vocal melody. Although primary sources written by white people, like the ads Southern uses, can give researchers important information, African American newspapers like the Cleveland Gazette are necessary sources to include in research because they highlight the narrative of black Americans. Researchers must always look to sources like the Cleveland Gazette that center black voices and experiences. 

Works Cited

“Advertisement.” Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, Ohio), October 18, 1884: 3. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B716FE88B82998%40EANAAA-12CC2DCC9D4D1D28%402409468-12CBE5CDD45206C0%402-12E046B1ACAC4B68. 

“Advertisement.” Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, Ohio), October 18, 1884: 4. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B716FE88B82998%40EANAAA-12CC2DCC9D4D1D28%402409468-12CBE5CDD4E6F7A8%403-12E046B291DEDFF8.

Encyclopedia of Cleveland History | Case Western Reserve University. “SMITH, HARRY CLAY,” May 11, 2018. https://case.edu/ech/articles/s/smith-harry-clay.

Smith, Harry C. Be True Bright Eyes. Smith, H. C., Cleveland, monographic, 1883. Notated Music. https://www.loc.gov/item/sm1883.01718/. 

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans : a History. [1st edition]. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

The fascination. The excitement. The muse. I have so many mixed feelings when it comes to looking into minstrel show advertisements and newspaper article sections about these apparent highly sought-after shows. I cannot help but question where this grand excitement for these shows is rooted. Was it for entertainment? The humor? The sophistication? The representation? As I looked into newspaper sections that talked specifically about the Campbell Minstrel group, I started to find some possible answers and drew some parallels between our most recent reading by Eric Lott about the concept of love and theft.

The newspaper sections that I found are from the New Orleans Daily Creole, “a Creole pro-slavery newspaper launched in 1856.” Is it also noted that scholars of the African- American press generally exclude the Daily Creole when referring to these types of newspapers. In reading this statement written about this newspaper I found on a database dedicated to African American Newspapers, I found this to be quite odd. I see a pretty distinct dichotomy between the foundational intention of this news source vs. how they portray the minstrel shows in these newspapers. This can definitely allude to Lott’s mention on how there seemed to be a general theme of “love” (eroticism, “celebration”, etc.) vs. “theft” (exploitation, insensitivity, etc.)- both terms in a great deal of contradiction. The minstrel shows seemed to be quite “sophisticated” based on the fact that they had a “change of programme nightly.” This broad repertoire most likely appealed to the general public quite extensively, almost giving them more of a reason to come back each night to hear a different show, even getting to hear “new selections” of various songs written for the shows.

The New Orleans Daily Creole- November 20th, 1856.

This other section of a newspaper clipping brings out more fundamental draws and attractions to the minstrel shows. The sentence where it talks about how Matt Peel, “never tires the ear or the eye” goes to show the fascination with the visual and audio aspects of the minstrel show- being drawn to the aesthetics and physicality of enslaved people. Even when referring to the jokes and how they are “excellent”- this can apply to the concept of “celebrating” or treating the experiences of black enslaved people as mere entertainment or a type of comic relief.

The New Orleans Daily Creole- November 24th, 1856.

These fascinations with the “grand” minstrel shows of the 1850s prove to show that there was a huge draw and attraction to the black experience- having shows go day after day. The “rage” continued for decades (as we can see in the Campbell Minstrels seeming to have toured for over 12 years). Although, it must be noted that all of these reviews and ads come from a pro-slavery newspaper- which alludes to the themes of “theft” and stealing of the black enslaved experience. It is so crucial to dive deeper into these themes that we read and really see the real-life evidence and sources that provide us with proof of these themes that we have read about.

Minstrel Concert Ad, 1856

Works Cited:

“Advertisement.” New Orleans Daily Creole, 20 Nov. 1856, p. 3. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A11B849020C1891B3%40EANAAA-11B95E54DF497DB0%402399274-11B86D1545DDADB0%402-1211B25BB46A165B%40Advertisement. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.

“The Campbells.” New Orleans Daily Creole, 24 Nov. 1856, p. 2. Readex: African American Newspapers, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A11B849020C1891B3%40EANAAA-11B95E58D0501DF0%402399278-11B86D154E124B80%401-1211B2645EE918AF%40The%2BCampbells. Accessed 11 Oct. 2021.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_newspapers_in_Louisiana#CITEREFDavis1983

Trigger warning: This blog post contains racist language.

Throughout history, the music of black Americans has been commodified and enjoyed as ‘other’. When slavery still existed throughout the United States, enslaved people were often made to make music for enslavers and enslaved people that could play an instrument or sing would be ‘worth more’ at an auction. Even after the abolition of slavery, the music of black Americans continued to be seen as a product for the enjoyment of others.¹ A black musician could be talented and their music upheld as great, but their work would still be seen as ‘different’ or ‘weird’ as it was often called, and the performer themselves would still be treated poorly by the very folks who came to watch the performance.

For the purpose of this blog post, I decided to focus on an article from the Cleveland Gazette, published in January of 1910 entitled, “Will not Sing ‘Coon Songs’. This article is about students at the all-black college, Howard University, standing up to the president of the University, Dr. Thirkield, and refusing to sing what he called “old time plantation “coon songs” and religious rags”²
.

According to the journalist, the president justified his actions by saying “It was well for Negro students to keep alive the traditions of their ancestors and emulate the spirit of contentment and happiness expressed in the folklore and plaintation melodies of before the war”.²

There is a lot to unpack in this single quote. Besides the blatant racism, the president treats the antebellum period with nostalgia, disregarding intergenerational trauma. These students very well could have had enslaved relatives and even parents, given that slavery was only abolished between 23-30 years before they were born. To suggest that enslaved people were happy on the plantation and these students should look back on that period with fondness is insulting. Additionally, this comment furthers the romanticism of the antebellum period that still occurs today.

Later, we find out the President of the university wanted them to sing these songs to entertain important visitors.

“On the occasion of a vist recently by a government officer the president’s effort to start an old time “coon” song failed because nearly all the students would not sing”²

The students in this case refused to be a commodity or curiosity for visitors, much to the outrage of Thirkield. Thirkield, like people throughout America’s sordid past, wanted to present the perceived ‘otherness’ and trauma of his students as entertainment.

To conclude the article, the writer takes the side of the students and states “Howard’s students are right and should stand firm”.²

¹Southern, Eileen. “Entertainment for the Masters.” Essay. In The Music of Black Americans: A History. New York: Norton, 1997.

²“Will Not Sing ‘Coon’ Songs. Students of Howard University Very Properly Revolt Against the President’s.” Cleveland Gazette (Cleveland, Ohio), January 1, 1910: 1. Readex: African American Newspapers. https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc?p=EANAAA&docref=image/v2%3A12B716FE88B82998%40EANAAA-12BBBFA4AF54CA70%402418673-12BA05617A2901F0%400-12D76A0895013A50.

This week I found an 1874 article from the Weekly Louisianian, a black-owned newspaper that ran from 1837-1921. The article, titled “Our Country’s Shame,” condemned the United States for the prejudice with which they treated the touring musicians of color. The first musician they described was a virtuosic Mexican musician who was pronounced “a wonder as a violinist.” According to the article, the violinist was treated so badly in the United States that he went home early without even completing his tour. The article emphasized the violinist’s high class and noted that in Europe he was “respected by the nobility, from whom he received many admirable presents.”

The second musical group they discussed was the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a prestigious African-American choral group from Fisk University in Tennessee. The article laments how the choir will be treated once they return to the United States form their English Tour (“OUR COUNTRY’S SHAME”).

I was unfortunately not surprised by the level of racism that these musicians had received in the United States, but I was curious as to why it was so much better in Europe. In my search, I found an article by Allison Blakely titled “The Black Presence in Pre-20^th Century Europe: a History,” which explains that while racism in Europe existed, discrimination based on class was much more common, as a person’s class was more important than their race (Blakely).

In addition, a Charles Seeger article titled “Music and Class Structure in the United States” explained how 18^th century United States underwent a campaign to “make America musical.” In the 1800s, the upper class began to differentiate the religious and folk music enjoyed by the lower class from the concert music of the upper classes. This concert music often satirized and sentimentalized the lowest classes, especially African Americans. According to Seeger, this served as a way for whites to “think they were socially above [African Americans], even though both were poor, downtrodden, and unschooled. It offered ready compensation to the musical and cultural superiority-inferiority complexes of the cities” (Seeger) People of color to performing  in the prestige of the concert hall would challenge these superiority-inferiority complexes, threatening the white-supremacist attitudes of the 19^th-century United States.

Blakely, Allison. “THE BLACK PRESENCE IN PRE-20TH CENTURY EUROPE: A HIDDEN HISTORY.” BLACKPAST, 9 February 2008. Accessed 10 October 2021.

“OUR COUNTRY’S SHAME.” Weekly Louisianian, 30 May,1874, New Orleans. African American Newspapers.

Seeger, Charles. “Music and Class Structure in the United States.” American Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1957, The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans: A History, Third Edition, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1971, New York.

Scott Joplin, now considered the most premier composer of ragtime, led a complicated professional and personal life. He found extreme fame within his traditional ragtimes, including “The Maple Leaf Rag” and “The Entertainer,” however, was consistently on the poverty line, forced to sell his possessions and manuscripts. In examining newspaper articles, we can examine the public perception of Joplin and also review these writings with historical perspective. 

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Content Warning: Racist representation of Black Americans.

Our last few class sessions have asked us to consider how history presents Black music and culture and the ways that we can critically evaluate those presentations. Our syllabus assigned us a series of readings about Black music, which were all categorized under the subheading “The White Hypothesis.” The authors of these articles, Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923) and George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953), each highlight a relatively convoluted set of principles that they saw to be universal truths about the origins of Black music and spirituals. Though Krehbiel and Pullen Jackson’s arguments are different, and even contradict each other on many points, they’re both rooted in inaccurate assumptions about Black culture, identity, and music. 

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As I was browsing through the prints and photographs archives of the Library of Congress, I come across an interesting primary source– “The Negro Element in American Life”, a published oration by Abraham Lincoln DeMond (1867-1936).

Demond, a minister and advocate for African-American emancipation in the late 10th to early 20th century, published his speech at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church on January 1st, 1900 and published it as “The Negro Element in American Life”. In the oration, he eloquently points out and argues for the contributions and achievements of black folks to the United States since before the country was even formed. His speech pushes back against forces and trends that challenges the validity and worthiness of black Americans as “authentic” American, urging people of his time to see the contributions and achievements of black Americans towards the founding and prosperity of the country as well as being full embodiments of American values and aspirations.

In the past week on Henry Krehbiel and Pullen Jackson’s readings, our class explored some of the arguments for and against whether people should consider black spirituals, folk songs and plantation music as “original” and as “American”. Krehbiel believed and tried to prove that black music is spontaneous, native and original by both locality as well as musical characteristic, although Jackson pushes back on this idea by contributing most “origins” of black music and tunes towards European roots.

“If the songs which came from the plantations of the South are to conform to the scientific definitions of folksongs as I laid it down in the preceding chapter, they must be “born, not made”; they must be spontaneous utterances of the people who originally sang them; they must also be the fruit of the creative capacity of a whole and ingenuous people, not of individual artists, and give voice to the joys, sorrows and aspirations of that people”

Henry Krehbiel, Songs of the American Slaves (1914), P.22

These discussions around identity, race and nationalism are so intertwining that we simply cannot talk about one without the other. Complementary to Krehbiel’s arguments, DeMond calls for people to consider black folks in America as Americans who belong on this land and carry this “American” identity just like all their white European counterparts in the country both by locality and by merit.

However, the positionality of DeMond narrative as a white pastor inevitably whitewashed the experience, merits and achievements of the African Americans on this land which is the foundation of his arguments. For instance, he pictured black folks as the silent, obedient and hardworking contributors of the prosperity of the United States, and that the statue of liberty was the hard labour of black Americans doing the job for the wage that white American workers declined. By doing so, he presented an almost romanticized idea of African Americans on this land as what Jackson has briefly mentioned in his writing.

The privileged subjectivity from a white man’s perspective is both a path for change and call-for-actions as well as a subject to be criticized from romanticized notion of race and identity in the United States.

Citations

Demond, A. L, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Emancipation Proclamation Association, and Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection. The Negro element in American life. Montgomery, Ala.: Alabama Printing Company, 1900. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/91898121/.

Henry Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1962).

I know, I know, you’re disappointed this is not another installment of my world famous series Cohen Quest. Fear not, dear reader, for yet have an interesting history to uncover. After an obligatory “Cecil Cohen” and “Charles Cohen” search in the National Jukebox Collection, I found myself sorting the recordings by date; the first recording to pop up was that of a song called “Who dat say chicken in dis crowd?”, composed by a Mr. Will Marion Cook, and recorded by “Sousa’s Band”, conducted by Arthur Pryor.¹

At first I was more than a little disturbed by the use of dialect and automatically assumed this was a blackface minstrel song and prepared myself for the worst as I looked up the contributors. Hoo boy was I wrong!

Will Marion Cook (1869-1944) was a prolific and accomplished composer and conductor; he studied at Oberlin College, the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, and under Antonin Dvořák at the National Conservatory for Music, and because racism prevented him from having a career in classical music he switched to composer popular music and was extraordinarily successful. His musicals Clorindy (1898) and In Dahomey (1903), composed for the comedy duo Bert Williams and George Walker, were the first all-black composed, produced, and performed musicals on Broadway.²

The text of Clorindy, where “Who dat say chicken in dis crowd?” comes from, was written by the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The use of dialect, in this case, was not in mockery; at the time Clorindy was first performed, operetta and minstrelsy were all the rage. As it was one of the only ways black musicians could be successful, Cook and Dunbar wrote their musicals in the styles of minstrel shows to appeal to white audiences, and subsequently helped usher in a new era of musical theater.³ Listen to the tenor William Brown sing the original version of the song, and perhaps follow along with the lyrics:

There are a few things going on here: Cook and Dunbar were incredibly talented artists caught in a time in which, because of national trends and the distribution of money, they were forced to write in a style that was a bastardization and exploitation of their very recently enslaved ancestors. Perhaps this is one manifestation of DuBois’s “double-consciousness”: this second sight encourages black artists to incorporate the proclivities of white consumers to have a chance at success.⁵ We could easily track the long history of black artists capitulating to white sensitivities in order to survive, starting from enslaved instrumentalists performing at plantation balls as described by Eileen Southern. However, for the artists involved, this can also be a way to take back some power: their use of dialect and minstrelsy styles gave the production team a larger audience and greater notoriety in a time where all-black productions were rare.

1 Cook, Will Marion, Sousa’s Band, and Arthur Pryor. 1900. “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd?”. Library of Congress National Jukebox. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-1762/.

https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-134701/

Felix Arndt’s piece Desecration Rag: A Classic Nightmare, takes works by classical composers Chopin, Liszt, Dvorak, and Sinding and rearranges them in a rag style, which was a popular musical genre in the early 1900s. Rag or ragtime is a musical genre that originated from and was created in African American communities. Rag can be identified by its syncopated rhythms and “ragged beat”. Rag was a precursor to the “swing” jazz and Blues, both musical traditions deeply rooted in Black culture, that developed throughout the 1910s and later years of the 20th century.

Scott Joplin, one of the first well-known composers of ragtime music and known as “The King of Ragtime”, stated the following in an interview for the newspaper New York Age: “that there had been “ragtime” music in America ever since the Negro race has been here, but the white people took no notice of it until about twenty years ago[in the 1890s].’” 

Joplin was referring in part to the white composers and bands beginning to arrange their own ragtime music in the 1910s and 20s, and also to the rising popularity of ragtime being played in minstrel shows; “entertainment” in which actors or singers performed in blackface and utilized racist stereotypes in typically comedic skits at the expense of black people. 

The increase in popularity of African American musical genres was met with opposition by many upper and middle class white people. This was especially true in the classical music sphere. A strong indication of this cultural sentiment is the presence of a counter culture to resist it, however superficial and performative some aspects of the movement might be. 

Arndt was a white, middle class, classical pianist, and, even if he obviously has an appreciation for ragtime, it is evident he had no intention of furthering recognition and appreciation for black art-forms in the mainstream.

Desecration Rag, published in 1914, contained the subtle subtitle “Introducing ragtime perversions of “Humoresque (Dvorak)…””. The syncopated, ragtime beats Arndt included in his work were labelled a “perversion” of classical music, and thus, a “classical nightmare”, by no other than himself and his production team. Even in modern times, one could easily identify it as a shock-value publicity stunt. 

To provide ragtime the same respect classical is given in the “mainstream”, is a tangentially different objective from instigating fear of the desecration of classical music.

If an artist sought to celebrate dialects, they would not call them a “Desecration of  the English Language”, as that would elicit an immediate negative response, and attract “purists”. An artist would only do this to create controversy, an endeavor most lucrative in the artistic profession. 

What Arndt’s piece elicited was the expected reaction from both conservative and more liberal white audiences, a reaction that entirely relies on anti-blackness, elitism, and young artists rebelling against the status quo. Arndt was not publishing this record in recognition of the brilliance of ragtime, or to empower those who pioneered it; he was just taking advantage of white middle class fears to evoke an emotional response from an early 20th Century audience, which now paints a staggeringly clear picture of racism in America. 

Citations

Arndt, F. & Arndt, F. (1914) Desecration rag A classic nightmare. [Audio] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-134701/.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, September 24). Ragtime. Wikipedia. Retrieved October 1, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragtime.

[African American man giving piano lesson to young African American woman]

This image is part of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’s collection of almost 400  photographs called African American Photographs Assembled for the 1900 Paris Exposition. W.E.B. Du Bois was an African American writer with a passion for social justice. These pictures, in particular, depict African American life in the regional south and take a different approach to the racist ideology circling both academic and public thought among white people. At the time of this exhibition, the world had taken to portraying African Americans (or any person of color, for that matter) as a race lacking the means to “attai[n] great material and cultural achievements”. However, W.E.B. Du Bois’s collection of photographs, like the one above, portrayed African Americans as “a proud people, dressed in splendor, as accomplished scholars and intellectuals studying the world with as much competence” as any student of the classics. Simply, Du Bois debunks many racist assumptions of African American citizens by photographing many men and women who work and live in affluent positions.

I think this photo of an African American man giving piano lessons serves as a wonderful example of Du Bois’s goal with the collection. To this day, playing the piano maintains a certain level of social sophistication– a skill that could be a party trick, the main entertainment, or a sign of affluence in one’s community (pianos are #expensive). Playing the instrument well requires diligent practice and lots of hours dedicated to improvement. Furthermore, African American pianists are not restricted to music that originates from their experience (i.e. spirituals, folk songs, psalmody…). Learning any instrument provides exposure to composers that wrote music particularly for that music-making machine. Even though it is difficult to see in this image, these African American pianists could be playing the same music as white pianists. 

At this moment, I recall our Eileen Southern reading: The Music of Black Americans. Southern  includes African Americans in the same musical and social practices as early white colonists, something scholarship was lacking  prior to her work. She uses language like the following phrases throughout these initial pages : “a variety of informal social activities were available to colonial villagers, participated in by white and black alike…” and “white or black, servant or master, religious instruction was not only an essential prerequisite for membership in the church, but was also a basic part of daily life.” Similar to how Southern takes back the narrative of African American life in the early settlements of America, Du Bois’s collection reclaims that African Americans are not only capable of producing intelligent cultural products, but also have always succeeded in doing so. 

References:

Du Bois, W.E.B (William Edward Burghardt),  collector. [African American man giving piano lesson to young African American woman]. Published 1899 or 1900, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs, African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition. Photograph. Accessed on 1 October 2021. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/99472455/ 

Du Bois, W. E. B., and Provenzo, Eugene F.. Illustrated Souls of Black Folk. London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2004. Accessed October 5, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.

The W.E.B Du Bois Center. W. E. B. du Bois’s Data Portraits : Visualizing Black America. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018. Accessed October 5, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans : a History. [1st edition]. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

It is so interesting (and frankly funny) to look back at history and see what embarrassing things people have said and done, it’s like that feeling when you log onto your old social media account and see that cringey selfie with the horrible fashion choice. Thankfully, even though we did not live to see the past, we have databases to help us dig up some dirt on those arrogant scholars. What I want to highlight is the hypocrisy when it comes to the origins of certain music and how the mainstream (which is the white community at the time) perceived them completely differently.

In this week’s reading and discussion, we focused on some articles that had a lot of racist opinions and language. In his book , Jackson cited some different views on the origin of African American spiritual singing. Wallaschek argued in his Primitive Music (yikes) that the black community simply imitated white music, which is similar to what Jackson ends up arguing. In White and Negro Spirituals, Jackson pulled up a map and a statistic table in and tried to prove a point that the white hymnals is the direct causation of black spirituals’ existence.

For this blog, I searched up some open ended keywords, and in my research I found out something interesting.

This is a collection of notated music for banjo. It was published in Philadelphia in 1885 by S. S. Steward(/t), and the file is titled “Plantation Jig.” This source is quite trustworthy because S. S. Steward is a big name in the banjo world, and is often being brought up when talking about banjos and their history. This collection is quite similar to what a modern music book looks like, it has some music scores and the first four pages consist of information about what to look out for when purchasing an instrument, prices of sheet music and performance notices. It even has advertisements. This collection is clearly marketed towards those who want to know more about the banjo. It is interesting that on page 5, the drawing of a white man shows up. His name was J. E. Henning, and he was a banjo teacher. I did a tiny deep dive on him, and it turns out that he is still a name that pops up in the banjo making industry.

The actual musical content is also very interesting and… eurocentric. It is written similarly to an instrumental method book, with explanations of how to do certain things on the instrument as well as basic technique training. What stood out to me is that the music selected in this collection are all very European. On page 9 of the digitized file, the two titles are Waltz and Schottische, which is a slow polka dance of European roots. Basically, in this book, Steward planted the European music traditions onto a non-European instrument. It is nuts to me that the banjo, an instrument that is 100% African in its DNA, was whitewashed since 1830 and still is being whitewashed (Winans, 174). 

Both the spirituals and the banjo are parts of American music history that involve African American and the white Americans. However, the way the white scholars/musicians went about this is very problematic and telling of societal issues. When there’s similarities in white and black practices, the white scholars are quick to claim that the black community assimilated the white practices; but when the white community picked up on banjo, they did not credit the black community, but instead whitewashed the instrument and the repertoire.

Works Cited

Holmes, Michael I. “Identifying S. S. Stewart Banjos.” Identifying SS Stewart Banjos, 1997, http://www.mugwumps.com/sss_date.html.

Jackson, George P. White and Negro Spirituals: Their Life Span and Kinship. New York, J. J. Augustin Publisher, 1943. 

Jackson, George P. White Spirituals in the Southern Uplands. New York, Dover Publications, 1932.

“John E. Henning.” Henning # – Vintage Banjo Makers, http://www.vintagebanjomaker.com/henning/4594323455. 

Stewart, S. S. Plantation Jig. Steward, S. S., Philadelphia, monographic, 1885. Notated Music. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/sm1885.06817/>.

Winans, Robert B., and Charles Reagan Wilson. “Banjo.” The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 12: Music, edited by BILL C. MALONE, University of North Carolina Press, 2008, pp. 174–75, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469616667_malone.49.

I’m sure many of us associate the blues with the early 20th-century; the 19-teens being the “Blues Era” in American society, but what if I told you the blues was at least 45 years old at that point? The blues is a great deal older than what tends to be portrayed in music circles and wider society; the practice actually goes all the way back to Emancipation, if not further.

https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-11226/ (“Memphis Blues” recorded in 1914, considered one of the marquis blues songs of the 19-teens.)

The blues emerged around the time of Emancipation, coming from the traditions of the shout and the spiritual. It was an expression of the newly available social and cultural structures that were previously unavailable, but it was also an expression of the new experiences regarding self-reliance and freedom. The way the blues evolved into a more standardized practice was through the migratory patterns of formerly enslaved people; whether that was from having to work as migrant farmers or moving to new areas due to the formerly unavailable ability to migrate as they pleased. Different regional forms of the blues would be exchanged as people moved around the South and later also moved to the North during the Great Migration. Regardless of the standardization, the blues began as a deeply personal form of expression and remained a personal form of expression for many Black artists. It was a way to express their reactions to their new found freedom, but it was another form of oral history and storytelling. Early blues songs were used to tell the stories of great Black heroes and what they accomplished, in spite of everything American society told them they weren’t.

https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-3235/?&embed=resources (“Ain’t That a Shame” the oldest blues recording I could find in the National Jukebox archives, recorded in 1901.)

 The early form of the blues does not take the form we would anticipate it to take. The blues is associated with a 12-bar, 3 line, AAB structure, but the most that could be found to be similar with the blues just after Emancipation would be the 3 line structure that came from the shout. One of the ways the early blues were able to be separated from spirituals and shouts is the usage of instruments within the music. Spirituals and shouts were primarily a capella due to restricted access to many instruments on plantations, but after Emancipation a wide variety of instruments were now available be used within their musical traditions. The guitar was an instrument that became quite popular among blues players for 2 main reasons: it was similar to the banjo(which many formerly enslaved people were familiar with) and it was an instrument that could be played and still retain the ability to sing. This usage of guitars(and other instruments) resulted in a further standardization of the blues because now vocalist had to be cognizant of the tonality of the instruments they were singing with.

https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-17557/? (“Homesickness Blues” recorded in 1916, as the genre was beginning to take off within wider society.)

The reason we are mistaken as to the general era of the blues is because the genre didn’t become popular with white audiences until the 20th-century. The reason recognition was even taking place was because the blues lyrics were shifting from AAVE(African-American Vernacular English) to the typical American English standard. It was at that point white record labels began to seek out blues musicians to potentially teach their white performers, but seeing an opportunity, many blues composers began to seek out white performers in order to further spread their music. This is when the blues was brought into the mainstream music scene of early 20th-century America. The blues is a musical tradition far older than we(as a broader society) give it credit for, and it greatly helped to develop the popular music styles of the 20th-century. The blues could exist without jazz, but jazz could not exist without the blues.

Bibliography:

Audio:

Handy, W. C, Morton Harvey, and W. C Handy. The Memphis blues. 1914. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-11226/.

Hess, Cliff, Nora Bayes, Cliff Hess, and Walter B Rogers. Homesickness Blues. 1916. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-17557/.

Queen, John, Silas F Leachman, and Walter Wilson. Ain’t That a Shame. 1901. Audio. https://www.loc.gov/item/jukebox-3235/.

Images:

Encyclopedia Britannica, 2021. W. C. Handy. [image] Available at: <https://www.britannica.com/biography/W-C-Handy> [Accessed 4 October 2021]. Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Nora Bayes.” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 15, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nora-Bayes.

Text:

Baraka, Amiri. “Primitive Blues and Primitive Jazz.” In Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed from It., 72-92. New York, NY: William Morrow and Company, 1963. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cdocument%7C452382Hall, Stephanie. The Painful Birth of Blues and Jazz. Library of Congress, February 24, 2017. https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/02/birth-of-blues-and-jazz/.

Louis Armstrong is perhaps one of the most well known and respected jazz musicians of all time. As a trumpet player and vocalist, he played a large role in the development of jazz, and his music had a lasting impact on the genre. He used his trumpet as an extension of his voice, popularized scatting after forgetting the words to “Heebie Jeebies” in 1926, and developed the individual solo aspect of jazz playing.1 With his soulful playing and cheerful stage presence, he captivated audiences around the globe.His contemporaries looked up to him for his artistry, although his music-making did not go without criticism from others. Known for his wide grin and cheerful, silly stage persona, as can be seen in this caricature drawn by Makoto Wada3, this aspect of Armstrong’s playing was controversial because it evoked traces of minstrelsy in his performance.

The 1932 short film, Rhapsody in Black and Blue, displays these traces well. Armstrong plays jazz in a dreamland called “jazz mania” while depicting African Americans as “savage” along with other stereotypes. As a response to Armstrong’s stage presence, Miles Davis said of him, “I loved Satchmo, but I couldn’t stand all that grinning he did.”, while others accused him of being an “Uncle Tom”.2

Although Armstrong may have depicted stereotypes while catering to a white audience, through his music, he was able to celebrate his black individuality. He used the roles as opportunities to advance his career, and as he gained popularity, he used his music as a form of protest. In 1931 after being arrested, put in jail, and then bailed out so he could perform, Armstrong dedicated the song “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal, You” to the Memphis Police Force.2 He later spoke out against segregation in the audience, losing many of the audience members who came to see him.2 Although Armstrong sought to entertain, above all he was proud of his heritage, outspoken in his individuality, and paved way for many other African Americans.

https://www.loc.gov/item/98502680/.

I knew Mexico was home to classical composers and had its own history in classical music, however, I am ashamed to admit I had no idea about the extent of its history. Mexico was creating music in the classical style at least as early as the seventeenth century during the baroque period. Unfortunately, many of these great composers have been forgotten or been written about so little. For that reason, this week I would like to discuss Higinio Ruvalcaba, a Mexican composer, and violinist who lived from 1905 to 1976.

Doing research on Ruvalcaba has certainly been very challenging. There are very few resources and documents about him in Spanish and even fewer in English. His son Euginio Ruvalcaba did publish a book on him in 2003, but I unfortunately did ot have access to it. For the purposes of this blog post, I will summarize the sources I could find and link the texts in the footnotes.

I could write an entire paper on his life, but I think his daughter Marcela Ruvalcaba does an excellent job of summarizing it in her article “In Memory of the Virtuoso Violinist Higinio Ruvalcaba”. I would highly reccomend checking it out. It is in Spanish and for the purposes of this post I read it in spanish, however you can hit the translate button and get the genral idea of the article. According to his daughter, Ruvalcaba was born in Jalisco, Mexico in 1905 and was a child prodigy on the violin and with composition. he began composing for strings at a young age. He learned the violin at four years old by listening to a mariachi player and imitating the sounds coming from his violin on his own instrument. Throughout his life, Ruvalcaba played in many orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra and the Mexico city Philharmonic. He also conducted and composed many works¹
. 

The first piece of of Ruvalcaba’s work I came across was his piece “Chapultepec” (listen here) in the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox archive. This particular recording was performed in 1923 in New York, New York by the International Novelty Orchestra. The piece is labeled a foxtrot. A foxtrot was popular during the 1920s and is in 4/4 time with a lilting beat²
.Ruvalcaba’s foxtrot “Chapultec” has the style of a foxtrot with some added instrumentation and musical ideas that bring in Spanish culture. One example of this cultural blending is the utilization of castanets in the recording. Castanets are an instrument popularized by flamenco music and dance and they are made of wood and make a unique wooden clicking sound.

Another interesting fact about this piece is that every recording I found utilizes different instrumentation and stylistic add ons such as the addition mordents, the melody being played by a salterio instead of a wind instrument (I struggled with identifying the instrument used in the 1920’s recording). A salterio is a traditional instrument used in Spanish music dating back centuries³.

In some ways, the recorded version of the piece performed in America is definitely more Europeanized, but since I could find little evidence or notation of Ruvalcaba’s piece I am unsure as to which recordings are more true to his intentions. Given that he was classically trained in what was accepted as the western canon, but also raised around and inspired by Mariachi I could see his vision going either way. I attached some other recordings below so you may compare them yourself.

The first is at this link!

Overall, I wish I had more answers About Higinio Rulvacaba and his life, but I was and still am excited by what I did find.

¹Ruvalcaba, PorMarcela Flores, Marcela Flores RuvalcabaBailarina, Bailarina, See author’s posts, and Nombre *. “A La Memoria Del Virtuoso Violinista Higinio Ruvalcaba.” Periodismo del sector cultural al estilo GRECU, April 20, 2020. https://pasolibre.grecu.mx/a-la-memoria-del-virtuoso-violinista-higinio-ruvalcaba/.

²Norton, Pauline. “Foxtrot.” Grove Music Online, January 20, 2001. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000010075.

³James W. McKinnon, Nelly van Ree Bernard, Mary Remnant and Beryl Kenyon de Pascual. “Psaltery.” Grove Music Online, July 30, 2020. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000022494?rskey=GJo2oe&result=3.

George Pullen Jackson

In the debate over the origins of Black spirituals in the southern United States, George Pullen Jackson, makes many problematic and strong claims. A notable musicologist specializing in southern hymnody, Pullen’s tone and voice in communicating his “true” origins of Black spirituals is heard loud and clear. 

In the telling of all history, however, it is commonly acknowledged that it is told from the perspective of the “winner”. Thus in good practice, it is important to search for and listen to the perspectives of other stakeholders in said history, who may tell a very different history.

As Black southerners were Christianized in the mid-1700s, four out of five Black church members eventually flocked to Baptist churches (Jackson, 286). This proportion is astounding, and impossible to not feel the need to inquire more about. This of course led me to wanting to know more about the first and oldest Black Baptist church. Continue reading →

TW: Extensive use of slurs in both lyrics and titles of songs.

The last paragraph on the National Jukebox’s About This Collection reads as follows: 

These selections are presented as part of the record of the past. They are historical documents which reflect the language, attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in these recordings, which may contain content offensive to users.

In early stages of research, I hoped to link musical traditions in modern musical theater to some of the early recordings within the “Humorous Songs” tag. However, as I scrolled, I began to notice how many of these songs were also tagged “Ethnic Characterizations.” We’ve begun to explore research and presentation of complicated data and information within this class, and I wondered how a database run by the Library of Congress would present difficult topics. I selected two songs tagged as “Ethnic Characterizations,” and examined what is missing and necessary for productive conversation.  Continue reading →

In class we have been studying how missionaries and colonizers brought English music, specifically sacred music, to the “New World”. The colonizers installed missionary schools to teach Native Americans how to sing hymns and psalmody. Christian music was also taught to African slaves.

These topics and histories led me to question the role music played in colonization and slavery. What was the purpose of teaching Christian music to non-Christians? 

The Gregorian Chant- Their Introduction Among the Negroes has helped me investigate this question and opened a door to a wealth of sources that depict the various ways Christian music has been weaponized as a tool of indoctrination.  

Published in the Charleston Gospel Messenger and Protestant Episcopal Register on the 20th of May, 1844, The Gregorian Chant- Their Introduction Among the Negroes gives modern scholars an insight into the purpose behind this practice, and the reason why a magazine article would deem this article relevant to its readers.  

This literature also stands as testament to the historical trend of American Christians weaponizing religious music to dominate, disenfranchise, and uproot the cultures of non-Christians of color. 

The correspondence was written by a church musician who taught African slaves Gregorian chant on a plantation in the South, claiming that learning this music will be to their benefit.

“The benefits of all this to the negroes you will appreciate without my pointing them out. To learn so much, at once of Scripture and of the Church service; to learn it in a way to imprint it indelibly on their memories, and to have it ever at hand for their instruction, warning, comfort, and devotional use…”.

Gregorian Chant, which is taught orally and sung in unison,  is said to give comfort and purpose to those who learn it, according to the people who were deeply involved in the business of slavery and proselytization. 

There is very little literature confirming this that was not written for and by slavers and clergymen at the time; and it is likely that these ‘benefits’ were greatly exaggerated, as Gregorian chant also served to familiarize “new Christians” with scripture, which they learned and potentially memorized through active participation in worship service in the form of collective singing.  What the article provides is, in fact, a ‘helpful guide’ to the Gregorian chant as a reliable method of forced assimilation: most writings about the subject focus on the practicality of teaching Gregorian chant to slaves as a gateway into re-culturing those who they deemed uncultured. 

The author cites its singular ability to be taught to those who are “unacquainted with music”, blatantly contradicting his own assessment that “the religious songs which they [enslaved Africans] are now accustomed to” were, in fact, music.

In an eerily similar fashion to the missionary schools put in place to erase Native Americans through cultural as well as ethnic cleansing; the magazine writers seem more invested in diminishing these individuals’ cultural identities, as an entire new mechanism of exerting control, than in ‘gifting them salvation’.

Citations

THE GREGORIAN CHANTS–THEIR INTRODUCTION AMONG THE NEGROES. (1844, 05). Charleston Gospel Messenger and Protestant Episcopal Register (1842-1853), 21, 45. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/magazines/gregorian-chants-their-introduction-among-negroes/docview/125266391/se-2?accountid=351

In the grand search of defining the term “American Music”, the deeper you dig, the more muddy and complicated it gets. It is seen even in this simple sheet music cover published in 1898 that the so-called “Yankee message” was something that was emphasized at one point or another, having an impact on what they coined as “patriotic music” (“Patriotic American Sheet Music.”)

The phrase “The Yankee Message” caught my eye and caused me to want to research the context and intention of this particular music. This piece of music was published and written in the midst of the Spanish-American War. According to an article from the American Mosaic talking about the Spanish-American War, for the United States, much of this war was ignited by the desire and push for American Expansionism (“Spanish-American War.”). Most Americans saw the conflict between Cuba and its colonial combatant Spain as an “in” for greater expansion and influence:

“Some were attracted by the idea of new financial markets; others were inspired by the notions of spreading the twin ideals of Christianity and American conceptions of liberty and equality to other peoples.”

This raised the question for me: “How can we look at music from this time period without the harsh influence of the American urge to be a world power?” The concept of “spreading the twin ideals of Christianity and American conceptions” made me think of the article we read by Richard Crawford pertaining to the Early Christian Music-Making that took place in colonial America where much European influence took place in the beginning formations of music in general of America when it came to sacred music-making and how colonization had a huge part in this movement of music at the time. This can point to the fact that this piece of music pointed to a sort of “patriotism”, even though much of the surrounding context revolved around wanting to gain total power and influence. It also made me think of the article we read by Drew Edward Davies discussing the topics revolving around “local music” and the music of “New Spain.” Reading about the influence that Spain had on the Latin music that has survived up until the present day (“villancico” and the Latin-Baroque style) compliments the backdrop and context of this sheet music cover from the Spanish-American war. The ideas that Davies raised at the end of their article pertaining to challenging the assumptions of particular genres of music involving various cultures that Spain (and eventually America) dominated and dialoguing about the “repertoire’s problematic issues” are ones that should be taken in consideration about these types of pieces as well.

Looking into the greater context of this piece of sheet music greatly coincided with the topics discussed around the locality and dominant influences of Europe when it comes to music produced and composed in times like the Spanish-American war and beyond. Terms like “The Yankee Message” can go beyond a simple phrase and raise questions around the context of various music composed and what directly and indirectly influenced the music of that time.

Davies, Drew Edward. “Finding ‘Local Content’ in the Music of New Spain.” Early Music America 19, no. 2 (2013): 64–62.

“Patriotic American Sheet Music.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021, latinoamerican2-abc-clio-com.ezproxy.stolaf.edu/Search/Display/1470303. Accessed 28 Sept. 2021.

“Spanish-American War.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021, latinoamerican2-abc-clio-com.ezproxy.stolaf.edu/Search/Display/1671743. Accessed 28 Sept. 2021.

In Eileen Southern’s writing, there were a lot of passages where she talked about hymnals and prayer music. She also introduced us to different practices, traditions and schools of psalmody singing, which all work with each other in the dome of music sung and played by the enslaved. While in class and doing readings, I have been thinking about what the music actually sounds like when they were sung by the enslaved African Americans: will they add their own harmonies? Any changes to the melodies? I found a source that also aimed to look into that.

https://www.proquest.com/americanperiodicals/docview/136697087/63A6277D9EA4D3APQ/3?accountid=351

This is an article that is, in my opinion,  “woke” for the time. The point of view of this article is neutral and unarrogant (unlike a lot of writings from that time), respectful of the culture, and the author acknowledges that more research needs to be done. The title of this article is Music: The Slave as a Revitalist. It was written by Horatio C. King, and was published in the Christian Union periodical on January 26, 1876. This article analyzed the music of African American religious gatherings (that are referred to in text as “sperichuals”… so is it spirituals?), and King provided information on what that is like, “To a stranger the peculiarity most striking is the intense emotion which pervades their singing and prayers as well as their preaching (pp. 78).” The outpour of emotions is not the only thing that stood out to him; he highlighted the importance of singing by stating that a meeting without singing will not accomplish much, and will also not uplift and enlighten people (pp. 78). 

King also pointed out some of the problems he encountered in his research. He stated that the harmonized melodies in the articles “must not be inferred that the ex-slaves sing thus strictly; nor on the other hand that they sing only in unison (pp. 78).” This is a slippery slope when it comes to musicological research because when music from a non-European tradition is transcribed into staff notes… you might lose some of that spice. King used the word “weird” when describing the tones of the music, and he is not the only one: in another periodical article, Penick, someone who is not a musician, said, “I am not able to analyze the weird melodies of the negroes.” (pp. 33) I bet some of that “weirdness” is lost in translation. 

I felt a bit lost with the property of this source, because it occurred to me that it is a combination of primary and secondary sources. It was written back in the days, and it has music scores from that time. However, it clearly states that some of the sources King cited were melodies heard from other people, and he understood that the melodies can’t be fully dictated, thus making it less authentic… Maybe this is the curse of doing research! 🙂 I think this topic is very interesting because you can’t avoid the discussion around authenticity, and the author approached the topic in an interesting way by combining African Americans’ religious life with their musical practices, and I find that quite interesting.

Works Cited

King, Horatio C. “Music.: THE SLAVE AS A REVIVALIST. THE OLD ARK’S MOVING. MY LORD, WHAT A MORNING. RISE AND SHINE.” Christian Union (1870-1893), vol. 13, no. 4, Jan 26, 1876, pp. 78. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/music/docview/136697087/se-2?accountid=351.

Penick, C. C. “NEGRO MUSIC AND FOLK LORE.” The Musical Visitor, a Magazine of Musical Literature and Music (1883-1897), vol. 24, no. 2, 02, 1895, pp. 33. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/negro-music-folk-lore/docview/137503923/se-2?accountid=351.

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans, 3rd Edition. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

While reading Eileen Southen’s passage about psalmody and hymnody practices in New England meetinghouses in the 1600s, I was interested to learn more about the separated and unseparated musical practices in the church based on skin color. Specifically, I was interested to learn more about when the separation of parish choir members shifted to include members of the black community — and why.

This curiosity led me to learn about H.T. Burleigh, dubbed “The First of His Race to Sing Among Vested Vocalists in a White Parish” by the New York Herald in 1894. The article highlights Burleighs trailblazing position as baritone soloist at St. George’s Church in New York City. The author, though unnamed, outlines Burleigh’s musical achievements, and throughout the article, praises all of the people that helped him along the way — people who are most likely white. 

While I’m sure it is true that Burleigh received much help along the way, this help is what the article focuses on. In doing so, the author seemingly takes much of the focus away from Burleigh and instead focuses on the people who made his success possible for him. With the likelihood that the author of this article is also white, it is impossible to ignore how their own musical experiences and perspective influence the means in which Burleigh’s story is presented.

This writing and tone of this article is therefore like many others of its time when the subject is the accomplishments of African Americans and Black people in the United States in that it either highlights or focuses on the role that white people played in such accomplishments. The tone of these writings intend to take some or all of the credit for the success of Black people in America and instead contribute it to the resources and doings of white Americans. 

A common theme in African-American and Black music-making, this portrayal of Burleigh’s success points to the overwhelming role that oppression played and has continued to play in American history. With this in mind, it is important to compare and contrast this primary source with other written histories in order to find the “truth”.

One way to do this is to read and learn about these histories in sources written by people with differing musical experiences, similarly to how we learned contrasting histories surrounding the origins and highlights of American bluegrass music. Though it is not a primary source, G. Yvonne Kendall’s recount of Burleigh’s career successes and highlights in The American Mosaic: The African American Experience paints a very different picture as to how Burleigh came to be the first Black chorister in a white parish, attributing it to his success at the Chicago World’s Fair.

This history considered, it is also hard for me to ignore the very title of this article, “No Color Line in this Choir”. The title attempts to diminish and ignore the role that race and ethnicity play in the lives and successes of African Americans and Black people. This title is nearly equivalent to the phrase “I don’t see color” and ignores the history and sacrifices that needed to be made in favor of continuing the oppression of African American and Black success.]

SOURCES:

Kendall, G. Yvonne. “Concert Music: 1861-1919.” The American Mosaic: The African 

American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021, 

africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1591461. Accessed 28 Sept. 2021.

https://africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1591461?terms=Burleigh&sTypeId=2

“No Color Line in This Choir.” New York Herald, 1894. 

https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/readex/doc

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans : a History 2nd edition. New York: Norton, 1983.

During a recent picnic social with our ELCA church congregation in Lonsdale, I get acquainted with a retired pastor who so happened to be talking about the brief founding histories of early colonizers in Minnesota from different parts of Europe who used church, religion and congregation as a way of reinforcing identity which inevitably set rules and definitions to exclude “others”. This led me to reflect on the purpose of music and musical practice in religious settings which I’ve been learning and putting much thought into for a musicology class about Race, Identity and Representation in American Music at college.

In Eileen Southern’s book, Music of Black Americans that we are currently studying, she pointed out that commercial and religious outreach formed the basis for Europe’s settlement of North America which confirms what the retired pastor was sharing with us during the picnic. Considering the first book published in the United States (the colonial America) was the “Bay Psalm Book”, printed by Stephen Daye in 1640 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is not hard perceiving truly how significant a role Christian faith played in people’s identity formation as well as the development of music in the colonial America.

“Bay Psalm Book”, the first printed book in colonial America.

By searching through the American Periodicals Series Online 1740-1900, I came across a primary source publication, Western Recorder (1824-1833) volume 2, by American Periodicals Series II in Apr 26, 1825. In the column “Poetry and Music”, they first presented a translation of an ancient Spanish Poem, then followed by a reflection of the purpose and performance practice of music in religious congregational settings during services.

“The following is a translation from an ancient spanish poem, which, says the Edinburgh Review, is surpassed by nothing which we are acquainted with, in the Spanish language, except the ode of Luis de Lean.”

Extremely few background or ethnographic information was provided except describing the piece as an “ancient Spanish poem” and it is interesting that no effort was made to at least include the original Spanish title of the poem. Instead, only “Kindled only at the skies.” This stands out to me as a form of using language (English) as a way of creating a new collective identity. Given that the language, the shape and sound of it plays a significant role in poetry, I’m surprised that zero efforts were made to include original texts in this column. I’ve tried briefly searching for the original texts with the English translation with no success.


In the section that follows, the writer discusses the fine line of the use of music during worship, that is to invoke a state of deep contemplation on the end of the worshipper without making the music too much of a distraction. The writer argues that in achieving such an ideal state of worship, the repertoire must be drawn from familiar tunes, with minimal use of dissonance or technical brilliancy or skills displayed by the musicians. While using familiar psalms and tunes provides security being within the comfort zone for the congregation to engage in contemplations and worship, it raises the question of how far the church and its congregations is willing to engage in truthful yet difficult topics that reflects Christian values and how progressive the church congregation is.

The religious movement, “Great Awakening”, during the 1730s has greatly shifted the music scene at congregations throughout colonial America. Slow, dragging and sometimes monophonic psalms are gradually getting out of favour while the more lively and vibrant hymns take over in many congregations. While this Western Recorder article was published in the early 19th century, it somewhat reflects a conservative drawback on the congregation and Church leadership.

Sources

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans : a History 2nd edition. New York: Norton, 1983.

POETRY & MUSIC. (1825, Apr 26). Western Recorder (1824-1833) Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/poetry-music/docview/126873323/se-2?accountid=351

When approaching a musical tradition that I find unfamiliar, I hope to analyze that particular tradition with the reverence it deserves. Additionally,  I aim to avoid making sweeping statements that describe this music in terms that fit only my personal musical experience. 

In today’s entry, I will examine some of the dangers of failing to do these actions within research through Reverend George H. Griffin’s article “The Slave Music of the South,” published in The Musical Visitor, a Magazine of Musical Literature and Music in February of 1885. It is important to note that even though this article is published years after slavery became illegal, the scars of its horrors were still fresh and did not dissipate immediately (if at all). 

“The Slave Music of the South”

At first, when I stumbled onto this article, I was taken aback by the glowing praise of slave songs packed into such a short blurb. This author not only labels African American songs as exhibiting the “real genius of music,” but also describes their emotional power on all who experience it. However, after further contemplation, I find his language ultimately misleading and maybe even dangerous.

In this article, Griffin begins with an examination of how the music of enslaved people feels to “outside” listeners. He introduces the concept of the “soul of music” and how this music provokes a “responsive thrill in every human breast.” I find that  beginning an article in this manner is interesting. In a lot of musical discourse, authors seem to dive into the sonic descriptions of the music they study before tackling the emotions that these sounds promote. For example,  Griffin points to the hauntingly pure melody of “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.”  Ultimately, I think genius for Griffin seems to be primarily how the music makes him feel, not the way it sounds. 

The sound of a slave song, however, does contribute to Griffin’s categorization of a “genius” piece of music. Upon his listening, this author points to different aspects of African American song that co-exist with Western Classical ideals. These songs contain balanced and rich harmonies, interesting melodies, abrupt “resolutions,” expressive bass line, common tempo, and “strange points of emphasis put upon syllables and unexpected cadences in rhythm, which are well nigh unreducible to musical notation.” Even though “[n]o exhaustive analysis of slave music is here attempted,” Griffin manages to describe this music in purely western musical terminology (e.g. “harmony,” “resolution,” ad libitum) . The crux of his description is how all “the children of bondage knew nothing of the methods of the school”  This music sounds  like “genius” to Griffin because these European-esque characteristics appear in enslaved people’s music without a “proper” musical education.

Despite both of these problematic ideas, I found that Griffin’s ending line made my stomach churn the most:

“The sweetest utterance of the sacred poets of all the centuries have been those ‘song in the night’ that came forth from the bitterest experiences of human woe.”

This line may seem bittersweet, because it sounds as though all beautiful creations come from absolute despair — then, “real genius” will manifest. I am somewhat surprised Griffen did not make a reference to ye olde Ludwig Van Beethoven at this moment. Anyway, what I find most troubling about this line is what is the audience supposed to do with this assertion. It seemingly justifies the horrors of slavery with reference to the beautiful music that resulted from the suffering of the enslaved. What are we supposed to do with this conclusion? These questions remind me of Mark Monmonier’s article regarding the way scholarship (in this case, maps) can deceive and justify the unimaginable. Here, Monmonier references the way “Nazi propagandists also used facsimile maps to prove their opponents’ treachery and justify Germany’s advancing western front” (Monmonier 104). I wonder if Griffin is subtly engaging in something similar–with intent, I am not sure. 

After sifting through this primary source, I include some questions that came up while writing this post:

1. Could an article praising the beauty, emotional power, and “naturally” Western-ness  of  slave songs justify the actions of those participating in the horrid institution? 
2. Is this an article to alleviate white guilt? 
3. Or was the purpose to canonize slave songs within Western Classical Music by pointing out the sonic similarities?

Leave a comment if you have some thoughts!

Footnotes:

Griffin, George H. “THE SLAVE MUSIC OF THE SOUTH.” The Musical Visitor, a Magazine of Musical Literature and Music (1883-1897), 02, 1885. 35, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/slave-music-south/docview/137490866/se-2?accountid=351.

Monmonier, Mark S. How to Lie with Maps  Third edition. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxQzWOgr8AurY1lieTR4OUkyRWhvVVpoZDVsTDAwY3JuNlRF/view?resourcekey=0-P–ubpi6ivwKxafR71b9xA 

“Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Streaming Audio. Recorded by Water Garrick. U.S.A. South Negro Folklore Collection. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Crecorded_cd%7C3561996.

I have always found that one of the most powerful aspects of music is its ability to tell a story, whether that story is triumphant, despondent, funny, or meant to act as a soothing balm to the soul. There is a folk genre among the Mexican community that encompasses all of the previously mentioned stories and more; it’s called Corrido.

Corridos have a documented history to pre-colonial Spain during the medieval era, but they were called “romances” instead of corridos. They were epic tales and lyrical poetry composed to entertain the people of Spain, from the poorest laborers and servants to the courts of nobility. Romances were tailored to their audience, exemplified by shorter pieces and the addition of refrains due to public demand for favored passages to be repeated, but missionaries found they could also be tailored to emulate the epic tales of the Indigenous people they resolved themselves to convert.

Corridos didn’t truly take hold in Mexican culture until around the time of the Mexican Revolution, but that isn’t to say that it was an immediate transition from religious propaganda romances to corridos. Nothing exists in a vacuum, and to that point, once the romances arrived in the colonies(especially the northern colonies) there began to be a shift in the format and topic of the epics. Instead of serenading audiences with religious stories and tales of love, the subjects changed to infidelity, incest, the majesty of the landscape, and other more novel topics. Examples of the shift from romance to corrido date back to 1808 in New Mexico and 1824 in Santa Barbara, California.

It was with the Mexican Revolution, beginning in 1910, that corridos really became a part of Mexican culture. They were used for communication between various regions and towns, to relay information during battle, and as a way to proliferate propaganda across the country. It was these very practices that led to the corrido form used today; it’s known to have a three-part structure(introduction, events, and farewell) to chronicle the great deeds of those that came before us.

There are also subgenres within corrido: border ballads are one of them. The border ballads were a social unionizer of sorts; they told stories of resistance against the ruling class and an oppressive society, and it helped to create a national identity due to many Mexican citizens being able to empathize with the heroes of the story and their desire to be free from societal oppression. These ballads wove tales of exploits and daring escapes, but they had various endings too. Some were triumphant with the escape of the bandit and others showed the bandit’s defeat, at times from double-crossing confidants or the bandit’s surrender. An example of this is the corrido of Aurelio Pompa who killed a man in self-defense, was convicted by an all-white jury, and killed.

The link below will take you to the transcript:

https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1449370?terms=corrido&webSiteCode=SLN_LAE_AC&sTypeId=2&token=F8C4D09EB273D0F4FF18407866C01C1C&casError=False

Through learning more about corridos, I have come to understand how much information and how many stories can be told through music. I also have greater respect for everything Mexican citizens and immigrants have gone through to be able to share corridos with their communities. We have a chance to learn from these corridos, to understand the issues facing Mexican communities today, but that also means we are given the chance to try and help fix these issues. Stories are told so that younger generations may learn from previous mistakes, so let us listen and learn to ensure that the subsequent generations have just a little less to fix when it is their turn.

Bibliography:

“‘Life, Trial, and Death of Aurelio Pompa’ (1928).” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021. Accessed September 26, 2021. https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1449370.

Kanellos, Nicolás. “Corrido.” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021. Accessed September 26, 2021. https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1448527.

Avila, Jacqueline. “Corrido.” Grove Music Online. 16 Oct. 2013; Accessed 26 Sep. 2021. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-1002249156.

“‘Venimos De Matamoros’ [3:13].” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience audio. 2021. Accessed September 27, 2021. https://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/2265362.

Pompa, Carlos A. “Aurelio Pompa (CORRIDO).” May 17, 2018. Youtube video. 6:04. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKk_j5OYW7E&ab_channel=CarlosAPompa

As Eileen Southern points out in The Music of Black Americans, African Americans had many opportunities to make music during colonial times, whether it be psalm singing, slave songs, or fiddle playing. Additionally, many enslaved people were valued for their musical abilities (Southern 26) due to a high demand for plantation dance fiddlers. While reading Southern’s chapter, it struck me that African Americans were able to learn new instruments by teaching themselves and practicing during odd hours of the day. Learning a new instrument is difficult enough the way it is, and even more so given the constraints imposed on them through slavery.

This brings up the point that much of African Americans’ music making was shaped by oppression. A common reason for fiddle playing in the first place was to fulfill the demand for colonists, and other music making was a response to oppression. African Americans had to learn new instruments because they did not have access to the ones they were accustomed to from their homeland, and they were given no other option but to find the time to practice during odd hours of the day. Additionally, they were forced to give up their native tongue.  This does not mean, however, that all of the music of black Americans was devoid of their African roots. There were many ways of infusing music with traces of Africa, whether this be with musical tools, imagery, or language. 

An excerpt from an 1847 magazine features a conversation about a slave song that highlights how the music of African Americans can be shaped by oppression, yet carry with it its roots:

This evening the female slaves were unusually excited in singing, and I had the curiosity to ask my negro servant Said, what they were singing about. As many of them were natives of his own country, he had no difficulty in translating the Mandara or Bornou language. I had often asked the Moors to translate their songs for me, but got no satisfactory account of them. Said at first said, ‘Oh! They sing of Rubee,’ (God.) ‘What do you mean?’ I replied impatiently. ‘Oh, you don’t know,’ he continued, ‘they asked God to give them their Atka!’ (certificate of freedom.) I inquired, ‘What else?’ Said: ‘They remember their country, Bornou, and say – Bornou was a pleasant country, full of all good things; but this is a bad country, and we are miserable!’ ‘Do they say anything else?’ Said: ‘No; they repeat these words over and over again, and add-O God! Give us our Atka, and let us return again to our dear home.’

Those who sung this song did so in their Native tongue, with references to their own religion and homeland. Although we can’t know what it sounds like, these markers in their language show how music continued to carry traces of Africa in it.

However, it is important to note that at its core, this song is still shaped by oppression because it functioned to comfort those who faced the horrors of slavery, and connect them to a homeland that they were torn away from. 

Bibliography

Boahen, A. Adu. “JAMES RICHARDSON: THE FORGOTTEN PHILANTHROPIST AND EXPLORER.” Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria 3, no. 1 (1964): 61–71. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41856689.

J, G. WHITTIERNational Era. A Song of Sorrow: Song of the Slaves in the Desert. Christian Secretary (1822-1889), Feb 05, 1847. 4, https://www.proquest.com/magazines/song-sorrow/docview/124265012/se-2?accountid=351 (accessed September 26, 2021).

Southern, Eileen. The Music of Black Americans : a History 2nd edition. New York: Norton, 1983.

TW: racism and violence

Francis or “Frank” Johnson, an African-American composer and performer, is said to have helped pave the way for Jazz and Ragtime, and therefore modern music as we know it. Johnson published works in a variety of genres and he was the first black composer to have his sheet music published and also the first black musician to tour Europe. His music was enjoyed by white and black people alike and he reached immense fame. However, he was still confronted by racism, hatred, and violence¹. 

The text I would like to focus on this week is an article entitled “Riot Near Pittsburgh— Frank Johnson’s band mobbed”. The article was published in the Liberator in 1843 and covered the violence against Johnson and his band on March 17th in Pittsburgh after a performance benefitting the temperance movement. The writer reports 

“A large rabble of men and boys gathered around the doors and windows, and by their hooting and yelling did what they could to mar the pleasure of those within, who had previously paid their money for a rare musical treat”“Francis Johnson”². 

My first instinct was to applaud this author for condemning the appalling racist behavior of the mob. However, upon digging deeper and thinking more critically I came to the realization that they were not condemning racist behavior per se, but disruptive behavior. Behavior that made themselves and their peers miss out on something they paid for. A commodity. There was no mention of the effect on Johnson or his band members beyond their physical injuries. The author then goes on to describe the attack on Johnson and his band after the show. 

“The mob followed Mr. Johnson and his company shouting (a racial slur)… and hurling brick-bats, stones, and rotten eggs… One poor fellow was severely, it is feared dangerously wounded in the head, and others were more or less hurt… Every well disposed citizen deeply regretted the disgrace thus brought upon our city…”². 

The word choice leads us to believe the author was less concerned about the safety and well-being of Johnson and his band, but rather how the actions of the mob made the city look.

 I do want to be clear that the article was written in a time where condemning the violence at all was very progressive, but I cannot help but wonder at the reasoning for the condemnation. Beyond the feelings of being sighted out of a show they paid for, the author likely has other motivations.

 In their parting words in regards to this event, they state “of course no friend of the temperance enterprise could be engaged in this cowardly affair”². 

Clearly, not only is the writer offended by the ruining of their evening, but they also want to use it to push their own political agenda. By stating only people against the temperance movement would engage in violent mob behavior the reporter demonizes those against the abolition of alcohol. 

Overall, the fact the creator of this article condemns the actions of the mob is a step in the right direction, but their motives do not feel pure to me.

¹“Francis Johnson.” University Archives and Records Center, https://archives.upenn.edu/exhibits/penn-people/biography/francis-johnson.

² “Riot Near Pittsburgh— Frank Johnson’s Band Mobbed.” Liberator, 9 June 1843, p. 93. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/americanperiodicals/docview/91225878/fulltextPDF/AEA86A48109E42E4PQ/1?accountid=351. Accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

In December of 2005 an immigration bill was passed that greatly increased the restrictions on immigration and undocumented immigrants. And although people from every country immigrate to the US, one community always seems to get singled out in the discussion: the Hispanic community. In response to the bill, protests occurred all across the country, with over a million people protesting in Los Angeles alone. 

This picture, taken in Los Angeles during one of the protests, depicts a mariachi band leading the protest, framed by signs and waving american flags. To me, this image is a perfect representation of a cultural identity existing in America, being celebrated with music. The mariachi music is displaying feelings of pride in one’s culture and in one’s immigration status. The band, with their traditional clothing, displays a strong hispanic pride, while protesting in america shows a unity to the country and to their community. In fact, the sign behind the band reads, “If you think I’m ‘illegal’ because I’m a Mexican, learn the true history. Because I’m in my homeland,” most likely referring to the Pobladores, a group of Mexican families who lived in (and named!) Los Angeles before the USA existed. 

I think that by performing and leading this protest, the mariachi band is completing the highest form of protest: celebration. By celebrating hispanic heritage and culture with mariachi music– something that’s usually joyful and special– their placing the joy of their culture and their community within the view of people outside of their community (ie. white people). Their adding to the significant history of protest music in the US, a genre that captures the emotions and qualms of politic unrest in the US. 

The music at the protest also somehow makes the atmosphere more lighthearted, which is sometimes needed at a protest, to remind people that their is hope and a future worth protesting for. 

Interestingly, many of the areas in which mariachi is suspected to have originated are the same areas from which mexican immigrants are from. Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and Sinoloa are all areas with heavy emigration and areas in which there is a strong mariachi presence. 

Below is an example of mariachi music being played at a protest– this time against Donald Trump, who is famously anti-hispanic immigration. 

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLkG7l-cy5E

bibiolography:

“Mariachi Band Leads Protesters.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2021, latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1602762. Accessed 27 Sept. 2021.

Hameed, Fatimah. Millions in the U.S. Protest Immigration Policy, 2006, https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/millions-us-protest-immigration-policy-2006. Accessed 26 Sept. 2021.

As I was doing my class reading in Eileen Southern’s book “The Music of Black Americans” something she mentioned caused me to pause, mainly, the way that she describes the relationship between white and black settlers. She makes multiple mentions of the almost nurturing nature of certain relationships between slave and master, as she mentions:

“Throughout the region, slavery a assumed a milder form than in the southern colonies, although in some places the harsh and severe treatment of black slaves provoked more than one rebellious uprising. Generally, slavery tended to be paternalistic, slaves being regarded as part of the family” (Southern 35).

She also mentioned the encouragement by members of the clergy to convert black Americans to Christianity (Southern 36). These views completely shook up my view of slavery and how it occurred in the Americas. In school, we were fed the narrative that slave masters and owners, treated all slaves as subhuman. Slave owners whipped their slaves, beat them, and treated them as livestock. Although these things were common, Southern for the first time made it seem as if this were not always the case.

To be clear, I am not looking to diminish the horrors of slavery. Even “milder forms” of slavery (as Southern puts) are disgustingly immoral. However, Southern challenged my assumptions and brought me to ask the question: Was the degree of severity and inhumane treatment of slaves something that was dependent upon region? Was it dependent upon religion? How did the ideologies of the time shape the treatment of American slaves? And what were some of the different ideologies surrounding the treatment of slaves around at the time? These are some the questions that I grappled with after reading through Southern’s book.

Which brings me to the primary source that I want to highlight today.

https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.stolaf.edu/americanperiodicals/docview/126331764/6AB217760D2D4523PQ/2?accountid=351

https://www-proquest-com.ezproxy.stolaf.edu/americanperiodicals/docview/126265009/pageviewPDF/6425386A7E574169PQ/6?accountid=351

I decided to explore some letters written in 1835 and 1836 by clergy member brother Jacob Zorn. The letters are addressed to someone known as “Brother” referring to another member of the clergy. Zorn seems to imply that the state of life for American slaves seemed to be improving by means of the Church. He quotes:

“When we call to mind the very different state of things thirty years ago, we bless the Lord for the special interest taken in these poor outcasts by the Christian of our day. By means of schools much good has been effected, perhaps as much indirectly to the parents as directly to the children. A few years ago the idea of schools for Negro children was ridiculed; now instruction is gradually spreading and many have already learned to read those precious pages on which are inscribed the truths of salvation”.

He also seems to imply that his church is particularly invested in including slaves in their congregation. Jacob Zorn makes this enthusiasm clear stating:

“Not a word, I am confident, need to be added to press the value of early religious education upon the friends of the negro race; they will not leave their work half done, by suffering the children to grow up in ignorance”.

Although Zorn makes it seem as if the church is bettering their treatment of slaves and encouraging their involvement in the church, this does not always seem to be the case. Southern argues that many slave owners were resistant to the baptism and conversion of their slaves to Christianity. And, to be clear, the conversion of Slaves to Christianity does not always reflect their treatment, as Christianity was also used to justify slavery.

By looking at these letters, it gives us a more accurate and nuanced look of the sentiments surrounding slavery and the treatment of slaves. Instead of generalizing that every white person treated slaves as subhuman, this letter gives us a small amount of insight into other ideologies surrounding this topic that were present in society around the time of slavery. The generalization of all white people as monsters during the era of slavery makes the current day population too quick to separate themselves from them. By making known a more nuanced version of the ideas surrounding slavery, we are reminded that we are just as likely to commit similar atrocities.

For this blog post, I was going to focus on When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again and its Civil War origins changed for the Glenn Miller Band. I like other blog posts are striving to write for narratives that don’t just tell a story of white culture. As my final blog post, this attempts to shine light on marginalized groups and the importance of music in ties to their story.

While Glenn Miller adapted the 19^th century song to his style of jazz to rally national spirit against the US enemies of World War II, using jazz as a strictly white American identity, in Mexican culture, something similar happened. Pedro Infante recorded the song, El Soldado Rosa, in 1943 for Mexican soldiers fighting in World War II.

The lyrics state:

Me voy de soldado raso
Voy a ingresar a las filas
Con los valientes muchachos
Que dejan madres queridas
Que dejan novias llorando
Llorando su despedida.

Voy a la guerra contento
Ya tengo rifle y pistola
Ya volveré de sargento
Cuando se acabe la bola
Nomas una cosa pienso
Dejar a mi madre sola.

Virgen morena
Mandale su consuelo
Nunca jamas permitas
Que me la robe el cielo.

Mi linda Guadalupana
Protejela a mi bandera
Y cuando me haga en campaña
Muy lejos ya de mi tierra
Les probare que mi raza
Sabe morir…

Translation:

I am going as a buck private,
I am going to the front lines
with brave boys
who leave beloved mothers,
who leave sweethearts crying.
Crying on their farewell.
I am leaving for the war content,
I got my rifle and pistol,
I’ll return as a sergeant
when this combat is over;
The only thing I regret:
leaving my mother alone.
Brown Virgin,
send me your blessing,
never allow
heaven to steal her from me
My lovely Guadalupe
will protect my flag
and when I find myself in combat,
far away from my land,
I will prove that my race
knows how to die anywhere.
I leave early tomorrow
as the light of day shines
here goes another Mexican
who knows how to gamble his life,
that gives his farewell singing:
singing to his motherland.
Brown Virgin,
I entrust my mother;
take care of her she is so good,
take care of her while I’m away.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-u-tWKr4AI

I find the line that discusses one having to die in war in order to p

rove their race is worthy particularly striking. In modern media, Latinx people are not depicted with respect so I cannot imagine the kind of bigotry faced during this time of national pride and lack of representation in mainstream media.

In a correspondence with former bracero Adolfo González, he states how important these pieces were to Mexicans for their morale in the war. He states:

 “í, cÃémo no. De aquel señor Jorge Negrete que era entonces y el señor Infante, esos eran muy grandes, grandes cantantes que lo divertían a uno. Cantinflas. (risas) (“Of course. Jorge Negrete was popular back then and then Pedro Infante. They were popular, great singers. They would entertain us. Cantiflas. [laughter].”)

Recorded Interview Here

Many in Mexican culture considered Infante very popular. Many migrant workers would sing his songs including El Soldado Rosa. The content produced by record companies to support the war and music presented from the soldier’s perspective is infinite but in contemporary media, we often gloss over content of minorities (specifically Mexican) and how

the war affected the music they produced and wrote.

Bibliography:

–YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-u-tWKr4AI.

-““El Soldado Raso”.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019, latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1481722. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019.

-“Bracero Program: Adolfo Gonzáles (Daily Life).” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019, latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1741283. Accessed 18 Nov. 2019.

I never read the Manitou Messenger (please don’t tell anyone I said this). I’m not a huge fan of the writing and as a senior, I’m trying to slowly assimilate to the outside world. Finding “Whatever folks are singing…that’s what makes it folk music” delighted me because it addresses ideas we’ve concluded with readings and in class discussion.

The article advertises a folk music festival at the college, encouraging everyone to audition. The article opens with a quote by Pete Seeger (the focus of my final paper) defining folk music as “whatever folks are singing; that’s folk music” (even though its so much more complex than that). Later in the article, the writer attempts to categorize folk by stating it addresses themes such as love, death, work, and historical events.

I’m not sure if this is just me, but these are extremely broad topics that doesn’t narrow down or help the reader understand what they’re supposed to understand about folk. I don’t blame the writer for their lack of communication of what folk is. The writer takes a quote from another musician on campus saying, “born with a feeling, putting into words and given a melody”.

I’m also impressed that the article recognizes the debate between the self-labeled purists and commercial style that came from record labels selling folk as a specific style.

As discussed in class and in the beginning of the article, this genre is incredibly difficult to grasp conceptually. I’m impressed for an early 60s article of St. Olaf of how honest the writer is about genuinely not knowing to answer the folk question. They provide certain musicians’ definitions but never make a solid claim on folk music. My only issues with this article comes from its failure to acknowledge the racial component within the broad genre of folk. Part of the reason folk has so many different styles within this umbrella genre is because of the exchanges made interracially throughout the late 19th and early 20th century.

Bibliography:

-Newbury, Jan. “Universal Databases.” Welcome to East View – Manitou Messenger (DA-MM), 1963, No. 1, Vol. 76, stolaf.eastview.com/browse/fullimage?issueId=2712140&pg=6.

I have to admit that although I am Chicanx, I don’t know very much about Chicano music. In general, I haven’t heard much about Chican@ art other than celebrities like Selena. Of course, there was the Chicano movement of the ’60s which I was aware of but what I didn’t know was that there was an entire Chicano Renaissance [1]. In an essay titled, “Chicano Movement Music” from The Latino American Experience, Azcona gives an overview of the music of the Chicano Movement and specifically how higher education was a major part of the movement [1]. College campuses became springboards for Chican@ musicians where bands, as well as solo artists such as Joan Báez, got their start. 

JJ6537 Joan Baez circa 1966
American folk singer Joan Baez sings and plays acoustic guitar on stage during a European tour, East Berlin, Germany.
(Photo by Hulton Getty)

Joan Báez was just this year inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Game along with Tupac Shakur, Pearl Jam, Yes, and Electric Light Orchestra [3]. Her 1974 album, Gracias a la Vida was her first and only full-length album entirely in Spanish. She collaborated with other chican@ music ensembles such as La Rondalla Amerindia where they recorded a huelga or strike song called “No nos moverán” which translates to “They will not move us” [1]. 

https://youtu.be/hMXQ026t3zY 

From early in her musical career, she was heavily involved with the civil rights movement and marched alongside MLK from Selma to Montgomery as well as a number of other protests, rallies, marches, and toured colleges to encourage young men to resist the draft [2]. Her music was, overall, regarded as a means to spread the pacifist platform during and well after the civil rights era [2].

What I found particularly intriguing about Báez was that she was the daughter of an elite professor, was educated, and primarily sang at protests. Later in life, she founded Humanitas International, a human rights organization; but later when reviving her singing career she lessened her political activism and shut down the org. The questions I am left with are primarily about how her singing domestically and internationally counted as an action that supported change. It is one thing to sing “We shall overcome” but it is another thing to put forth change, which she did, but eventually put her singing career before her human rights organization. The ambiguity of the morality of her choice is pressing, however, perhaps the net impact of her returning to music and a life of advocacy is more fulfilling as well as influential. I think there is also an assumption that individuals who are associated with a marginalized group must choose the path of advocacy over anything else or be labeled as unauthentic. 

Sources Cited

[1] Azcona, Estevan César. “Chicano Movement Music.” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019. Accessed November 12, 2019. http://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1329550.

[2] Meier, Matt S., Conchita Franco Serri, and Richard A. Garcia. “Joan Báez.” In The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019. Accessed November 12, 2019. http://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1332577.

[3] Pulley, Anna. “JOAN BAEZ TO BE INDUCTED INTO ROCK & ROLL HALL OF FAME.” Acoustic Guitar, 03, 2017, 15, https://search.proquest.com/docview/1874317065?accountid=351.

For my final blog post, I wanted to focus on W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and how it has evolved and survived throughout the years as a jazz standard.  I am particularly interested in its history because I will be performing the Bob Brookmeyer arrangement with Jazz 1 on Friday, November 22nd at 7:30 pm in the Pause Main Stage (hey, nobody said we can’t use these blog posts to advertise!)

The song itself first originated from W.C. Handy’s Blues: An Anthology, which Handy used to portray blues music as folk music (even though there were some complications with classifying it as such.)[1]  But nonetheless, it was touted as such by Handy as “The First Successful Blues Published.”  Its success not only comes from its publishing, but arguably its legacy as a standard as performed by various blues and jazz artists.  For the sake of the length of this blog, I am going to include 5 performers who are icons for their place in jazz history: Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.

In Bessie Smith’s version, she ignores the tango-like interlude and the beginning she enters with the melody and the 12-bar blues form, accompanied by an organ and none other than Louis Armstrong responding on trumpet to her lyrics [2].  Her version may not be authentic to Handy’s original composition, but she owns this version and it well represents the NOLA jazz sound:

Moving into the swing era, with the likes of big bands such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and, as I will present here, Glenn Miller.  The Glenn Miller Orchestra was very well-known for its standards like “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and “In the Mood,” but when Glenn Miller was enlisted to serve in Europe during World War II, he made sure to keep his music going.  Here is his version of St Louis Blues presented as a march:

From the Swing era, jazz musicians started to get a little more adventurous with exploring different textures in rhythm and harmony.  Musicians like Charlie Parker, Max Roach, and Dizzy Gillespie were at the forefront of the bebop era by taking old standards such as St Louis Blues and creating bebop-ified version of their roots in Handy’s composition.  Here is Dizzy Gillespie’s version, this time featuring the tango interlude that could likely be attributed to Dizzy’s fondness of Afro-Cuban music as he explored in “Manteca” or “A Night in Tunisia”:

On the other side of the same coin, West Coast cool jazz coexisted with bebop as a mainstay in jazz music in the ’50s and ’60s.  Still using the St Louis Blues standard, Dave Brubeck also uses that tango beginning, but goes into the form with a lighter feel in comparison to Dizzy Gillespie, which is apparent in Paul Desmond’s improv solo, which couldn’t possibly be lighter or more laidback:

To close the blog post, I leave you with Bob Brookmeyer’s arrangement of St Louis Blues as performed by the Thad Jones/Mel Louis Orchestra.  While it may not necessarily be faithful to Handy’s original idea for St. Louis Blues, it represents a culmination of St Louis Blues’ place in jazz history:

Sources:

[1] Hagstrom-Miller, Karl. “How Blues Became Folk Music” in Segregating Sound (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2010). 241-274.

[2] Smith, Bessie. “St. Louis Blues” on Nobody’s Blues But Mine. Future Noise Ltd., 2008, Streaming Audio. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Crecorded_track%7C1018361.

The Accordion wasn’t invented until the mid 1800s in Eastern Europe, and its form has had undergone countless innovations and stylistic changes since then. The accordion has long been associated with the music of lower class people, partially because it could provide the basic elements of melody and bass all within one instrument. This instrument thrived as nationalistic styles emerged throughout Europe, and later when immigrants arrived in the United States it maintained cultural specificity.

In a series of photographs taken in 1977 Chicago found in the Library of Congress Photography Collection, several cultural celebrations feature an accordion player, including a Norwegian Festival, a Lithuanian wedding, a Spanish heritage meeting, and a school ensemble. 

Norweigan Cultural Dinner

Spanish Heritage Ensemble

Lithuanian Wedding

In “The Accordion in the Americas,” a collection of essays about Accordion music throughout North and South America, Helena Simonett writes “The accordion reflected the zeitgeist of the industrial era of the late nineteenth century. In a time of technical excitement, the new, mechanically sophisticated instrument came to symbolize progress and modernity.” Simonett explains that the accordion was an emblem of not only cultural, but musical progress. So how did the instrument become so closely associated with small cultural expression?

The accordion is such a compelling case study for American music because while it might otherwise be thought of as a marking for “other” or closely held ethnic enclaves, in reality its history is more complicated. Just like with so many musical traditions, it wasn’t only European immigrants who held claim to the accordion. The accordion was a major part of the folk revival movement. The stories that have always been told are not necessarily the stories that we must continue telling. 

“Introduction.” In The Accordion in the Americas: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More!, edited by SIMONETT HELENA, 1-18. University of Illinois Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt3fh3m4.4.

Artists have an ongoing love-hate relationship with critics in the press. Whether reviewers of artistic works use their words to uplift or pick apart what they’ve seen and heard, it feels like performers, producers, and audiences alike put too much emphasis on the words of critics. While I myself am certainly a fan of giving my own lengthy monologue detailing the highs and lows of any musical production I see only moments after exiting the lobby, my words are rarely given a hint of importance offered to those that take to newspapers and online sites to review professional productions. But, how important are the thoughts and words of these critics?

This question came to a head when looking for newspaper reviews for the original Broadway production of West Side Story in 1957. As a #megafan, I new that initial reviews of the work were mixed, and that the work aged quite well despite initial concerns from critics. In an article from the Daily Defender published in 1958, I though in perplexing that a review of the recent Broadway season listed a musical I had never heard of.

As seen in the article above, the show used in what should be the attention-grabbing title of the article was not my beloved West Side Story, nor the Tony-Award-winning-for-best-musical The Music Man, rather a musical entitled Jamaica. A quick google search of the musical shows an initial success and relatively positive reviews along with a slew of Tony Award nominations, but also a show that hasn’t aged well due to its musical choices and a sort of cultural cringe factor evident in too many creations of a racist America.

So this still leaves my original question unanswered: Do the voice of critics really matter? What impact do they have? It appears that to get this answered, we must follow the money (or, as the kids say these days, “show the receipts” *clap clap*). There has been scholarship that factors the opinions of critics into statistical models of successful and not-so-successful musical theatre endeavors (as well as other forms of arts and entertainment).¹ While it appears the opinion of critics rarely shows any correlation of commercial success with theatrical productions, scholarly models note the importance of the opinions of critics in forming audience interest and ideas about the production prior to possibly seeing it or buying a ticket

Fig. 1: A visual model that describes the factors in determining success in Broadway Shows

So, I guess my conclusion here is that critics don’t always get it right. While they might think their educated inferences should ultimately dictate the fate of the Broadway musicals they struggle to sit through or heartily applaud, the reality is much more complicated. When I came across the newspaper article, I was confused about how the review of a Broadway season somehow featured a now unknown and unperformed musical at its heading. But hindsight is 20/20, and I have the luxury of time that was not afforded to the critics writing in the heat of battle on The Great White Way.

A quick P.S.: while it is certainly arguable whether we should look at money and commercial success as the main factor for determining a successful piece of art, this blog post fails to engage in that conversation. That is another topic for another blog post/paper/thesis/lifetime of research.

Primary Source

“Jamaica’ Tops on Broadway.” Daily Defender (Daily Edition) (1956-1960), Jan 07, 1958. https://search.proquest.com/docview/493716192?accountid=351.

Secondary Source

For the title of this course being “American Music”, it is strange that we haven’t discussed the fact that “America” is not synonymous with “United States”. It is often overlooked that Canada is indeed American, as it is part of North America, and Central and South America are usually both overlooked entirely. North America, Central America, and South America are all themes within Brazilian pianist Eliane Elias’s jazz album “The Three Americas”.

The opening track of the album, “An Up Dawn” starts as a jazzy song with prominent scatting and piano, but morphs in a very latin piece. The rhythms are very danceable and syncopated, keeping true to a jazz feel while incorporating some latin instrumentation, for example the samba whistle, which pops out of the texture to provide cultural depth to the piece. 

A stand-out song on the album is “Caipora”, as its opening feels like cool jazz but with a bit more spice than usual. The piano is very expressive, and leads to the expressive climax of the song when flute and voice come in together, eventually leading to the takeover of the melody by flute in an improvisational flurry. By this point in the song, there are many drums in the background providing a samba-like rhythm underneath the voice and flute. This seamless amalgamation of North American jazz elements and Brazilian samba makes it clear that “American” culture and identity can be a mix of any two, three or more (!!) elements.

The mixing styles of jazz and the Brazilian samba throughout this album help show how the three Americas have distinct qualities, but easily morph together to become one cohesive sound. American culture is capable of the same thing, but cultural integration is often met with more backlash than in music. Although it’s very cliche, music really serves as a unifier between cultures, with Elias’s album serving as a reminder that Americaness is more than just North America.

Works Cited

The Three Americas. Rec. 19 June 1997. Warner Music, 1997. Music Online: Jazz Music Library Database. Web. 

The liner notes to Ragtime Jubilee, recorded in 1947 in New York and released in 1999,  suggest that ragtime is an undying art, in much the same tone that blues musicians have suggested that the blues has always existed. While the context of the record’s quite late release date might make one immediately wary that the publishers’ desire to make money outweighs their desire to provide an accurate representation of the varied history of ragtime, considering the perspective offered is worthwhile, because it sheds light on how ragtime has been successful both as popular music and as art music.

Rudi Blesh, 1975

Rudi Blesh (1899-1985), a jazz critic and enthusiast (and, notable for this class, a white man), writes about ragtime in a very positive light; it is the “warmest, gayest, liltingest music ever born here” to him, and held the greatest potential to create an American sound. He remarked that Europe immediately understood its uniqueness and vitality, and while American society forgot it for a time, it persisted until “we simply discovered what had been going on all the time.” To Blesh, ragtime was not a museum piece but a living and dynamic art form worth as much as the works of Mozart.

This suggestion, that ragtime somehow has shed its need for an audience and survives on its own, simply by being passed down from musician to musician, is both strange and familiar. It once again recalls images of the blues always existing, whether or not the public knows about it, but also images from the western classical tradition. That tradition is not part of popular culture, yet lives on as conservatories and teachers pass their practices to further generations. Some elements of classical music have permeated popular culture, such as the symphony orchestra being used in movie scores, but it has largely been relegated to a niche audience. Ragtime has since fallen from the public eye as well, but it is still passed down in some form, which I can personally attest to as a pianist.

From sheet music of Scott Joplin’s “Felicity Rag;” click for a pdf

This context makes a piece of art included in the liner notes a bit ironic, as it appears to satirize the (largely German) classical tradition by implying the performer is unable to play the “new fangled stuff” that is ragtime, choosing instead to play old music that is considered to be great and timeless–not unlike how ragtime revival artists return to an earlier style when popular music has moved on to new things. There are some notable differences between genres–their respective focus on complex harmony versus complex rhythm, the varying lengths of pieces, typical orchestrations, not to mention the predominance of black composers in ragtime–potentially referred to in this record by “Jubilee,” a word which appears in famous spirituals and the names of groups which sing them. These differences aside, however, the similarities between changes in these genres’ popularity over time, as well as the continued practice and interpretation by new musicians, helps to elevate ragtime as an art form and dignified link in the evolution of American popular music.

Bibliography

“Jazz Scholar Rudi Blesh; Historian, Biographer, Critic,” Los Angeles Times (1985). https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-08-31-fi-24324-story.html

Le Sony’r Ra (Professionally known as Sun Ra. Born Herman Poole Blount) led an interesting life, to put it mildly. In addition to being one of the single most prolific recording artists of the 20th century (he recorded over 1,000 compositions on over 120 albums, according to Ra scholar John F. Szwed), he was a philosopher and mystic who worked with Amiri Baraka, in addition to many others, was possibly (probably?) the first person to integrate the concept of a “light show” into a live music performance, and was also possibly an alien abductee.

While we’ve spent quite a bit of time in class with text by Amiri Bakara, we haven’t actually touched on his role in founding the Black Arts Movement during the 1960s and 70s very much (if at all). To provide some quick context, the Black Arts Movement sought to create cultural institutions, such as the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School (BARTS) that would allow black artists to express themselves and create without being overshadowed or governed by traditional Western (and white) critics and tastes. Sun Ra was an important member of this movement. Not only did he write many essays and pamphlets that helped to define his particular aesthetic that would crystallize into Afro-Futurism, he lived his aesthetic and philosophical ideals every day, according to everyone who knew him. Bakara wrote in his Autobiography,

“Sun Ra and Albert Ayler were always on the scene. For some, Sun Ra became our resident philosopher, having regular midweek performances in which he introduced the light-show concept that white rock groups later found out about and got rich from. When Ra would play his Sun-Organ, when he played low notes, deep blues and dark colors would light up on it. When he played high notes, oranges and yellows would light up, and we sat, sometimes maybe with fifteen or twenty people in the audience, and thought we were being exposed to the profundity of blackness” (Bakara 204).

The albums The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra vol. 1 and 2 (which are bundled into one album through the database) carry good examples of the developments Ra made to jazz as a genre. For example, Ra was the first person to utilize two string basses in a jazz ensemble instead of just one (according to Szwed), and this album is an example of that.

Ra’s philosophy is a little tough to grasp. Not only did his views profoundly change over time (which is to be expected with many philosophers, so that isn’t quite the point) (he initially identified with sentiments of Black Power and Black Unification, but later started to identify less and less with any race and identified more with divine beings such as angels), his philosophy has heavy esoteric influence and is written in almost a “beat prose” style. In his essay Lucifer Means Light Bearer, he argues that the Bible was not written for black people, and that african Americans allow themselves to be rendered complacent by white power structures that utilize religion as a tool for this purpose. (Ra 133-137)

Sun Ra is a fascinating figure within the context of the Black Arts Movement, and in my opinion, he has enough of his own writing as well as scholarship about him to merit a place within the MUS 345B curriculum. Hopefully a future class will have a chance to study him.

Works Cited:

Bakara, Amiri. The Autobiography of Leroi Jones. Freundlich Books, New York, 1984.

Ra, Le Sony’r. The Wisdom of Sun Ra. Compiled by John Corbett. WhiteWalls, Chicago, 2006.

Sun Ra. The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra. Recorded November 15, 2010. ESP Disk, 2010, Streaming Audio. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/be%7Crecorded_cd%7Cli_upc_825481040624.

Szwed, John F. Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra. Pantheon Books, New York, 1997.

“Through the open windows of a second-story room opposite Hull House on a midsummer Saturday evening come the jazz strains of a gospel hymn being lustily sung in Spanish. If we were to trace this music to its source it would lead us into the midst of a revival meeting of the Pentecostals. There in a crowded room we would find a Mexican evangelist, eyes shining and face flushed by his enthusiasm, leading the singing, while an orchestra made up of a cornet, two drums, three triangles, and a piano beats out the rhythm with a will.”[1]

This is how Robert C. Jones and Louis R. Wilson describes an evening scene in a Mexican neighbourhood in Chicago. Their article was published in 1931 and addressed how many people from the migrant Mexican population converted to and adapted the beliefs and practices, including the musical practices of Pentecostalism.

Pentecostalism being defined in the Encyclopædia Britannica as a charismatic religious movement that gained popularity during the 20^th century. The belief in a “post conversionreligious experience called baptism the Holy Spirit” [2] was (and still is) a defining trait for the associated denominations. Pentecostalism and similar movements grew out of a growing disregard for traditional religious practices in late 19^th century. Expression of emotion and a more spontaneous articulation of the Gospel was preferred to the traditional church service. This was (and still is) very much present in the musical practices. “[…]the jazz strains of a gospel hymn lustily sung in Spanish” as described by Jones and Wilson, is an example of  what is described as “enthusiastic congregational singing”[3], a form of this emotional religious expression. This was a world away from the Latin chants of the Roman Catholic Church, in which the majority of Mexican immigrants were raised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVteZ794xE

Just shy of a century after Jones’ and Wilson’s observations, services are still being held in Spanish in what identifies as Mexican or Spanish Pentecostal churches across America. This video from a Pentecostal service Hammond, Indiana, uploaded in 2013 around which I assume it was filmed, shows not only gospel elements but Latin elements within the music, and rightfully so. Maracas, and what could be a vihuela [4]  can be hard, as well as a variety of other rhythmic instruments.

The Spanish adaption of gospel music within Mexican Pentecostalism is a good example of the hybridity we find in so much of American music, even though the two styles of music, traditional Mexican music and the gospel music of the United States are not necessarily mutually exclusive genres. It has for instance been argued that gospel music has drawn from Latin and Caribbean influences as well as its African American and European roots.

Sources:

Melton, J. Gordon. “Pentecostalism” Ecyclopædia Britannica. August 31th, 2014. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pentecostalism [Accessed November 11th, 2019]

“Mariachi”. Ecyclopædia Britannica. January 29^th, 2016. https://www.britannica.com/art/mariachi [Accessed November 11th, 2019]

Jones, Robert C.. Wilson, Louis R. The Mexican in Chicago (1931). Comity Commission of the Chicago Church Federation. The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019. http://latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1449373. [Accessed November 10^th, 2019]

“Sunday Service Spanish Pentecostal Hammond, IN”. Uploaded April 14^th, 2013. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZVteZ794xE [Accessed November 11^th, 2019]

[1] Jones et al. 1931

[2] Melton 2014

[3] Ibid.

[4] “Mariachi” 2016

In 1966, a group of grape workers organised by famous labor leader and activist Cesar Chavez marched 300 miles from Delano to Sacramento, CA to protest the low wages they worked for. While they marched, they sang a variety of songs, including both pieces in Spanish, known to the majority-Latino workers, as well as traditional union songs – a category of American music that I didn’t realise existed until finding a video source for this blog post. Here you can hear a classic union anthem, Solidarity Forever, the melody of which you will probably recognise. Below are the lyrics.

When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.

Chorus:
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.

They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, multiplied a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.

There are a further 3 verses, somewhat different in tone. They are aggressive, proclaiming the evils of the wealthy who the unions are working against, and the comparative goodness of the union members. This dichotomy is probably not what was used in actual negotiations with the growers in order to get wage increases, as calling some one evil tends to not make them want to treat you very kindly. However, putting yourself of the side of justice and right does make for a very compelling and energizing song when you’ve decided to walk several hundred miles to make a point.

This type of music has some interesting nationalistic parallels, as does any music whose goal is to unify people for a common cause. This kind of parallel seems somewhat concerning to me at first glance, because anything that dehumanizes some people in order to lift others up is not a sustainable way of viewing the world. However, it’s worth remembering that humans, by nature, must simplify and group things in order to understand the world and not be constantly overwhelmed and paralysed by its complexity. As long as songs like this are able to serve their role in empowering and motivating people through trying times and also understood in a more complex way in their particular context, they can be a helpful, not harmful, tool.

Works Cited:

When I first scrolled through all the genres listed on the Alexander Street Jazz Music Library, the “Opera and Operetta” category immediately caught my eye, as jazz and opera rarely intersect. Only three results popped up, once of which was titled “Modern Jazz Performances from Bizet’s Carmen” by American jazz guitarist Barney Kessel [1]. The album, released in 1986, takes popular motifs from Bizet’s opera and transforms them into jazz tunes, featuring guitar, brass, woodwind, and percussion instruments.

Georges Bizet (1838-1875) was a French composer who wrote the opera Carmen three months before dying [5]. Carmen takes place in Seville, Spain and places heavy emphasis on the exoticisms of both Spain and the gypsy world. Bizet was drawn to the exotic cultures and music of non-Western European countries, and additionally wrote operas set in Sri Lanka and Egypt [4]. Habanera, or “Havanan Dance,” is sung by the title character Carmen as soldiers in the town square flirt with her and other female workers [3]. The aria frequently repeats the words “L’amour est enfant de bohème,” or “love is a gypsy child.” While Bizet allegedly believed the Habanera to be a folk song, he actually stole it from Spanish composer Sebastian Iradier. Bizet was forced to acknowledge Iradier after this was brought to his attention. 

I decided to focus on comparing Bizet’s famous “Habanera” with Kessel’s version, titled “Free as a Bird.” Habanera begins with a simple, pulsating cello ostinato that continues throughout the entire aria, against the soprano’s descending chromatic line. The rest of the strings join in pizzicato, along with the flute. The triangle and tambourine provide percussive elements.

In “Free as a Bird,” the guitar replaces the cello, and the soprano solo is traded between the saxophone and the flute. While Kessel essentially uses the same melody as Habanera, he adds other contrasting motifs and harmonies, as well as more complex percussion. Towards the middle of the track, the guitar plays a solo improvisation-sounding cadenza, taking Habanera’s basic melody and harmonizing it with 7 and diminished chords, common in jazz music. He then adds in a drumset, gives the melody to the brass, and has the guitar improvise on top. 

What I found most interesting about this album was Kessel’s choice to take Bizet’s melodies and essentially American-ize them by using jazz instruments and chord progressions. The album is also purely instrumental, thus removing all of Bizet’s French text. This choice is ironic, because Bizet did a similar thing when choosing to compose Carmen. As a French composer, he took, and sometimes stole, Spanish melodies, and made them more Western by adding French libretto and generally Western-sounding orchestration. However, Kessel’s adaptation of Bizet’s melodies is not as controversial in my opinion, because Bizet stole non-Western “exotic” music, whereas Kessel took music from a white French composer (and fully credited him).

1. Barney Kessel : Modern Jazz Performances from Bizet’s Carmen. Recorded January 1, 1986. Contemporary, 1986, Streaming Audio. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Crecorded_cd%7C543727. 
2. “Habanera Lyrics, Translation, and History.” liveaboutdotcom. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019. https://www.liveabout.com/habanera-lyrics-translation-and-history-724328
3. Henson, Karen. “Exoticism in Carmen.” Bizet: Carmen; Columbia University. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019. http://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/opera/carmen/exoticism.html
4. Macdonald, Hugh. “Bizet, Georges.” Grove Music Online. 2001; Accessed 11 Nov. 2019. https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000051829.

I would like to start off today’s blog post with the poetic opening of a 1931 article, “the Mexican in Chicago”:

Chicago’s Jane Addams Hull-House

Through the open windows of a second-story room opposite Hull House on a midsummer Saturday evening come the jazz strains of a gospel hymn being lustily sung in Spanish. If we were to trace this music to its source it would lead us into the midst of a revival meeting of the Pentecostals. There in a crowded room we would find a Mexican evangelist, eyes shining and face flushed by his enthusiasm, leading the singing, while an orchestra made up of a cornet, two drums, three triangles, and a piano beats out the rhythm with a will. But we do not wish to loiter long within doors. There are other interesting things to be seen along South Halsted during this twilight hour. ¹

This passage conjures an image of 1930s Chicago life that is not often represented in histories detailing the “Chicago Renaissance” years — the immigrant experience. This article in particular was originally published in the Comity Commission of the Chicago Church Federation that bears witness to the Protestant Mexican experience. The article, in which a few Mexican Protestants in Chicago are interviewed, makes an implicit claim about a sense of belonging. Members of these west side churches prioritized community over adherence to their Roman Catholic roots. The religiosity seemed to be a byproduct of wanting to find a community that could eat together, discuss openly together, and make music together.

As I continue to research for my final paper, I learn more and more about the overlap (and sometimes tensions) between religiosity and community. The author makes the observation that roughly 0.5% of Mexico’s population identifies as Protestant, whereas at least 3% of Mexican immigrants living in Chicago identify as such.² These churches were not only supportive, but were also constructive in building a sense musical community. This newspaper article reminded me of an important lesson as I continue to read about venues both for my paper or in assigned readings. As researchers, we cannot project our expectations onto a historical event. If I had not read the whole article, I might have assumed that the only music was worship music. Or that most discussions happened in the context of prayer, service, or bible study. Rather, I found a  vivid account of how a space conceivably dedicated for one purpose was transformed into another. Don’t fall into the trap! When we assume, we make an … of you and me.

El Son Mexicano, or the Mexican song, is a type of folk music derived from classical music styles of the baroque in terms of rhythms and harmonies, but incorporated into a style of folk performances with guitar and singers.  E Thomas Stanford wrote a good article on the characteristics of the style, and the history of the term and style.  Stanford emphasizes the importance of dance in the style, although there is a vocabulary difference.  A Danza, which is often used as a synonym for Son, denotes a more “primitive” or “raw” version of the word Baile, which is reserved for formal dances.  Stanford also finds that there are elements of Baroque dance performance styles that had been lost or forgotten in other mediums, but rediscovered through the Son.  It is likened to the way Madrigals have been treated in England.  The Son is closer to an authentic madrigal performance than a choir singing from a stage, as both forms are intended primarily as dances.

Contrasting with this is La Canción Mexicana, another form of mexican folk music.  This form is more popular in the area now known as the American Southwest and Borderlands and originated some time in the mid 19th century.  Peter J Garcia wrote an encyclopedic entry for the Latino American Experience, an online database of articles related to Latino American subjects.  Garcia characterizes the Canción as more emotionally driven than story driven, expressing feelings of intense sorrow, joy, grief, and gaiety.  Garcia claims that the Canción reached maturity in the 1850s, causing a “golden age of mexican song.”  The Canción takes its influences from Italian dramatic operas of the 18th and 19th century, using emotion as a drive rather than character motivation or storytelling.  This most cleanly fits into what Americans think of as Mariachi music, although it is not mariachi.  Mariachi is a distinct musical tradition with a set of specific instruments, although the two styles share some similarities.

Now that a brief history of both terms has been established, we can get into the purpose of this blog post, which is listening to some performers of both styles and contrasting them to see if there is as clear a definition as García and Stanford would have us believe.

Our first musical example comes from the Naxos audio library, and is an album called Son de Mi Tierra (song of my earth/land) by a group from Veracruz named Son de Madera.  The tracks on this album are described by the group as a blending of old and new styles of Son, with a reverence for the traditions but an eye on the future.  Listening to the album, which can be done here, shows some link to Baroque senses of tonality, with the solo guitar line often mixing major and minor modes in a way reminiscent of Monteverdi and Allegri. The rhythmic nature of the lines, with clear beats in the bass line, also lends itself well to dancing.  The percussion (perhaps a guitar being hit, perhaps some form of drum) provides quite a bit of ornamentation around those beats, indicating a potential for some dancing ornamentation (think salsa dancing styles, with lots of hands and wardrobe accents on their dancing).  The themes of this music, being a clearer story and plot driving the narrative, also indicate that this would fit into the category of a Son.

If we have found a Son, what then makes a Cancíon.  The album “Con su Permisos, Señores” by Los Centzontles serves as our example here (found here).  The primary difference found here is the instrumental emphasis.  While the Son revolved around the stringed instruments, using the voices in conjunction, these Cancíones make heavier use of the voice.  This is to such an extent that the first track begins with an acapella chorus, beginning the themes of more emotionally driven music than plot.  In these pieces, an understanding can be gleaned without knowing Spanish or reading a translation.

Works Cited

García, Peter J. “Canción.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019, latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1329518. Accessed 11 Nov. 2019.

Stanford, E. Thomas. “The Mexican Son.” Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 4 (1972): 66-86. doi:10.2307/767674.

Barak Obama, Donald Trump, and Hillary Clinton have all used popular songs to further their presidential campaigns in recent years, but this idea is surprisingly not new to American politics.

When I began researching for my final paper, which is about presidential campaign songs, I wanted to gain a broad understanding of these songs and their usage, so I headed to Google. The first song that came up is “I Like Ike.” “I Like Ike” was used for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidential campaign in 1952. I wanted to take a closer look at this primary source for my blog post this week because this trend of using a pop song for a campaign song seems to have sprung up from “I Like Ike.”

“I Like Ike” was written by Tin Pan Alley songwriter Irving Berlin in 1950. It was published and performed under the title “They Like Ike,” first appearing in Berlin’s musical, Call Me Madam. The musical is centered around a Washington D.C. socialite-turned-ambassador. The show was a major hit and won a Tony Award for best score. At the time, Eisenhower was not running for the presidency, but Berlin was hopeful that he would.

The original publication of “They Like Ike” from Berlin’s musical “Call Me Madam”

Once Eisenhower announced his candidacy, Berlin switched the lyrics around a bit and changed the title to “I Like Ike.” The song became a cornerstone for the Eisenhower campaign strategy, as the phrase “I Like Ike” was widespread on advertisements, posters, buttons, and even license plates. With the change of a few words, Berlin’s Broadway hit became a driving force in winning Eisenhower’s presidency.

Some of the many forms that “I Like Ike” appeared across America in 1952

The 1952 “remix” used for Eisenhower’s campaign

The song has elements that make for a solid campaign song: a march-like accompaniment and a simple to follow melody line. If I was to take away the lyrics from the sheet music, you or I probably couldn’t tell this song apart from any other written in the lineage of Tin Pan Alley.

After Eisenhower won the presidency, Berlin continued in his role as musical fanboy for Eisenhower, as he would later update the song two more times to “I Still Like Ike,” “Ike for Four More Years,” and “We Still Like Ike.”

P.S. Unfortunately, all versions of “I Like Ike” are still under copyright, so we’re not able to view and compare them, except for the original publication of the campaign song that I was able to attain through The Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection.

Primary Sources:

Berlin, Irving. I Like Ike. New York, New York: Irving Berlin Music Corporation, 1952.

Berlin, Irving. They Like Ike. New York, New York: Irving Berlin Music Corporation, 1950.

Secondary Source:

“Irving Berlin ‘They Like Ike’ from Call Me Madam.” Yale University Library: Exhibits at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library: Hail to the Chief: Irving Berlin, “They Like Ike” from Call Me Madam, 2010, www.library.yale.edu/musiclib/exhibits/hail_chief/like_ike.html. Accessed 11 November, 2019.

“Before the United States entered World War II, agricultural authorities warned the federal government that a labor shortage loomed due to American workers enlisting in the armed forces or taking jobs in the defense industry. To fill the shortage, the United States negotiated a guest-worker program with the Mexican government that led to the creation of the Bracero Program [1].” The Bracero Program allowed millions of Mexican men to come to the United States to work short-term on primarily agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed, with many individuals returning several times on different contracts, making it the largest U.S. contract labor program.

a poster from 1941 promoting the Bracero program

In my research, I found some very painful songs that arose from this era in American history. These songs were called “corridos,” or traditional Mexican folk songs. One of the corridos I found was entitled “Corrido de los desarraigados,” or “The Corrido of the Uprooted Ones [2].” 

check out this link for a song that sounds similar to “The Corrido of the Uprooted Ones.”

I found it difficult to read the text of this song. Some of the lyrics are quite shocking:

“They work us like slaves
And treat us like dogs.
All we need is for them to ride us
And to put the bridle on us.

The men in the Bracero program were not treated well. “Guarantees for braceros were not kept. Many employers paid workers less than agreed. They also charged for workers’ food, housing, and tools. Some money was kept back in savings accounts, which were usually not given to braceros. Living conditions were often poor, and most braceros faced discrimination and hostility from local populations. Conditions resulted in some strikes by braceros, but force and threats of deportation to Mexico usually ended the stoppages [1].”

The men in the Bracero program found a way to express their suffering through music. I imagine that with all of the immigration conflicts America is currently undergoing, there is going to continue to be music that tells of the painful parts of the Latin American experience. My hope is that we as a nation will listen.

Sources

[1] Watts, Tim. “Bootstraps and Braceros, 1942–1948.” The American Mosaic: The Latino American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2019, latinoamerican2.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/27. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.

[2] Castillo, Arnulfo, “Corrido de los desarraigados,” 1942, transcribed and translated in Herrera-Sobek, María, Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, (1993), p. 164-165.

Delving into jazz this week, I’ve realized that by own perception of the genre is full of contradictions. I simultaneously have a conception of jazz as a broad, far-reaching category of music and as a very specific sound. I would count myself as a peripheral consumer of jazz; I’ve listened to it intentionally a few times and been exposed to it in a vague sense for my whole life, but I’ve never studied it or fully immersed myself. In this sense, I’m probably fairly representative of the general public in my relationship to jazz; accordingly, I think many of the contradictions I find in my own perception of jazz show up in the way the general public talks about jazz.

Even our use of the word jazz itself reveals this contradiction; we use “jazzy” as an adjective almost constantly. It’s odd, considering that we wouldn’t really call anything “classical-y,” “rock-y,” or “country-y.” Usually, syncopation, a swing, a little dissonance, and some blue notes are what prompt us to label a music as “jazzy.” In this way, we have some very specific sounds that we think constitute jazz. Many early critics of jazz, such as Anne Shaw Faulkner and Frank Damrosch, found that these very characteristics of jazz were what made it “primitive,” “vulgar,” and even “evil.”¹ I am more inclined to agree with Langston Hughes and Dave Peyton, who see jazz’s structure, style, and sound as enabling freedom of expression.² It is this very quality that I suspect allows the span of musics that are considered jazz to be so vasts. This span is excellently illustrated just by the Wikipedia page “List of jazz genres,” which lists fifty-five distinct sub-genres of jazz.

Chico O’Farrill, circa 1950

My reflection on how we conceive of jazz was prompted by one of these sub-genres, Afro-Cuban jazz, which I stumbled upon while searching through The Latin American Experience database.The founder of the Afro-Cuban jazz genre, Chico O’Farrill, was a Cuban-born musician who is now regarded as one of the most influential figures in the forming of Latin jazz. Particularly, O’Farrill’s “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite” fuses Afro-Cuban drumming practices, Cuban dance forms, jazz styles, and classical music form.³

Chico O’Farrill’s “Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite”

Listening even just to the first track, “Cancion,” we can hear the typical call and response solo style of jazz, the intense rhythmic drumming in Afro-Cuban style, the syncopation and melodic lines of a traditional Cuban “Cancion,” and the dissonant, sharp chords typical of big bang jazz. I think it was precisely the contradictory nature of our conception of jazz that allowed this kind of fusion to be fully embraced as a part of the genre.

I seem to have a knack for digging up old American patriotic songs. In a previous blog post, I compared three sets of sheet music written between 1916 and 1918 and compared them to Virgil Thomson’s definition of musical traits post 1910. In the Latin American Experience database, I found a piece titled “The Yankee Message or Uncle Sam to Spain” by Edward S. Ellis and Chas. M. Hattersley. This one, however, was written in 1898, a full 20 years before “Come On, America” and its counterparts exemplified Thomson’s traits of 8^th note continuity, separation between dynamics and tempo, and “phonetic distortion without loss of clarity.”

Like the other pieces, “The Yankee Message” is primarily in 2/4 with the eighth note driving the rhythm. The refrain is in 6/8 with alternating quarter and eighth notes. Syllabic text setting gives it a distinctly march-like feel, and dynamics and tempo are independent. The cover art features an American flag, and the “Yankee” title situate it firmly as patriotic

The date, title, and content leaves little guess work about the context of this piece. In 1898 the Spanish-American War began and ended in a matter of months. The most immediate and oft-pointed to cause of the Spanish-American War was the explosion of the USS Maine in 1898. However, the U.S. had long had interest in purchasing Cuba, and the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain was harming US monetary interests. After the Treaty of Paris concluded the conflict, Cuba gained independence, and the US received control over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines.

The lyrics of this piece read:

“1. I hear across the waters, From out the southern sea, The wail of sons and daughters, In wo[e]ful misery, If you must act the butcher, And helpless ones roust die, I swear by the Eternal! I’ll smite you hip and thigh!

 

2. We’ve got the boys to do it, A million men and more; We’ve got our new born navy, And Deweys by the score. We’ll smash your grim old Morroe[?], And brign them round your ears, And make the measure honest, With a thousand ‘Volunteers.

 

[Refrain:] Then hurrah, hurrah for Cuba! Our free Cuba.

We strike, we strike for wage and fight the battle. We strike, we strike for liberty! Until our Cuba’s free!

 

3. We greet you gallant Cubans, We’re fighting side by side, Not yet, O fair Antilles, Hath sleeping Freedom died; We’ll make that horde “walk Spanish,” (You hear my thund’rous voice,) And as between two evils, We’ll give you ‘Hobson’s choice.’

 

4. Our tears for the dead heroes, The Maine and martyred crew; A sigh for smitten sailors, Who died as patriots do; But sure as dawns the morrow, and sure as sets the sun, We’ll avenge our murdered brothers, Avenge them ev’ry one!

 

[Refrain]”

There’s a lot to unpack in the lyrics alone, especially as they are quite lengthy. The focus on freedom, liberty, and martyrs, suggest the war was fought for purely humanitarian reasons, a narrative the US government encouraged. Many phrases would require substantial investigation to understand from a contemporary perspective.

If the previous pieces I studied fit Thomson’s ideas to a fair extent, and this piece does as well, what does this say about American music? For one, perhaps identifying music after 1910 as distinct is not particularly helpful. Or, perhaps these pieces are more representative of a different genre, that of American patriotic marches. The design of the cover suggests Tin Pan Alley and pop music. Perhaps the exclusion of popular music was implied in Thomson’s writings. Regardless, examining patriotic music is helpful because these are the pieces that explicitly try to define themselves based on a national identity. From this we can gain insight into which common sonic features are thus implicitly “American” and recognize their significance when they appear outside of this context. This piece is also a great example of how current events routinely impact musical production. “The Yankee Message” is significant because it can be viewed as both a mirror to and an active participant in the discourse surrounding the Spanish-American War.

(Like my last blog post, I was unable to find a recording of this piece. Perhaps this calls for a recording session of American patriotic marches composed during war times?)

Works Cited

Hattersley, Chas. M. and Edward S. Ellis. “The Yankee message; Uncle Sam to Spain.” Trenton, New Jersey: Chas. M. Hattersley, 1898.

“The World of 1898: The Spanish-American War.” Hispanic Reading Room. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/intro.html.

Thomson, Virgil. “American Musical Traits.” American Music Since 1910. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

September 15, 1963: A bomb goes off at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young African American girls are killed during church services, 14 more are injured.

September 16, 1963: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President John F. Kennedy speak on the tragedy, each calling it cruel and charged by racial hatred and injustice.

1965: Suspects of the bombing emerge. Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, and Herman Frank Cash—four members of the Ku Klux Klan. Witnesses don’t speak up and physical evidence is determined insufficient, so no charges are filed.

1976: Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopens the case.

1977-now: Chambliss, Cherry, and Blanton are each eventually charged with the bombing. Chambliss and Cherry died in prison; Blanton was denied parole in 2016. Cash dies without being formally charged.

However, this timeline is missing an event not typically added to timelines of the Birmingham bombing.

 November 18, 1963: Jazz performer, John Coltrane, records “Alabama” which, although never verbally confirmed by Coltrane, is known as a musical eulogy for the victims of Birmingham.

The song features a melancholy melody, a much slower tempo than many of Coltrane’s songs, and a hauntingly sorrowful tone from Coltrane’s saxophone. These aspects not only capture the tragedy and sorrow of the Birmingham event, but of the human injustice that ignited the civil rights movement.

It is said that Coltrane was motivated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eulogy for the girls. This video, featuring King’s eulogy, also shows clips from the aftermath of the Charleston church shooting from 2015, which has evocative parallels to the 1963 Birmingham bombing:

In his eulogy, King states, “These children, unoffending, innocent and beautiful, were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity…They did not die in vain. God still has a way of bringing good out of evil.”

Jazz can be something joyful. It can be songs like “Sing, Sing, Sing” by Benny Goodman, it can be music that dozens dance to at weddings and in bars. But it can also be something politically motivated and inspired. “Alabama” was a source of solace for many individuals shaken by the tragedy; the rawness of the song shows the devastating nature of the bombing, but also the tragedy behind all African American lives lost during the Civil Rights Movement. Coltrane, a black musician, used what he knew best to make an impact on the Movement – music.

“Alabama,” among other politically motivated songs, remains known as an anthem of a kind for the Civil Rights Movement. Not an anthem that was sung during protests or at speeches by Civil Rights leaders, but that was heard on the radio and sparked a remembrance for the four girls who lost their lives in Birmingham in 1963.

Bibliography:

“1963 Birmingham Church Bombing Fast Facts.” CNN.com. https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/13/us/1963-birmingham-church-bombing-fast-facts/index.html (accessed November 8, 2019).

A John Coltrane Retrospective: The Impulse Years. Conducted by Eric Dolphy. Recorded November 10, 1998. Universal Music, 1998, Streaming Audio. https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity%7Crecorded_cd%7C694615. 

“Birmingham Bomb Planted.” New York Times (1923-Current File), Sep 21, 1963. https://search.proquest.com/docview/116602072?accountid=351.

“MLK’s 1963 eulogy after the Birmingham church bombing.” YouTube Video, 2:26. “CBS Evening News,” June 15, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKxb0FuFlTA

Sitton ,Claude, “Birmingham Bomb Kills Four Negro Girls” New York Times (1923-Current File), Sep 16, 1963. https://search.proquest.com/docview/116339790?accountid=351.

“The Story Behind “Alabama” by John Coltrane.” The Music Aficionado. https://musicaficionado.blog/2016/04/14/alabama-by-john-coltrane/ (accessed November 8, 2019).

What better use of the Manitou Messenger than to look into the history of the St. Olaf Choir! Having just gone on tour with the choir this past summer, I wanted to look into previous “homecoming” tours such as the tour of 1930. This tour, in particular, piqued my interest as it occurred during the depression and spanned 3 months and several countries, not including the winter tour to the south. Here is what the touring schedule included:

Manitou Messenger. June 3, 1930.

Manitou Messenger. June 3, 1930.

According to the SHAW-OLSON CENTER FOR COLLEGE HISTORY, the invitation to the celebration of the 900th anniversary of the Christianization of Norway was carefully considered and accepted [3]. This year, when preparing to leave for tour, it was emphasized that the return of the St. Olaf Choir was very much seen as a homecoming as I had stated and is further supported by Schmidt’s memoir [3].

My first question was primarily, how could students and their families afford a 3-month European tour during the Depression? One way was through selling sight-seeing tours for parties interested in touring with the choir which amounted to $6,500 then, approximates to $99,936 for adjusted inflation [2, 3]. Uff da! These additional funds were said to have alleviated some of the costs but any more details around financial issues were not mentioned [2]. More importantly, it was the celebration of Christianity being brought to Norway (as well as some good old fashioned sight-seeing!) that inspired donors and students alike. 

There was also mention of a farewell party, “to bid bon voyage” which I found endearing. Events surrounding the choir were published throughout the school year such as, “Choir Presents Concert Tonight In Minneapolis” on April 29th, 1930 and “Choir Leaves Northfield on European Tour,” June 3, 1930. A number of similar articles were published throughout the announcement of the tour and throughout the year. What I am trying to get at is 1) the events of the choir were always in the paper and 2) not even the great depression can stop the St. Olaf Choir from touring.

Works Cited:

[1] “Faculty Entertains Choir At Farewell Party Sunday; Speeches, Songs on Program.” Manitou Messenger, June 3, 1930. https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/45743203

[2] “Sale of Tickets Mounts as Norway Tour Approaches.” Manitou Messenger, January 7, 1930. https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/45744023

[3] Schmidt, Paul. “The 1930 European Tour,” Shaw-Olson Center for College History. St. Olaf College, 1967. https://wp.stolaf.edu/archives/my-years-at-st-olaf/the-1930-european-tour/

After its 1924 premiere in New York City, George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ caught the attention of both critics and audiences, and Gershwin became known as the “man who had brought jazz into the concert hall” [1]. Gershwin intentionally combined musical styles from the classical and jazz worlds, creating controversy due to the African-American roots of jazz. As current discourse surrounding appropriation constantly increases among musicians, one may wonder why Gershwin, who was not black, would insert jazz music into his classical compositions.

Gershwin (1898-1937) began as a song plugger in NYC’s Tin Pan Alley when he was only 15 years old. He later became involved in writing Broadway shows, and eventually started composing concert music [1]. 

As Evan Rapport describes in his article “Bill Finegan’s Gershwin Arrangements and the American Concept of Hybridity,” widespread ideas surround ‘white’ versus ‘black’ music were incredibly binary and distinct from one another during the 1920s. As a result, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ was considered a ‘symphonic jazz’ piece, a ‘hybrid’ of black and white music. Rapport states:

“[The concert] exploited the taboo appeal of playing music widely associated with popular entertainment and African Americans in a concert hall mostly patronized by wealthy white elites, with boasts such as “the first jazz concert that was ever given in the sacred halls of a symphonic hall“–although black composers and performers were absent from the concert, along with any mention of the black origins of jazz” [4].

Gershwin was so comfortable using black musical ideas because he regarded jazz as American, not specifically black, music; “In speaking of jazz there is one superstition . . . which must be destroyed. This is the superstition that jazz is essentially Negro. . . . Jazz is not Negro but American.” To Gershwin, “Jazz was ‘the voice of the American soul,’ which was ‘black and white . . . all colors and all souls unified in the great melting pot of the world’.” Others, however, believed that Gershwin was ‘diluting’ the quality of classical and jazz music by combining them [4].

Another fact to consider when speculating Gershwin’s intention behind ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is his Jewish heritage, and the “ambiguous racial position of Jewish Americans” at the time; “His Jewish race existed between black and white, linked to blackness and European otherness, and shaped by centuries of antisemitic rhetoric.” Gershwin’s use of jazz idioms could have therefore been geared “towards the possibility of immigrant assimilation and racial and social mobility in the New World” [4].

In a 1965 annual pops concert at the St. Olaf College Gymnasium was themed around Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ featuring a student as the piano soloist accompanied by the Chamber Band. The article describes the set-up:

“Tables for four complete with tablecloths and candles will cover the gym floor, thus providing a cozy atmosphere. These will be on a first come, first served basis. During the first intermission refreshments will be served to those seated at the tables. During the second intermission those at the tables will be asked to change places with those in the bleachers who will in turn be served refreshments” [3]. 

This article echoes Rapport’s description of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’s’ premiere; St. Olaf, filled with a mostly white audience,  attempts to turn its gymnasium into a prestigious concert hall complete with tablecloths, candles, and refreshments. In my opinion, “Rhapsody in Blue” is a valuable American piece to study and perform, but one must discuss and consider its racial context and origins to understand Gershwin’s musical intentions.

1. Carnovale, Norbert, Richard Crawford, and Wayne J. Schneider. “Gershwin, George.” Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press. Date of access 3 Nov. 2019, <https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000047026>
2.  Gershwin, George et al. Rhapsody in blue : American in Paris. Place of publication not identified: Vox, 1901. Print.
3.  “Pop concert features ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.” The Manitou Messenger (1916-2014),  No. 5, Vol.078, March 12, 1965, page(s): 1 https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/46103667
4.  Rapport, Evan. “Bill Finegan’s Gershwin Arrangements and the American Concept of Hybridity.” Journal of the Society for American Music 2.4 (2008): 507-30. ProQuest. 3 Nov. 2019 .

After realizing this blog post was due 3 days ago, I decided to search the term “Jazz” in the Manitou Messenger database just to see if there was anything of note.  Lo and behold, I found an advertisement for the Carleton graduate and cornet player Doc Evans and Dixieland Band in the October 23rd, 1959 edition:

[1]

(The only available records of Doc Evans were at Carleton, so here’s a recording I found on YouTube)

The advertisement seemed a little bit strange to me.  By calling his music “traditional” and “happy” jazz, it implies that his music being aesthetically “happier” makes it somewhat significant in the spectrum of jazz.  I would agree that Dixieland jazz is much peppier sounding, but it still seems like a weird emotional signifier in the context of jazz, which isn’t always the most jubilant music.  While I am also in Dave Hagedorn’s History of Jazz course, I should also point out that this advertisement and performance take place in 1959, which is a rather significant year for jazz in that it was the same year in which Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue released (and it is still the best selling jazz album of all time).  Obviously the comparison of Doc Evans to Miles Davis is a bit silly, but I think there is an implication that Doc Evans performs jazz the way it traditionally has been in contrast to Miles Davis and his iconoclastic approach to jazz.  Just for the sake of comparison, here’s “So What” from Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

After learning about how jazz had been commodified throughout the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s by featuring primarily white jazz artists like Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Bix Beiderbecke, and many others for consumers who were also primarily white, it does not seem unsettling to me that Doc Evans would be presented as such.  In fact, even the earliest recordings of jazz were from white groups such as the Original Dixieland Jass Band in 1917.  It’s likely that Doc Evans took it upon himself to learn jazz as it was “traditionally” performed and played in the Dixieland/NOLA style of the ’20s and ’30s because that was easier for him than learning the growing trend of swing and bebop.  Or it could have been the only thing for him to learn in Northfield, Minnesota.

Sources

[1] “Doc Evans brings Dixieland to delight Ole jazz fans.” Manitou Messenger, October 23, 1959.

The Manitou Messenger is primarily a modern source, giving us access to information very close to home. Many articles focus in on issues that are affecting students on the hill. One recent such issue being the large donation that was given to the music department last year, allowing international tours to become free for all members of the St. Olaf ensembles. That being, the St. Olaf ensembles that are given the huge privilege of touring every year. Anna Moen’s article from last spring brings attention to the fact that there are many more ensembles on this campus that will not receive any benefit from this huge donation, making the members of these ensembles once again feel discounted (Moen). One could argue that the department is spreading funds to where most music majors are placed in ensembles, but on the same hand, many music majors spend at least one year, if not all four, in ensembles other than the St. Olaf Band, Choir and Orchestra.

This unsteady dynamic between the top ensembles and the others can even be seen visually in concerts like the annual Christmas Fest. The St. Olaf Choir is placed at the front of the ensembles, making sure they draw focus. Even on the Christmas Fest website, the St. Choir and St. Olaf Orchestra are listed at the top of the ensembles list, showing they take priority before any other group even though there are more participants in other ensembles within the massed choir, like Chapel Choir.

In the world of music, it is very nearly impossible to not make distinction between individuals and groups based on personal preference or reputation. I don’t believe it is any one person’s doing that some ensembles are treated more favorably than others, and no student in any ensemble should feel guilty for their placement. However, they all deserve to feel valued, and it seems the department could be doing more to make the majority of the ensembles on this campus feel that way.

Moen, Anna. “Money Donated to Music Department Should Benefit All”. Manitou Messenger. St. Olaf College, March 21, 2019. https://www.manitoumessenger.com/2019/money-donated-to-music-department-should-benefit-all/

“The St. Olaf Christmas Festival”. St. Olaf College, 2019. https://christmas.stolaf.edu/

In a past blog post I explored a small evolution of the national anthem in written and notated forms, and this post I hope to extend a bridge from that topic towards my eventual final research topic of state songs. Finding common threads in state songs can be tricky, as distinct similarities between all of these tunes is rare. However, I believe looking at states with the older official state songs- and songs written at a similar time with a similar subject or tone- can provide important clues as to what sort of formula, template, or resemblance these pieces had with one another.

It was on Columbia Records “Great Songs of America”, compiled in 1961, that I found a recording of the song “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. While this is not the official state song of Texas (that honor goes to “Texas, Our Texas”), the piece offers an example of how a particular location is essentialized and remembered in American song. The song conjures ideas of a military march, complete with constant snare drums and occasional piccolo interludes between verses. The male chorus sings lively tune in tight harmony, with moments that sound almost like barbershop. The peppy tune uses vivid imagery of the Texas landscape, although there are varied versions to the lyrics when searching online. 

“The Yellow Rose of Texas” was known before the American Civil War, but became quite popular among the soldiers of the Confederate Army, especially those from the state. The song shared among these men fighting together created a camaraderie within the piece, a connotation that goes beyond simple performance practice. In addition, the piece has been situated in its own mythology of sorts, with a popular legend that a young woman by the name of Emily West aided in helping the Texans win a decisive battle in the war for independence from Mexico.¹ Scholarship has noted the inaccuracies in these mythologies², but the fact of the matter is that the piece still gained notoriety for representing a land that many young soldiers longed for and remembered as home.

Primary Source

Great songs of America. Place of publication not identified: Columbia Records, 1961.

Secondary Sources

1
https://www.civilwarheritagetrails.org/civil-war-music/the-yellow-rose-of-texas.html

As a relatively new country, America has had to define its own folk music rather forcefully, instead of allowing that definition to come about from hundreds and thousands of years of culture. Because of this, the line when it comes to what is considered folk music and what is not is relatively thin and grey. Folkways has been integral in this construction of a distinctly American folk music. 

Folkways was founded in 1948 by Moses (Moe) Asch and Marian Distler. Though the label also distributed “world music,” it was and is known best for its part in the 1950s American folk music revival. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, when the Smithsonian Institution acquired the label, that Folkways branched out into other genres. Now, Folkways releases  music from virtually every genre, with a Hip Hop anthology being released in 2020 (had to do my due intern diligence and plug it here).

So, why is this important? American folk music can be categorized and defined two different ways: as a genre and as a descriptor. Historically, American folk music as a genre has been very exclusive – meaning it has been dominated by white men of lower-middle and middle class backgrounds, and usually from rural/small-town America. As a descriptor, however, folk music has a much broader connotation. It is because of this that the Folkways of today looks little like the Folkways of 70 years ago. Blues, Jazz, and Hip Hop have all been recognized by Folkways as genres that fall within the definition of American folk as a descriptor. 

Volume 2 of Folkways Jazz Anthology (released in 1950, so one of the early signs of Folkways being a leading force in this new definition of folk music) is called The Blues. Both the foreword and the editor’s notes discuss the definition of the blues in a similar way to how I have discussed the definition of folk. The Blues is folk, it is defined by certain syncopations, an aural tradition, specific instruments, chords, and inflections, etc. My question is, there are so many characteristics specific to blues as a genre, but does that mean that tunes that have some of these characteristics and not others are not blues?

The blues are also defined in the liner notes as stemming from slavery and African/ African-American traditions. The content of the blues is often related to “protest, recrimination, and ridicule.” Because of the shifting and exclusive nature of these definitions, it is difficult to choose what to subscribe to. My personal favorite comes from Lead Belly, who defines the blues as a state of mind, saying, “Now I’ll tell you about the blues. All negros like blues. Why? Because they was born with the blues. And now, everybody have the blues. Sometimes they don’t know what it is. But when you lay down at night, turn from one side of the bed all night to the other and can’t sleep, what’s the matter? Blues got you.”

Now that rehearsals for Christmas Fest have begun, I thought it might be time to talk about every musician’s favourite (and longest) season of the year. The amount of Christmas and Christmas-adjacent winter music that musicians of all stripes play during the end of fall and winter is staggering. This is as true for pop musicians as it is for classical musicians, and it has been since the days of Tin Pan Alley. In fact, the origins of much of the most-played Christmas music comes from the times and artists that we’ve been discussing in regards to the sheet music extravaganza that was the early 20th century.

Think of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas,” or the many Christmas songs sung by old-time crooners like Bing Crosby. If you’ve been exposed to this music anywhere near as much as I have, the voices of these singers (along with a good 3 or 4 other arrangements) will pop immediately into your head. Much like the sheet music of the 1890s to 1920s, Christmas music floods the market every year in such quantity that there are many, many hits to be drawn upon. As Horacio Lopez discusses in his Manitou Messenger article, “Music on Trial,”  almost every artist that you can think of has released a Christmas album, be it Pentatonix, Nat King Cole, Kanye West, or R.Kelly (to mention a few of Lopez’ examples). Whether the majority of this massive musical output is any good is very much a matter of opinion. Lopez, calling himself Grandmaster Ho (presumably in reference to Grandmaster Flash and other hip hop icons), in fact doesn’t seem to like almost any of the songs he mentions. Instead, they are primarily sentimental to him, being from albums he was gifted or heard at Christmastime.

  On the other hand, Andrew King of Canadian Musician thinks that all the vast quantity of Christmas music has value, even if some of it the unifying force of people’s annoyance at hearing the same songs over and over again. He challenges his readers to seek out new or less-traditional Christmas songs, and to keep searching for the musical value in these pieces.

His argument reminded me of Dr. Epstein’s discussion of sheet music, in which the quantity of music makes said music simultaneously worthless and priceless. Claiming Christmas music as a unifying cultural force is certainly problematic – it comes from a Christian tradition drawing on pagan traditions, and isn’t representative of or important to a lot of people. However, here in North America Christmas, especially Christmas music, has an unquestionably lengthy reach into our collective cultural experience.

Works Cited:

1. Lopez, Horacio. “Music on Trial: Not-so-Traditional Christmas Jingles to Jangle the Soul.” Manitou Messenger, 9 Dec. 2013, www.manitoumessenger.com/2013/music-on-trial-not-so-traditional-christmas-jingles-to-jangle-the-soul/.
2. King, Andrew. “In Defense of Holiday Music.” Canadian Musician, vol. 41, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2019. Music Periodicals Database, EBSCOhost, ISSN: 0708-9635p. 9.

There is no question that jazz as a genre experienced much success throughout the 20th century. Around 1960, after it had begun to be replaced in popularity by rock n’ roll and bebop, its live performance was revived in part in New Orleans’ French Quarter.^[1] Preservation Hall provided a space for aging jazz musicians to return to their art. “Almost all of the musicians have given up any work other than music, and have benefited from the new respect accorded to the New Orleans musician.”^[2] Several jazz bands became affiliated with the space, among them the Wendell Brunious Band and Jim Robinson’s New Orleans Band. Manitou Messenger published an article in praise of the former,^[3] and Halvorson Music Library has a record including recordings by the latter. But this success carried with it the baggage of preservation.

The back cover of the record suggests overtones unsettlingly similar to those of the “Vanishing Indian” phenomenon. The album–indeed, even the name  of the hall which hosts the musicians performing on it–could be seen as portraying jazz as something which might fit well in a museum. If minstrelsy is understood to be an obsessive fascination with blackness, using primitiveness and exaggerated emotions as tropes to make something unsettling or intimidating approachable, seeing jazz as part of a bygone era that ought to be preserved meant society no longer feared blackness in music and could look to it for inspiration.

It should be noted that the founders of Preservation Hall, Allan and Sandra Jaffe, were white, and so could have had analogous attitudes toward jazz as MacDowell had toward Native music. That is, as a source of inspiration for new, less “other” art, even if the dominant race of performers at the Hall was still black.

The Jaffe family

But this is not the only presentation of these groups on the album. While it clarifies that performers at the Hall don’t typically take requests (suggesting a static, less improvisatory style), it says that they do play popular and folk music alongside the traditional pieces that are being preserved, with more “consistently better” performance than before. Many of the performers also personally played at the turn of the century, when jazz was first taking off. The Mess also calls out the mixing of disciplines to create Preservation Hall’s style, as well as the improvisation which does in fact take center stage.

St. Olaf’s interest, in a region of the country comprised mostly of white people, could be seen as merely scholarly, fascinated by something which was unique and “other,” or as genuine interest in a revived tradition with new ideas to offer. Regardless, interest in jazz from all demographics has grown; whether this is seen as a black art being taken by white artists after its “death” or new creative cooperation, the genre has carved itself a lasting place in the repertory.

[1]   “History.” Preservation Hall. Accessed: http://preservationhall.com/hall/history/

[2]   Pierce, De De, and Billie Pierce. 1963. Jazz at Preservation Hall, II. Atlantic.

[3]   Hosch, Jennifer. 1992. “Artist Series introduces traditional style of New Orleans improvisational jazz.” Manitou Messenger. Accessed:  https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/44949516

The blog post for this week has been based on this short article[1] from St. Olaf College’s very own Manitou Messenger published on October 20^th, 1925:

This touches on a couple of interesting topics. Firstly, the fact that a white American man is categorized as a composer of “negro spirituals”. Secondly, it seems to me that the fact that someone was trying to promote Afro-American music, however narrowly defined as it may be, certainly got the attention of the unnamed writer of the article, hence the choice of title. This could indicate that this was an unusual topic for the time, and this might very well be an attempt to spark a discussion in the newspaper, and to draw in the readers.

The writer does not give any details of what “the Reverend M. A. Christenson” viewed as the American folk- sound, and if he personally differentiated between American folk songs and negro spirituals as stated in the article, as if they are separate from each other and had no connections whatsoever. I admit that this is slightly speculative, but it seems to me that what in the title seems like an attempt to advocate for African American music, is actually endorsing the separatist tendency we see in the scholarly writings of the time, trying to define American music history. He wants to praise the music, but trough white man’s authority and as his creation. This is of course based on the presumption that Christenson of Portland, Oregon is not an African American, this might be the case, but then the argument he is making might seem a bit regressive.

In the Vinyl collection I found this collection of Stephen Foster Favourites, containing a 1978 recording of “My Old Kentucky Home”, the song that superseded Christenson’s address. The Robert Shaw Chorale sings “My Old Kentucky Home” with a straight rhythm, classical technique, and the song itself is harmonised in a simple SATB-chorale style “spiced up” by some counterpoint nearing the end of the piece. This seems very “on-brand” when you look at the cover art for the record. The description in the back, if not in a bit condescending and romanticising way, does not, however, deny the Afro-American influence on Foster’s compositions:

“[…] he was under the spell of the minstrel shows, the singing of the Negroes […] on the riverboats from the South, and of the Negro worshippers in a little church near his childhood home”

Bever and Robinson in their 2018 article[2] on “My Old Kentucky Home” they write about the controversy surrounding it being sung annually at the Kentucky Derby. This discussion was seemingly sparked due to to the removal of Fosters rather racially unsensitive statue, made in 1900 and situated in Pittsburgh,  a few months earlier. Bever and Robinson quote critics expressing that the statue

“glorifies white appropriation of black culture, and depicts the vacantly smiling musician in a way that is at best condescending and at worst racist,”[3].

As much can also be said about Fosters music, and the way his role in the American musical canon has been presented both in the 1924, 1978 and as well as his borrowing from African American culture shows that much is glossed over to find that holy grail of authentic music without dealing with a painful past. The same goes for using his music for the sake of tradition in our own time. Bever and Robinson also include a quote by  Forster biographer Ken Emerson, which I chose to end this post with:

“ “Ironically,” Emerson said, “here is a song that was inspired by a great abolitionist novel, and which no less a leader than Frederick Douglass himself singled out as a song that awakens the sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish. So, like all of Foster’s music, it’s thick with contradictions that, to this day, I think, are part of the American experience.” “[4]

Sources:

“Chapel Speaker Praises Composer of Negro Songs”. The Manitou Messenger. No. 6, Vol.039, October  20th, 1925. Page 4. Northfield, United States https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/45709272

Bever, Lindsey. Robinson, Lynda. “‘My Old Kentucky Home’: The Kentucky Derby’s beloved, fraught singalong about slavery”.  The Washngton Post. May 5, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/05/05/my-old-kentucky-home-the-kentucky-derbys-beloved-fraught-sing-along-about-slavery/ [Accessed October 30^th, 2019

Photo:

Statue of Stephen Foster https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/tojNvSZQTrTrpF2qfCst1OWMJP0=/1440×0/smart/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/SNJPNNFVZUZFRHAVFS6W7LYOUE.jpg  [Accessed 30.10.2019]

[1] The Manitou… 1925: p. 4

[2] Bever and Robinson 2018

[3] Ibid

[4] ibid

While St. Olaf College has been well known for a strong choral program since its inception, as it turns out Jazz didn’t take long to become a part of music on campus. In fact, during the 1920’s Jazz music was regularly positioned as an opposing musical form to choral music. In a 1924 visit to St. Olaf by Princeton Professor Dr. J Duncan Spaeth, a Manitou Messenger article quotes him saying

“The production of your choir, alone would make St. Olaf a worth while institution,” said Dr. Spaeth. “To hear a choir sing classical music, and sing it well, in this age of jazz, is to me, a spiritual bath. I feel that people who have learned to appreciate the type of music sung by your choir, should also be able to discriminate between the genuine and the jazz in poetry, art, journalism, and drama.”¹

St. Olaf Choir album from 1949

While Dr. Spaeth’s biases (he continues on to praise the “Nordic” appearance as “refreshing in comparison to foreign types” and makes an argument against co-ed teaching) undoubtedly reveals his racist sentiments about the value of classical music as superior to Jazz, he is not alone in this opinion. In fact, both choir and jazz come up many times in the 1920s and 1930s as moral opponents. However, students also expressed their frustration through the campus news paper. In 1933, a Campus Opinion article wrote this notable complaint

“Maybe people at large would begin to realize that actual human beings attended school at St. Olaf if our “Jazz Band” programs were broadcast. Why be afraid to admit that St. Olaf is not a monastery? Too many false presentations of Manitou life have already escaped. Surely the criticisms of a pep orchestra would be neglible in comparison to the criticism of other “evils,” if all were known.”²

A 1925 “Student Pulse” article started with the important claim that Jazz was not being played on the campus radio show despite possible students efforts to have it played.

“[Correction: An error based on misinformation as to facts inadvertently crept into the Student Pulse column of last week’s issue. Careful perusal of recent WCAL programs will disclose the fact that the station is not now, nor has it been broadcasting Saturday night “jazz” programs.]”³

While campus attitudes almost 100 years later don’t represent the same perspectives on choral superiority, the Vinyl collection is heavily skewed towards choral recordings. A quick library search yields 43 Jazz recordings, only one of which is by the award-winning St. Olaf Jazz Band whereas there are some 225 vinyl records by St. Olaf Choral Ensembles. Vinyl is particularly interesting in this context because it has been passed on as a preferred recording technique, and offers a snapshot of what the school was choosing to not only save, but to sell. The St. Olaf Jazz recording, on the other hand, is from 2017 and heralds a slightly more futuristic view of where St. Olaf Music could be going.

St. Olaf Jazz Band Album

As a choir member on campus, I sometimes find myself quick to disregard complaints that St. Olaf Music favors the choirs too heavily.  However, in that act of dismissal I am engaging in a centuries-old practice of prioritizing a specific musical form which causes true detriment to the success of other types of music at St. Olaf. How do we celebrate legacies of music that are known for excellence and tradition when that recognition was partially entrenched by creating an environment that punished other types of music?

Since reading Carol Oja’s article, “West Side Story and The Music Man: Whiteness, Immigration, and Race in the U.S. During the Late 1950s,” I’ve wondered how the existence of movie versions affect how musicians study and perform the shows.¹ Movies act as time capsules, whereas broadway shoes, even iconic ones, have opportunities to be reimagined year after year as social climates change. Does an actor’s race (or the race they are made to resemble in the case of West Side Story’s Maria) cement how that role is portrayed in high school/college level productions?

During the 2013-2014 school year, the theater department put on a production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights.” In her article Julia Pilkington noted that “the musical was selected in part because of its significance in the context of a college campus: Students come from various corners of the country and world, live here at St. Olaf College and are contemplating where they will go with their lives.”² It is true that this is central to the plot, but outside of the Spanish pronunciation coachings the cast received, it seems that the cultural implications of being a Latinx person in Manhattan was not central as it was in the original production.

A discussion about the stakes of movie productions is timely considering the impending release of a movie version of “In the Heights” in which one of the original cast members of “Hamilton” plays the lead role.

Just like West Side Story or the Music Man before it, this version of In the Heights will undoubtedly influence if schools like St. Olaf choose whether or not to tackle this show. When Hamilton starts reaching high school theater departments with the same consistency as West Side Story, what will the cast look like? If there is a movie version of Hamilton, will that affect how it gets performed? Although this post relies on many hypothetical questions, they are questions that theater departments internationally will inevitably face as critical conversations of race (and performing race) continue to fill musical conversations.

“Easy to listen to…” 

…were the words used to describe George Gershwin’s works in a 1949 piano faculty recital, according to the Manitou Messenger[1]. That evening, Prof. Joseph Running of St. Olaf College performed a piano concert consisting of all American works. He stated in his interview with The Mess that he is “desperately anxious to be a missionary for the contemporaries.” With this in mind, he programmed White Peacock and Sonata by Charles Griffes, Variations on a Bavarian Dance and The Camptown Races by Paul Nordoff, and the “easy to listen to” Three Preludes for Solo Piano by George Gershwin. (I found a recording of Gershwin, himself, playing them here!)

I took a listen to Gershwin’s Three Preludes, and what struck me is that while they may “easy to listen to” because they make us listeners want to tap our toe, they are not this way because of having a simple harmony or rhythm. In 1986, Leonard Pennario, the American pianist who performed Three Preludes on the LP recording I found in Halvorson Library’s Vinyl Collection, stated that,

“Gershwin’s music is very dear to my heart and is among the most beautiful music ever created.”[2]

People today find Gershwin’s Three Preludes just as beautiful and encapsulating of the American spirit as they did over 60 years ago. Nana Kwame, a Youtube user, commented,

“[They] just give you that ‘New York’ spirit.”[3]

Likewise, Dimitri A. commented on Youtube,

“Simply beautiful. Prelude #1 and #2 always give me the goosebumps. Gershwin was a genius.”[4]

As we’ve learned from readings and discussions in class, not all music that had its origins in Tin Pan Alley has had such long-lasting success. Each of the three movements of Gershwin’s piece are motif- or riff-driven: the first prelude is built upon a blue-note riff, the second is a blues-y lullaby, and the third combines these blues elements and sets them to a Caribbean beat. When I was listening to the LP and reading the YouTube and Mess reviews, I realized that Gershwin’s music contains a kind of “glue” that has influenced the American pop music genre: riffs. This riff-based inspiration is something that can be found in most any popular song to this day. Today’s #1 song on the USA pop charts is Selena Gomez’s Lose You to Love Me… a song that is based upon a riff that the piano opens with.

Because Gershwin’s innovations never departed from American pop music, his music has trained the American music consumer’s ear to find riff-based pieces… easy to listen to.

Primary Sources:

[1] “Running Is All-American In Last of Recital Series.” The Manitou Messenger, May 6, 1949. Accessed October 28, 2019. https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/45919778.

[2] George Gershwins Song Book & Other Music for Piano Solo, 1986.

Secondary Sources:

[3] “George Gershwin: Three Preludes.” YouTube. YouTube, July 29, 2008. Accessed October 30, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4yLMxaqWIM.

[4] Ibid.

African-American composers and performers have long been disregarded and ignored in the American music industry. But visibility and exposure are the not the only problems they have faced; even when performances or recordings featured music by African-American composers, for example, they often did so in a way that presented these works as peripheral.

While searching through old articles written in The Manitou Messenger, one particular review of a vocal performance stuck out to me. The article is a review of a Canadian baritone, Cameron McLean, who performed at St. Olaf on December 6, 1923. Apart from several unintentional roasts by the author (“It was pleasing, but not especially brilliant”), one of the opening descriptions of the repertoire caught my eye. The author details the program, saying “His native Scotch songs were features of the program, although he presented several from other sources, Italian, American, Russian and German. One negro spiritual was also included.”¹

https://www.manitoumessenger.com/

Listing the spiritual song as separate from all of the other pieces featured is just one example of a way music by African-Americans was othered even when it was performed. By all rights, the spiritual should be included in the previously mentioned category of “American music,” but instead, it is viewed as something different that must be mentioned on its own. In addition to this, the actual content of the review specifically calls out the two spiritual-esque songs, “The Gospel Train” and “Goin’ Home” as weaker parts of the performance.² It could very well be that the reviewer just thought the McLean did not connect with these pieces as well or that his performance was technically weaker, but I suspect the author had a personal and societally enforced bias against these songs.

When I Have Sung My Songs: The American Art Song 1900-1940, New World Records. 1976.

Though it came earlier in time, an album of “American Art Songs” found in the music library was less blatant in its othering of African-American spirituals. The album, called “When I Have Sung My Songs,” features twenty art songs by American composers, including three by H. T. Burleigh.³ While these three are not blatantly treated any differently than the rest of the songs on the record, the cover material does seem to set them apart a bit. There is a large informational timeline entitled “Highlights of German Immigrant Influence in the United States, 1859-1918” that takes up half of the back cover. Digging deeper into the other composers featured in the album, I found that the majority had connections to Germany. From Edward MacDowell, who studied in Germany, to Walter Damrosch, who was born in Germany, it seemed like German-influenced American composers were the theme of the album, with African-American composers such as H. T. Burleigh and J. Rosamond Johson once again conspicuously outsiders.

Clearly, even when African-American composers did begin to gain a little attention and exposure in the American classical music scene, the battle was not won. The early twentieth century may have allowed them to have a corner of the spotlight, but the way they were presented still made it clear that they did not fully belong.

Footnotes:

While browsing the LPs available at the St Olaf Halvorson Music Library, I came across an interesting find:

This is an LP entitled “White Spirituals,” recorded by the Atlantic Record Label in 1959.  It comes from their Southern Folk Heritage Series, and contains 14 songs (7 per side) of various style and origin.  The timing of the album is what brought my suspicion, as 1959 seems a peculiar time to publish such a collection, and remarkably close to the Civil Rights Movement.  In fact, the 1950s saw a resurgence of racially motivated killings and beatings, as well as less violent forms of segregation.  1954 saw the passing of Brown v Board of Education, which received quite a bit of pushback in many states throughout the US.  1957 saw the passing of the civil rights act, propelled by the protests of Martin Luther King Jr in Montgomery starting in 1955-1956.  1959, the year this album was published, saw Mack Charles Parker beaten in his Jail cell by a mob while he stood awaiting trial for raping a pregnant white woman.  Parker was lynched shortly after in a park.

This brief racial history of the 1950s in the US serves to give us a backdrop for this album and its insistence on “White Spirituals.”  If George Pullen Jackson is to be believed, all spirituals have their origins in white music.  In fact, George Pullen Jackson had written most of his work between 10-20 years prior to this albums recording, so its possible that the producers were familiar with his work and seeking to support his hypotheses.  Interestingly though, it seems as not all of the recorded songs would support Jackson.

There are three in particular that seem to point this album towards the path of cataloguing, rather than racial politicking.  A5-A7 are all songs in the Lining Out or Sacred Harp style, an easily identifiable style of music popular in the Appalachian and Southern Churches, although they were brought to prominence in New England before the independence of the colonies.  After seeing these three songs, I looked into the other artists and they are all quite prominent musicians of the southern Gospel tradition.  Estil C Ball is the most prominently featured musician, and he is a songwriter/singer/guitarist performing his own original music, informed by the bluegrass tradition in Appalachia.  This is to say, I don’t believe this album is a political statement towards the whiteness inherent in spirituals at all.  The title does not refer to spirituals in the “Negro Spiritual” sense, but rather songs of the south that are sacred in nature.

This is all a longwinded, and potentially completely unwanted explanation, on how my personal biases have been shown rather false.  I was struck and intrigued by an album called White Spirituals, and I hoped it would be a treasure trove of racist bile.  My confirmation bias led me to initially criticize the album for being published at such a time.  In the end, however, research won out and showed me an example of good musicological work with an unfortunate title.

In 1971, the Archive of Folk and Jazz Music released a new record: “Pete Fountain: New Orleans All Stars.” On the back of the record packaging, there is a Statement of Purpose saying that the Archive wishes to bring historic jazz and folk records to the general public, as the modern jazz and folk music does not represent the “sincerity and soul of the [original] artists” ¹

So, the Archive has taken it upon themselves to find and clean previously released records by jazz performers they find authentic who may have been robbed of the opportunity to record in a quality studio.

They hope to recognize these artists and ensure that the public is receiving top-notch recordings from “true” jazz performers.

“Pete Fountain: New Orleans All Stars” was one of those records. It was originally published in 1957 and featured songs such as “Jazz me Blues” and “South Rampart Street Parade.” Fountain was introduced to music early on, as his father played with various bands around Mississippi and Fountain eventually played with prominent bands before creating his own group, “Pete Fountain and his Three Coins.” In the records, you can hear Fountain implementing staple aspects of jazz, including blues notes and polyrhythm.

“Pete Fountain: New Orleans All Stars” record cover

In 1956, only one year before Pete Fountain released the original record, the St. Olaf Manitou Messenger published an article titled “An Introduction to Jazz,” written by Allan Townsend. It was published in a section called “Arts and the Man” and was written in anticipation of pianist Don Shirley’s visit to campus.  Townsend writes, “At last the great white gods of the conservative circles have been forced to openly recognize Jazz as a truly creative art.”² According to Townsend, Shirley is honored as the missing link between classical and jazz music.

However, Townsend opens the next paragraph with, “Without being burned for heresy, we can now look at Jazz for what it really is—America’s greatest cultural contribution to the creative arts of the world.”²

Townsend’s article in the Manitou Messenger

He finishes: “Jazz is American. It breathes of the very stuff that has gone into making you and me what we are, and we should make an effort to learn about our own culture.”²

Both Townsend and the Archive of Folk and Jazz Music take authority in determining what they think is authentic jazz. However, they seem to have a similar opinion that jazz is a product of American culture. 

Sure, Shirley and Fountain are a part of American culture, but does that mean that jazz comes from America?

In my opinion, the answer is “no.” We can’t say that America is the birthplace of jazz, when two fundamental aspects of jazz that Fountain featured in his record—polyrhythm and blues notes—come from African roots. We can’t say that America is the birthplace of jazz if another factor of jazz, call and response, is a pattern characterized in African music. ³

Townsend says that jazz is in American culture, and yes, jazz has become a part of American culture, but that doesn’t mean that America created jazz. 

Whether Shirley and Fountain are “authentic” jazz musicians is a different question, but it is unquestionable that they are Americans who have infused jazz into American culture, not Americans performing American music. Jazz comes from roots all around the world; while Townsend and the Archive may want to claim jazz as America’s musical genius, it is simply not the case.

Bibliography:

Cover of St. Olaf Orchestra’s 2005 recording of Highway One, USA by William Grant Still

In 2005 St. Olaf Orchestra recorded William Grant Still’s Highway One, USA under conductor Philip Brunelle. This recording recently made national news in the New York Times’ article “Operas by Black Composers Have Long Been Ignored. Explore 8.” Here, the St. Olaf recording is linked as the go-to alongside a shout-out for a recording from Sony’s 1970s Black Composers Series. Luckily, both of these recordings are available through the libraries, the former in an online database and the latter in the Halvorson Vinyl Record collection.

Cover of the Black Composers Series recording of Highway One, USA

The Black Composers Series is a 9-volume box set featuring works by William Grant Still, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, Ulysses Simpson Kay, George Theophilus Walker, Roque Cordero, José Mauricio Nuñes-Garcia, and José White, among others. In addition to the arias “What Does He Know of Dreams?” and “You’re Wonderful, Mary” from Highway 1, USA, Still’s Afro-American Symphony and Sahdji: Ballet for Orchestra and Chorus are featured. The inside cover notes that this 1986 reissue was a project by the Committee on the Status of Minorities of The College Music Society in consultation with the Center for Black Music Research, firmly situating the album in a socio-political agenda of representation.

Liner Notes from St. Olaf Orchestra’s recording

While the Black Composers Series is valuable in providing an anthology of recordings that have been often marginalized, St. Olaf Orchestra’s recording is arguably more in line with Still’s ambitions because it presents the opera without qualifying it based on the composer’s race. By presenting the opera as it would any other recording, the publication avoids further alienating or segregating works in the classical music genre.

Because the St. Olaf Orchestra recorded this in collaboration with the accomplished Twin Cities-based VocalEssence, I went into the Manitou Messenger archives eager to find content about the recording’s process and reception. Unfortunately, despite extensive digging I was unable to find anything about the recording. Much less notable concerts were covered, including what felt like an endless slew of post-tour home concert summaries.

Although I was unable to find anything about the recording session of Still’s opera, I was so excited to see the headline “St. Olaf Orchestra concert to feature wide variety of composers” come from a March 1996 article of the Manitou Messenger. Since we’ve been talking about racial representation in classical music, and performing works by marginalized groups is one way to reform this narrative, I was interested to see what this article had to say about the concert.

I was more than a little disappointed when the “diversity” I expected to see was no other than the white-boy trinity of Igor Stravinsky, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and Samuel Barber. In addition to being Euro-centric and commonly performed as a part of the Western Classical Canon (although perhaps not household names for those unfamiliar with the genre), they are all 20^th century composers. The author does not address why he considers this to be a “wide variety.”

Works Cited

DeRose, Jason. „St. Olaf Orchestra concerto to feature wide variety of composers.” The Manitou Messenger 13, vol. 109. March 15, 1996. 9. https://stolaf.eastview.com/browse/doc/44807752.

Still, William Grant. “What Does He Know of Dreams?” from Highway 1, USA, London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Freeman. Black Composers Series, CBS Records. The College Music Society, 1986. Vinyl recording.

Still, William Grant. “You’re Wonderful, Mary” from Highway 1, USA, London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul Freeman. Black Composers Series, CBS Records. The College Music Society, 1986. Vinyl recording.

The chill in the air around campus has started to make me think of the approaching Christmas season. Every year the caf fires up its ovens to make Fest Food ™, a huge Christmas tree is put up in Buntrock, and you may find students watching a particular movie huddled up in their dorms: A Charlie Brown Christmas. 

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7g87qh

Released on December 6th, 1965, “‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ incorporated unexpected elements in its animation – the voices of children instead of trained adults, jazz music, a Bible passage, and no laugh track [1].” Created from the popular comic strip by Charles Shultz, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” had a large sponsorship when it first premiered with the coca-cola franchise (in the midst of the pepsi/ coke wars). “In 1966,  “A Charlie Brown Christmas” would go on to win a Peabody and an Emmy for outstanding children’s programming, The success of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” changed the network’s prime-time philosophy [1].”

I would argue that the most well-known aspect of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is the music. The music from the Charlie Brown Christmas special is engrained on millions of American memories, including my own. “Christmas Time is Here,” and “Skating” were both originals created for the show and are now sung around the world during the holidays. American jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi composed most of the music himself, while including traditional Christmas hymns such as “O Tannenbaum” and “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.” In 2012 the album was added to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry list of “culturally, historically, or aesthetically important” American sound recordings

While looking through St. Olaf College’s Vinyl collection, I was shocked at how many versions and remakes the college owns of the songs from the original album:

There’s something about this film that seems to hit a chord with people (pun intended). According to Conlan Campbell of the Manitou Messenger:

“I’m not a particularly big fan of Christmas media or a particularly big fan of the Peanuts series, but every year I find myself drawn to the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Unlike most holiday specials, this one does not feel to me like an aside or cash-in on Christmas iconography. There is some essential quality in this film that sets it apart to me, making it perfect. […] Beyond the narrative, all the compositional elements are in perfect interplay. Vince Guaraldi’s iconic low-key jazz backs up almost every scene and the environments feel authentic. The world is flat and simple, but immersively so. Nature is compact but always shifting and the indoors feel cozy and certain. The night sky is constantly changing and the scale feels like childhood. What was small in a moment becomes immensely large and the characters shrink into it [3].”

Campbell is not alone is his love for the show. Over 15 million households around America (nearly half of all American television sets) tuned into the Christmas special on the night of December 6th, 1965, and it has run at least once every year after (2019 will be its fifty-fourth year!). This sweet, unassuming children’s special has turned into a musical tradition for generations of Americans, and remains a timeless part of American popular culture.

Sources

[1 Hagen, Carrie. “The ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Special Was the Flop That Wasn’t.” Smithsonian, 9 Dec. 2015.

[2] St. Olaf College Vinyl Collection, accessed Oct. 29, 2019.

[3] Campbell, Conlan. “Charlie Brown Film Achieves Perfection.” Manitou Messenger, 11 Feb. 2018.

© National Portrait Gallery, London Poldowski (Régine (née Wieniawski), Lady Dean Paul) by Bassano Ltd http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

The composer I’d like to center this blog around is one whose music I was introduced to last year when I was searching for female composers. Although she went by a handful of names, her pieces were published under the name of Poldowski, a nom de plume that had no signifier of her gender. She was born in Brussels in 1879, moved to England around the turn of the century, adopted British citizenship when she married in 1901, and composed art songs in french [2,3]. She isn’t an American however I found the intricacies of her background parallel to how we have been discussing identity in music. She did, however, “concertize” in the United States for two winters and a summer. Her passing in 1932 led to some striking obituaries, one in particular was in the New York Times ten years after she had visited. The obituary discussed the fame she had gained in both Paris and London and how her concerts in the United States helped to establish her as a great “writer of songs” in comparison to Debussy [2]. In that same obituary, certain musical qualities were associated to parts of her race:

“Through an Irish mother, she inherited an added gift of the fantastic and paradoxical in humor with the mixture of Polish ancestry, which gave her music the complex sadness and gaiety of harmonization….”

We don’t often discuss the essentialization of white composers since whiteness has become a term of homogeneity but it’s informative to see articles such as these that othered composers of different nationalities. 

What caught my eye, in particular, was an article she had written called, “The Influence of Jazz” in 1927. She is reflecting on the influence of Jazz on orchestrated music and her conclusion is:

“To admit the influence of jazz on music, is to admit the influence of cocktails on vineyards, or the cinema on painting! A composite American device is not a new creation, or any sort of creation, it is a stimulant, and a very good and healthy one, if kept in its own sphere.” [2] 

She compares jazz musicians to Wagner and Stravinsky and claims that the two were geniuses whereas jazz musicians are “stunt-monger[ers]”[2]. This type of critique is outdated but important to look back on, especially when choosing art-song composers to perform.  

Although she asked as she was dying, “Do look after my music!” I feel hesitant to continue to do so [1]. 

Works Cited

[1] Drucker, Ruth et al. “A Collection of art songs by women composers .” 1998: n. pag. Print.

[2] Brand, Myra. “POLDOWSKI (LADY DEAN PAUL): HER LIFE AND HER SONG SETTINGS OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH POETRY.” ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 1979. Web.

[3] Kness, Karen. “An analytical comparison of the art song style of Poldowski with the styles of Debussy and Fauré.” (2012).

Samuel Floyd Jr. and Rae Linda Brown both allude to the tight community of black composers during the Harlem Renaissance, but I did not process the significance of this until I read some of W.C. Handy’s letters to William Grant Still. Even reading just a few of these letters gave me a much better idea of the relationship between Still and Handy.

Brown notes that Still worked for Pace & Handy’s publishing company first in Memphis and then in New York, acknowledging that:

“Handy’s office was to become important in Still’s career. It was here that prominent black musicians met and made personal contacts so critical to their professional survival.”(72)

Letters between Handy and Still prove an intimately personal in addition to professional relationship. This relationship is most obvious in the non-musical discourse between the two, particularly the familiarity of their greetings and discussions. Handy’s salutations most commonly read “Dear Friend Still,” and he routinely closes with a greeting from his wife or an update on the health of his two daughters, Katherine and Lucille.

My personal favorite letter dates from April 29, 1941. I am particularly drawn to it because of the synthesis of personal endearment and professional collaboration.

From the first section of the letter it is clear that Handy has sent Still a “script” for his scrapbook. Although the exact context is unclear, my interpretation is that this was a speech of Handy’s. Here, the professional is closely intertwined with the personal; the speech itself was most likely professional in its content, but the familiar tone of the letter suggests that it was sent to his friend simply for Still’s enjoyment. The paragraph closes with a promise to make a new disc so that Still’s son Duncan will have a recording of Handy’s voice.

In addition to a discussion of sponsorship, new recordings, and the recent Ziegfeld picture, it is clear that Handy’s primary reason for writing this letter was to ask for advice on what he should charge for an appearance in Birth of the Blues as well as for a book. This simple request demonstrates the familiarity with which Handy is able to ask for Still’s opinion and shows that their close relationship is still rooted in their professional lives.

W.C. Handy and William Grant Still, 1939-40.

The letters of this collection are important to see how personal relationships worked alongside the professional musical output of this period. Based on this (albeit limited) evidence, I think Brown’s statement can be amended to include the importance of personal contacts to their social as well as professional survival.

Works Cited

Brown, Rae Linda. “William Grant Still, Florence Price, and William Dawson: Echoes of the Harlem renaissance.” Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays. Ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr.. New York: Greenwood Press, 1990. 71-86.

Handy, W.C. and Eileen Southern. “Letters from W.C. Handy to William Grant Still.” The Black Perspective in Music , no. 2 (1979):199-234. Accessed October 26, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214322.

This week was the first time I was able to really sit down and skim through materials useful for my final essay. Overall, I am interested in understanding Chicago concert music life between 1915 and 1930 to show that geographically limited micro-histories help us better understand musical life (as opposed to blanketing all music making under a period marked as a precursor to the Chicago Renaissance). Two books in particular, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and Their Music¹ and Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878-1943² make something very clear: community and camaraderie were vastly important to American composers, especially African-American ones. During my time at St. Olaf, part of which I thought I was going to major in composition, the “composer” stereotype described a person who spent most of their time locked in a room alone, maybe with a piano, writing. However, this representation shows no grounding in the black artistic communities of Chicago.

One great example of such a community surrounded the composer and pianist Margaret Bonds. Bonds grew up in Chicago and learned to play piano from her musical mother, Estella Bonds, and Florence Price. She attended Northwestern University, and continued to teach and work in Chicago until age 26. In addition to her mentors Florence and Estella, her writings and letters reveal some of the most reputable names in black artistic life. For example, early in her career, Bonds worked with prominent soprano Abbie Mitchell. And early on, Bonds was introduced to Mitchell’s then husband, Will Marion Cook, marking the beginning of a life-long working relationship.”³

Or for example, the beginning of Bonds’ friendship with Langston Hughes:

“I actually met [Langston]…after I came out of the university. The first time I saw Langston was at Tony’s house in Chicago, Tony Hill, the ceramicist. Finally he came to my house. My family rolled out the red carpet. We were like brother and sister, like blood relatives.”⁴

My initial reaction to reading these letter excerpts was, “Wow Margaret was popular”. I’m sure that it was partly because of the political environment — because African Americans were shut out of other communities, they especially relied on one another. While this might have been true to a certain extent, why was I surprised that this musical community was so intertwined? Humans are social beings. We spend our lives building connections that produce more connections. However, maybe I was surprised because of the way we are traditionally taught history. In my experience, the names of community members, families, or others who helped the success of one person are often left out of history. This is especially when it comes to celebrities. I hope that in the future, these names will be included more and more.

After my previous blog post, I left feeling somewhat incomplete about Virgil Thomson’s opinion of American opera not having a distinctive voice and how Thomson ignored George Gershwin’s works entirely, especially Porgy and Bess.  I wanted to investigate further if there may be a possible reason why Thomson made such an omission.  While I could not find any readily-available correspondences of Gershwin, I did manage to discover an interesting transcription of a letter by a University of Michigan undergraduate student that was discovered in the DuBose Heyward archives held by the South Carolina Historical Society.  This letter was written “about a year and a half before Porgy and Bess‘s premiere in September of 1935″ to DuBose Heyward, the author of the novel Porgy, which was the source material for Gershwin’s opera.  After discussing his early work on the music and the script, he describes seeing 4 Saints In 3 Works, an opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson:

I saw “4 Saints In 3 Acts”, an opera by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, with a colored cast. The libretto was entirely in Stein’s manner, which means that it has the effect of a 5-year-old child prattling on. Musically, it sounded early 19th Century, which was a happy inspiration and made the libretto bearable – in fact, quite entertaining. There may be one or two in the cast that would be useful to you. us [handwritten]. [1]

It is as though Gershwin saw Thomson’s opera as an opportunity to say “I like what you’ve done with this, but watch me do it better.”  If so, that is one hell of a flex on Virgil Thomson.  However, after reading some of the correspondence between Thomson and Gertrude Stein, I would imagine that Thomson felt that his work had not payed off to the reception that he had anticipated:

21 April [1934]

Dear Gertude

The opera is closed now for the summer and everybody has had a lovely time about it and I must say that in every way it was very, very beautiful and of course there were some who didn’t like the music and some who didn’t like the words and even some who didn’t like the decors or the choreography but there wasn’t anybody who didn’t see that the ensemble was a new kind of collaboration and that it was unique and powerful and I wish you could have seen the faces of people as they watched and listened. [2]

The letter continues with the logistics of their arrangements of the publishing rights split 50-50 between Thomson and Stein, which seemed to be an uphill battle for Thomson to demand an equal split between the composer and the librettist, but that’s a topic for another day.

Out of these correspondences from the same time-frame, I would imagine that there might have been some animosity between Thomson and Gershwin from Porgy and Bess standing the test of time as an “innovative” opera compared to Thomson’s 4 Saints in 3 Acts, which has not received the critical success that Gershwin did.  Perhaps that might explain why Thomson chose to not discuss Gershwin in the particular section of the reading from last week.  He has every reason to take personal offense to think Gershwin stole his thunder with Porgy and Bess and it certainly speaks to the idea that Gershwin frequently rode the line when it came to writing music from inspiration and straight-up stealing.

Sources

[1] Sobolak, Frances. “Making Porgy and Bess – The Letters,” The Gershwin Letters, University of Michigan, February 26, 2016, https://smtd.umich.edu/ami/gershwin/?p=689.

[2] Thomson, Virgil. “Letters to Gertrude Stein, 1926-38.” Grand Street Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1988). 50-70. DOI: 10.2307/25007076

The iconic West Side Story is one of my favorite pieces of art, just ask any of the people who surround me about my numerous excited rants about the show or my incessant humming of its melodies under my breath at all times. When looking at the creation story of the musical and artistic landmark, what sticks out to me is the massive team that was utilized in its birth. The history of Broadway and the American Musical Theater is littered with creative duos that write and compose blockbuster hits. Whether you think of Rodgers and Hammerstein churning out what would become the Golden Age of the art form, or more modern examples like Pasek and Paul, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, or Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. One conclusion is clear: Power couples have long ruled the scripted stage.

What was unique about West Side Story was the size of its creative team- a team in which each member contributed greatly. The production assembled names that are now known as musical theater heavyweights and masters of their craft. Compositions by Leonard Bernstein, a book by Arthur Laurents, choreography by Jerome Robbins, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim combined in the groundbreaking piece to tell a story that continues to resonate with audiences today.

In a letter to Bernstein, a young Stephen Sondheim oozes gratitude and affection for his colleague. Throughout his writing, Sondheim emphasizes the friendship the experience has engendered, specifically referencing not only Bernstein but Laurents and Robbins as well. It should be noted that although Sondheim was very early on in his career, this letter doesn’t communicate a feeling of hierarchy. Instead of using words like “mentor” or “leader”, Sondheim opts for a connotation of “collaborating”.

Stephen Sondheim’s letter to Leonard Bernstein, September 26, 1957. Collected and edited by Simeone Nigel in “The Leonard Bernstein Letters”, published by Yale University Press, 2013.

Exploring this unique friendship and team dynamic has led some scholars to draw conclusions about the factors that led bonds among these men to be so strong. Scholar David LaFontaine asserts that all members of the creative team “were all in various stages of coming to terms with their homosexuality in the oppressive atmosphere of 1950s America.”¹ Further scholarly speculation points to the themes of troubled love in the song “Somewhere” from the musical as an anthem from four men who were personally and romantically troubled in a world that didn’t allow them the expression they yearned for.² Back in the letter to Bernstein, Sondheim’s use of the word “us” when talking about the four men working together gives us hints to the bond that solidified among the creators of the innovative story. It is important that we remember the creation of such a powerhouse group in this art form was not only due to artistic merit, but also a shared identity.

“May West Side Story mean as much to the theater and to people who see it as it has to us.”

-Stephen Sondheim in a letter to Leonard Bernstein, 26 September 1957

Primary Source

“West Side Story,: 1955–7 (Letters 359–409).” In The Leonard Bernstein Letters, edited by SIMEONE NIGEL, 341-90. Yale University Press, 2013. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm538.10.

Secondary Sources

The late 1930s to the early 1940s  were a turning point for American identity as we now know it. In the midst of World War II, Americans’ perceptions of themselves and their relation to the world shifted dramatically with the rise of nationalism and a sense of a distinct American identity – one that did not revolve around the previously established identities of other nations. This creation of an American identity called for the generation of what we now consider the “American sound.”

Aaron Copeland was the pioneer of this sound. Hailing from Brooklyn, he became influenced by street jazz, as well as music from his travels to Paris, Mexico, and Cuba. He found real success beginning in 1939 with a move to Hollywood, where he composed commercial film scores, which led him to a New York premiere of a ballet – Billy the Kid. This premiere brought his name to national recognition, which led to, arguably, his greatest success and a key example of the aforementioned American sound, Appalachian Spring. 

1939-1945 was also a period of personal and musical identity exploration and definition for Copeland. In 1939, he began what would become a long-term friendship with composer Leonard Bernstein. The two wrote often, and it is speculated that the two were involved romantically from ‘39 to ‘41. When Copeland visited Havana, he wrote Bernstein about sitting in clubs for hours on end listening to music, saying “the thing I like most is the quality of voice when the Negroes sing down here. It does things to me … and just to think, no serious Cuban composer is using any of this.” 

I found it particularly interesting to see Copeland, who is the father of American sound, influenced by Cuban and Parisian music, especially at a time when it was so important for America to distinguish itself as a leading nation.

Works Cited:

CRIST, ELIZABETH B., and WAYNE SHIRLEY, editors. “Musical Triumphs, 1937–42.” The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 120–147. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq05k.8.

PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, www.pbs.org/keepingscore/copland-american-sound.html.

Blogpost #6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLRoH-PuNqs

This is a 1945 recording of Charles Ives’ “In the Inn”. The performer in question is John Kirkpatrick[1], a pianist who championed of Ives and other composers of his scope, for instance Carl Ruggles. This is evident in his lengthy, if not a bit irregular correspondence with Ives’, from the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s until Ives death in 1954. Kirkpatrick’s approach to the works of Ives and Ruggles is nothing if not thorough; always asking for clarification of his interpretations, and expressing a profound respect for the harmonic intent of Ives.

Th correspondence shows that Kirkpatrick quite continuously throughout these decades was helping Ives develop pieces and initiating projects regarding his works, including this recording of “In the inn”. The piece’s original draft was dated around 1915 and composed about a decade earlier. As the second movement of Ives’ A Set of Pieces for Theater or Chamber Orchestra it shares the overall ragtime feel of the collection. The repurposing of the something with such close ties to Afro American culture, albeit in a new harmonic context, may indicate that Ives’ idea of creating a “new music” does in fact not completely sever ties with the American past.

In one of what Owens calls Kirkpatrick’s “semiregular progress-report letters”[2] he finishes his letter with contextualising the works of first Ruggles (“good old Carl”) and comparatively:

“Take good old Carl, for instance,— the splendid freedom of his musical inspiration, and the almost pedantic preoccupation with his non-repetition-of-note principle — the startling “modern” quality of his dissonant harmony, and the unmistakably “romantic” Wagner-Strauss derivation of his melodic contour. And of course, nobody has ever combined in their music more diverse elements than Ives!”[3]

It is evident that drawing inspiration from a wide variety of musical influences, both aesthetically and with regards to musical traditions, from different time periods and cultures is something Kirkpatrick holds in high regard. Is the synthesizing of inspirational sources an attempt of constructing a music that transcends race, identity and nationality? One could argue that if one merges enough elements one dilutes the source material to the point of transcendence.

Primary sources:

“Ives: In the Inn (John Kirkpatrick, 1945)”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLRoH-PuNqs [Accessed October 23th, 2019]

Owens, Tom C. (ed.). Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives (2007). University of California Press, Los Angeles.

Secondary sources:

Barron, James. “John Kirkpatrick Is Dead at 86; A Pianist Who Popularized Ives”. The New York Times. November 11th, 1991. https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/arts/john-kirkpatrick-is-dead-at-86-a-pianist-who-popularized-ives.html [Accessed October 23th, 2019]

[1] Barron 1991

[2] Owens 2007: p. 305

[3] Ibid p. 304

A week in late April 1932 stirred up unexpected controversy between American art music composers and their critics. Yaddo, a five-day conference modeled after European composition festivals, was held to “give leading American composers an opportunity to present their lesser-known works before distinguished audiences.”[1] Yet, not a single music critic came to hear the “strange tunes, in which harsh chords rasped out above brooding harmonies.”[2] And Aaron Copland, one of the leaders in American music composition in the 1930s, was not about to let this incident go unnoticed.

In a letter to The New York Times on May 8, 1932, he wrote:

Copland’s outcry to music critics to take American music seriously prompted Olin Downes to chime in on the discussion. Downes, a music critic for The New York Times, had “considerable influence on musical opinion, although many of his judgments have not stood the test of time.”[3] In an article written in response to Copland’s letter, Downes wrote:

[4]

Apart from degrading the quality of new American works, Downes throws Wagner, perhaps the “most German” of all the German composers, into the ring. His comparison of American composers’ treatment versus German composers’ treatment reminds me of discussions we’ve been having in class about the significance of European (mainly German) composers to the identity of American composers. These German “greats” were the cornerstone of the building that is American music. However, following the building analogy, Downes thought Copland and his contemporaries were not building on the grand building that he envisioned American music to be, but rather, they were building a little hut off to the side.

I find myself getting frustrated with Downes’ dismissive attitude towards the new American works of the 1930s. Yet, how easily we Americans can still fall into this trap of constructing an identity for American music in 2019. The question for us is, are we going to continue falling into that trap?

Primary Source:

Copland, Aaron. The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.

Secondary Sources:

[1] “COMPOSERS ASSAIL CRITICS AT YADDO.” The New York Times, May 2, 1932. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1932/05/02/100728910.html?pageNumber=13.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “Olin Downes.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, February 5, 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olin_Downes.

[4] Downes, Olin. “The Daily Review Versus the Weekly Essay – The Native Writer’s Opportunities and Merits.” The New York Times, May 8, 1932. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1932/05/08/issue.html.

Antonín Dvořák

As we have read in the latest Shadle reading, Antonín Dvořák’s interest in involving black music into a specific American sound sparked controversy in the American classical world of music. In a letter, Anton Dvořák wrote to Oskar Nebdal, his former student and principle conductor of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra from 1896 to 1906. The letter comes from Otakar Dvořák’s work, Anton Dvořák, My Father. The date of the letter is unknown but I believe its reasonable to guess it came after the publication of From a New World. Dvořák writes:

“I am sending you Kretschmar’s analysis of Symphony, but omit the nonsense that I used an American and Indian motif because it is a lie. I just wrote in the spirit of American national melodies,” (Dvořák 159).

(Hermann Kretschmar: German musicologist)

After reading this passage for class, I had questions regarding the intentions and thoughts of this composer. After finding this letter, I have more questions. If Dvořák sparked so much controversy in America defending his stance of Negro music needing to make American music distinctive, then why leave out details for his friends at home. What does he mean by the spirit of American national melodies? In my last blog post, I discussed the spirituality involved in Negro Spirituals argued by H. T. Burleigh and Samuel Floyd Jr.
Perhaps Dvořák didn’t want to explain the race relations of America to his Czech friends and the controversy following him around. Another possibility could be the composer wanting credit for the music and not being told he stole from other sources.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HClX2s8A9IE

I find this letter fascinating. While it makes a clearer image of the life of Dvořák during this time, it brings up more and more questions about the thought process of the composer and what occurred during this time for him.

Bibliography:

-Dvořák Otakar, and Paul J. Polansky. Antonín Dvořák, My Father. Czech Historical Research Center, 1993.

“The Americans expect great things of me and the main thing is, so they say, to show them to the promised land and kingdom of a new and independent art, in short, to create a national music.” — Antonin Dvorak

“To classify music according to nationalities is to narrow its scope.” — Edward MacDowell

“To attain musical independence, more national consciousness is a present necessity for American composers.” — Henry Cowell

The more letters by composers one reads from the turn of the 20th century, the more clear it becomes that, just as much a focus as how to create an American sound, a primary issue of the time was whether to do so. Certainly many composers sought this end, including Dvorak and Cowell, as well as Gershwin, who suggested European composers like Dvorak may be more initially suited to extracting such a sound. Yet there were also voices like MacDowell’s, who resisted the others’ nationalism.

Edward MacDowell, image from Britannica.com

In a letter written in 1897, MacDowell replied to Mary M. Shaw regarding which pieces to program for an American-themed concert by saying the whole idea is unwise. Since audiences would only be able to compare between American composers, he believed they would elevate some composers to the disparagement of others. This problem does not disappear when comparing composers of all nationalities, but MacDowell did not advocate for a national sound. At the least, his approach prevents all of American music from being disparaged at once. His wishes advocate a different kind of independence: that of the composer from any restrictions on composition, rather than that of America from Europe.

This understanding of MacDowell’s argument is instructive with his second point as well, quoted briefly above. His choice of words is unfortunate, due to minstrel connotations–“In spite of Mr. Dvorak’s desire to clothe American music in Negro costume…”–but allowing composers freedom in their creativity is a worthy goal when separated from that institution, and being expected to conform to their national identity could be seen as restricting their expression.

The points MacDowell raised are not unreasonable (at least not outright, and without some problematic connotations), but they may have been futile. Virgil Thomson remarked on musical developments around the world, including American music. Young Italians, he said, would sit around late at night until world pop music came on the radio, waiting to have “the satisfaction of hearing real American music, by which they mean Duke Ellington and Bob Crosby . . . They don’t call that music jazz or swing or anything special; they call it la musica americana. And their hats are off to it.”

Art of Duke Ellington by Leonid Afremov

Sources

Fisk, Josiah, and Jeff Nichols, ed. Composers on Music: Eight Centuries of Writings, 2nd Ed. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997.

Norman, Gertrude, and Miriam Lubell Shrifte, eds. Letters of Composers: an Anthology. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1946.

Page, Vanessa Weeks, and Tim Page, eds. Selected letters of Virgil Thomson. New York: Summit Books, 1988.

Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) was an American modernist composer who has achieved international renown, though not during his own lifetime. He is notable in that he was not a career composer; he was an insurance executive, and actually laid the foundation for the modern system of estate planning as we know it today. Through his compositional career, he became close friends with Henry Cowell (1897-1965), one of the most prolific and ahead-of-his-time composers and music theorists of the 20th century. Cowell and Ives, in addition to their friendship, were bound together through the New Music Society, an organization run by Cowell that was dedicated to organizing new music concerts and publishing new music.

Despite advancing his career to the international stage, dark times loomed for Cowell. In May 1936, he was arrested for allegedly engaging in homosexual acts with a 17 year old boy. He was eventually sentenced to a maximum of 15 years in prison. Many of his composer colleagues lent him support and publicly campaigned for his release, but Ives, one of his best friends, cut contact with him.

In a letter from Harmony Ives (Charles’ wife) to Charlotte Ruggles (the wife of Carl Ruggles, another central figure in the modernist movement Cowell participated in), she describes Charles’ reaction to hearing the news.

“… I told Charlie and he and I feel just as you do. A thing more abhorrent to Charlie’s nature couldn’t be found. We think these things are too much condoned. He will never willingly, see Henry again — he can’t— he doesn’t want to hear of the thing— the shock used him up and he hasn’t had a long breath since I told him but he will get used to it— isn’t it shocking the things we “get used to”? He said characteristically “I thought he was a man and he’s nothing but a G——— D——- sap!” (Ives 245).

Ives is notorious within music history for his quite conservative and deeply impassioned views on masculinity and femininity (one might even call his views obsessive), but it shows how deep seated his prejudices were that he would completely cut off contact with one of his best friends for over 4 years. According to a 1994 New York Times article, “Ives apparently, in fact, suggested to mutual acquaintances that suicide would be Cowell’s only honorable option” (NYT July 10, 1994).

Ives and Cowell eventually reconnected after the latter’s pardon, but their friendship was much more restrained. Ives did not fully open himself up to Cowell until Cowell told Ives that he planned to marry Sidney Hawkins Robertson, who was an important ethnomusicologist in her own right. (Ives 286-288). It speaks to the societal and interpersonal prejudices Cowell faced that once he was exposed as a queer person, he was not able to shed off such a blow to his character until he married a woman. Though this is speculation on my part, it would make sense to think that Ives reconciled with Cowell because he felt that by marrying a woman, Cowell was somehow relinquishing his identity as a queer person. Though perhaps this idea of forfeiting or changing one’s identity out of personal necessity does not manifest in the same way it has in other areas of the class (black minstrel artists playing up stereotypes in order to make a living, for instance), Cowell had to undergo this process all the same.

Sources:

Borchert, Kevin. “Gay Composers; behind Ives’ harmonic clashes.” New York Times, 10 July 1994, section 2, page 2. Web. https://www.nytimes.com/1994/07/10/arts/l-gay-composers-behind-ives-s-harmonic-clashes-605190.html

Hicks, Michael. “The Imprisonment of Henry Cowell.” Journal of the American Musicological Society, vol. 44, no. 1, 1991, pp. 92–119. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/831729.

Owens, Tom C., editor. “EDITORS AND PERFORMERS (1933–1944).” Selected Correspondence of Charles Ives, 1st ed., University of California Press, 2007, pp. 209–314. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1ppr8v.12.

One particular quote from Tuesday’s reading by Samuel Floyd grabbed my attention; Floyd reveals that “William Grant Still maintained that his purpose was “to elevate Negro musical idioms to a position of dignity and effectiveness in the field of symphonic and operatic music”.¹ The fact that Still seems to imply that the current state of black “musical idioms” was lacking something puzzled me. My impression had been that Still was one of the composers who most explicitly worked toward making black voices and sounds heard. Indeed, Rae Brown says that Still “was consciously writing in the Negro idiom”, and Still himself says works such as “Darker America” are meant to “represent the American Negro.”^2, 3 That Still seemed to believe that black music was in need of “elevation” at first seems at odds with these other sentiments.

https://www.periodpaper.com/products/1941-print-william-grant-still-portrait-classical-music-composer-black-americana-220605-xmc9-012

Digging deeper into Still’s personal correspondences with his long-distance friend and colleague, Irving Schwerke, I found myself engrossed in a web of attitudes and opinions that sometimes seem to build on each other and sometimes contradict one another. In one enclosure to Schwerke, Still analyzes his own “Afro-American Symphony” and seems to build upon his previous implication that black musical idioms were at a lower level than classical music. He says that his symphony “portrays that class of American Negroes who still cling to the old standards and traditions…These are an humble people. Their wants are few and are generally child-like. Theirs are lives of utter simplicity.”⁴  Still’s blatant comparison between this “class of American Negroes” and children actually shocked me. How do we make sense of one of the most prominent and accomplished African-American composers of the 20th century seeming to buy into many of the stereotypes of black music that we condemn?

Another of Still’s earlier letters to Schwerke perhaps reveals some of the psychology behind his remarks. A distraught Still writes “It is unfortunate for a man of color who is ambitious to live in America…I have never felt this so keenly as in the past few months. Friends who would lend me a helping hand, who would make it possible for me to make a living for my family, are unable to do anything because of those who are opposed to placing a colored man in any position of prominence.”⁵ This letter reveals some of the strain under which Still struggled during his career. It also made me think twice about my own criticisms of Still’s words. While we certainly should analyze a composer’s opinions, I think it is also important to not let a composer’s identity alter our expectations for these opinions. Perhaps we should criticize Still’s implication that some black melodies are in need of improvement, but we should also acknowledge that he was a composer struggling to make a living; it is entirely possible he was pressured to either conform to society’s stereotypes of black music or espouse them himself. Furthermore, it is natural for any composer to believe their genre of music is superior. It is a slippery slope to write off Still’s statements as pure pride or societal pressure, but I think it is an equally slippery slope to ignore these factors.

All in all, I have no clear answers or even arguments regarding Still’s words, and that is precisely my point. Like all of the issues we discuss, the opinions and words of a composer such as Still are complex and multi-faceted, and we must always strive to avoid oversimplification.

“What Americans are wrestling with chiefly (and the British too) is opera- trying to make our language serviceable for serious dramatico-musical expression.  I cannot predict the success or failure of this enterprise. I merely point out that American music, having become by now a musical speech notably different from European, is testing its maturity on the problem that has ever been the final test of a musical idiom, namely, can you put it on stage?”     (Thomson)

I found it strange, as did several others, that Thomson is asking this question about “american music” in the seventies, given that by this time several distinctly american operas, such as Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” and Menotti’s “Old Maid and the Thief,” had been performed by notable ensembles and groups in America as well as Europe. 

Menotti:  https://www.lubranomusic.com/pictures/29951.jpg?v=1523032808

To know of these works, and then say he can’t predict the success of american opera seems to signal that either he doesn’t believe these works to be american music, or that they are outliers, and not representative of american musical traits.

Virgil’s bias is especially obvious when he pays homage to other composers, with more obviously White-European heritage, like Ives and MacDowell, and hails them as fathers of american style. To cherry-pick certain well known composers like this and then disregard the international successes of others seems to imply some judgement by Thomson of them being less American. 

Menotti was an Italian immigrant, and Gershwin was of Ukrainian/Lithuanian Jewish decent. MacDowell and Ives were both born in america to white american parents. Without assuming too much about Thomson’s intent, it does bring into question his understanding and perspective of American music in how it relates to “whiteness” rather than “American-ness,” and how he may harbor some elitist perceptions of American music in how it relates to white European music tradition, rather than the innovation and creativity of non-white Americans of various immigrant heritages.

Sources:

Gershwin, George. Porgy and Bess, New York: Gershwin Pub. Co., 1935.

Menotti, Gian-Carlo. The Old Maid and The Thief, New York: G. Ricordi & Co. inc. 1939

Thomson, Virgil. “American Musical Traits” in American Music Since 1910, ed. Anna Kallin and Nicolas Nabokov (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971) 14-21.

Aaron Copland is widely known as “the dean of American music.” His music reflects Americanism and also helped in the World War II war effort. Aside from domestic efforts, his letters reveal his efforts in spreading American music and its influence to other countries and composers.

U.S. composer Aaron Copland in 1969

Based on Copland’s frequent travel, it almost seems like he did not like staying in America for too long. One country Copland’s musical travels brought him to was Mexico. The purpose of his visit was for a showcase of American composers. Prior to this musical festival, Copland writes to fellow musician Elizabeth Coolidge in 1937 speaking on what American music can do for the country.

“Having lived in Mexico before, I think I can understand what a profound influence such a series of concerts is most likely to have on the musical life of the country.” ¹

His expectation of the concerts are later documented in his reply to Coolidge.

“On the whole,  from my own standpoint, the most important aspect of the Festival, was the opportunity it gave me for a cross section view of the present status of our own music. I came away feeling strongly encouraged for its future.” ²

Copland seems to view his performance’s success not only as spreading influence to Mexico, but as a validation for American music’s stronghold to itself. Later in regards to broadening his reach to other Latin American countries, Copland writes to Carlos Chavez, a growing Mexican composer.

“Any other bright ideas you may have, along the lines of furthering cultural relations between Latin American countries and the USA, via music, would be very welcome.”³

Copland and Bernstein

Aside from Copland’s American influence to Latin America via music, is to his admirers who ask for his advice on American nationalism in music. A *special friend* Lenard Bernstein known to Copland affectionately as Lenny, asked for advice while a student at Harvard for his senior thesis about nationalism in American music.

“Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because a Gilbert used Negro material, there was therefore nothing American about it.  There’s always the chance it might have an ‘American’ quality despite its material.” ⁴

The fact that Bernstein asks for Copland’s opinions about nationalism in music secures Copland’s place as a stronghold for influence for American identity. Based on this and from his success in spreading American music to other countries show the success of spreading American music and his overwhelming influence on others.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was known as perhaps the most influential American composers of the 20th century; “by his centenary in 1974 he was recognized worldwide as the first composer to create a distinctively American art music” [1]. 

Unlike the careers of many other prolific composers, he spent most of his working for insurance companies, composing only on the side. As a result, he was sometimes regarded as an amateur and did not become widely successful until late in his life. 

One hallmark ‘American’ feature of his music was his tendency to borrow Protestant hymn melodies and American popular songs, complexifying and inserting them into his pieces. He also heavily quoted European composers in his music, such as Beethoven, Bach, and Massenet [1].

However, Ives constantly went back and revised pieces he had already written, often times adding more dissonance to pieces as time went on, perhaps suggesting a level of insecurity in his composition. In 1921, Henry Bellamann, dean of Chicora College for women, wrote Ives and proposed to program his Concord piano sonata on a lecture recital. Ives’s reply “shows his reluctance to accept praise without a veil of self-deprecation” (Burkholder 215). Ives writes, “I am afraid [the Concord Sonata] will arouse little enthusiasm with most audiences…perhaps by this time you have decided that to undertake my music will be a too arduous and thankless job” (Burkholder 215). He also encourages Bellamann to feel free to make any revisions desired to the sonata. It is somewhat unclear what Ives means by the statement that his piece will be unsuccessful with “most audiences;” either he is unconfident in the sonata, or he thinks it is too good for average listeners to appreciate. I think that it is likely a combination of both sentiments. 

Ives’s father, who had taught Charles his fundamental knowledge in counterpoint and composition, died prematurely and suddenly in 1894 [1]. Ives’s health later began deteriorating, and he developed both diabetes and depression (which he refused to acknowledge and referred to as ‘n  x’). He also suffered from tremors, making it necessary for his wife and daughter to transcribe his letters for him. 

In a 1938 letter to composer and friend John Becker, Ives rants, “These Philharmonic-nice-lady-bird-afternoon-tea-parties are an insult to music and to ‘man’…any American Music (that is not American but made in America) the Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony….play has to be ‘emasculated’ to get the saps’ okay. I would get in a row with these g*dd*mn sissy conductors if I came within cussing distance” (Burkholder 237). Ives argues that ‘feminine’ music is inherently European and not truly American, regardless of where it was composed. This sentiment is interesting, considering Ives drew significant influence from European composers and often quoted them in his pieces. 

In my opinion, the sudden loss of a father figure combined with his forced reliance on the women in his life likely contributed to Ives’ anger towards women and ‘feminine’ music. His insertion of ‘masculine’ traits into his compositions reflect his own insecurities, also evident in how often he revised already composed pieces. However, I am honestly not sure where his view of Americanness and masculinity as synonymous originated from. 

1. Burkholder, J. Peter, James B. Sinclair, and Gayle Sherwood. “Ives, Charles.” Grove Music Online. 2001. Oxford University Press. Date of access 23 Oct. 2019, <https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000014000>
2. Burkholder, J. Peter . Charles Ives and His World . Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1996. Print.

I have selected the letters of Aaron Copland, particularly those during the time of McCarthyism in the US, in order to discuss the class topic of the privileging of Western music in our society. 

Copland is one of the go-to American composers for most people, and many  are unaware of the struggles he went through with the American musical audience post-World War II. These letters help historians to better understand the political atmosphere in the US as communism was on the rise, and allows them to see the effects of the Cold War on areas one might not think of right away, like the Western Classical music. In the book that the letters are compiled in, The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, the letters are a useful way to understand the changes in Copland’s composition style that occurs after Copland’s personal struggles with McCarthyism. 

Copland’s style had changed to reflect a more simple style that was easily defined as American, and his Folk song arrangements “Old American Songs” were a hit (Crist 192). This was at a time where the roots of American identity were important in order to push away any suspicion of being too left-leaning. The folk-song roots of the composition can be heard, not only through its melodies but by the lyrics, a tenor singing about being thrifty and seeing a pretty girl (Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra). However, Copland was not always seen as being as clearly American as these songs make him seem.

A series of correspondences Copland made about a conflict between Arnold Schoenberg and himself reveal the defensive nature toward communistic accusations that affected the way Copland interacted with other composers and the music he made. In a letter to Virgil Thomson, he writes “Imagine my astonishment on reading your column this morning to find Arnold Schoenberg coupling my name with that of Joseph Stalin as one of the suppressors of his art”. The letters expand to explain Copland thought the reason of Schoenberg’s attack was that Copland and Shostakovich had been photographed earlier that year, making Copland anxious that his political beliefs were being associated with Shostakovich, and in turn, Stalin. (196).  Copland’s tone of urgency in his letter reveals how important it was for him to not have any accusations against him that would lead people to believe he was betraying his Americanness. 

In more correspondences between Copland, Thomson and Schoenberg himself, it is made clear it was not the photograph that led to Schoenberg’s remarks. Instead it was composition advice of using “simple intervals” Copland had been rumored to give that led Schoenberg to group Copland and Stalin together. Copland replied to Schoenberg, stating that “It is quite untrue, for example that I have advised students to compose in a ‘certain style’ or that I have recommended ‘simple intervals’. These impressions must have been gained from isolated sentences taken out of context by persons who do not know me well”(198). The language Copland uses here is again defensive, and admits no fault, demonstrating another time that it was of utmost importance to Copland to maintain an image of freedom in not only his compositions, but additionally in the advice he provided to others. 

Early American values of freedom for all rose to become top priority for all who were avoiding accusations of conspiring with communists. Copland’s works from this era reveal this phenomenon trickled into the world of composition, and his letters show us these values were essential in maintaining tranquility between prominent composers of the time.

Works Cited

Crist, Elizabeth B., and Wayne, Shirley, editors. “The Post-War Decade, 1948–58.” The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 191–220. Print.

Lake Superior Chamber Orchestra. “Old American Songs, Set 1- Aaron Copland- LSCO & Jeffery Madison”. Youtube, Nov. 8, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdBbO71HBUM

In Source Readings in American Choral Music from 1995, a review of Amy Beach’s Mass in E-flat, a work of “mysticism” and “direct dramatic appeals,” is paired with her discussion of the mystery surrounding the compositional process, particularly when it comes to creating choral works. This idea of mysticism is a common one in perceptions of classical and art music, and can perhaps shed some light on why art music has been such a difficult realm for minority or oppressed groups to break into.

“Each form brings requisites of its own… the steps the composer follows in developing any of these types depend, naturally, upon his own inborn abilities, the force of his creative urge, the way his mind and soul ‘work’, his background, and his training.”

 

“The text called melodies to my mind. I went out at once … and the text took possession of me. As if from dictation, I jotted down the notes…”

Amy Beach, while one of the few known female composers of the early 20th century, seems to fit very much the mold of a composer – a different breed than the rest of humanity, to whom melodies and musical works come, almost complete, in their moments of inspiration. To those who have spent any time composing, the actual process is extremely difficult to describe, which only lends to this sense of mystery around the creation of music. This contrasts very strongly with our understanding of popular music like that of Tin Pan Alley, in which commercial music is pumped out almost mechanically fitting any formulas.

No wonder, then, that there is so much of a gulf in people’s minds between “high” art music, which comes from individual inspiration and personal expression and “lowly” pop music. And even less wonder that, given the stereotypes applied to oppressed groups such as women and black Americans in the early 20th century, that people were unlikely to accept art music composers from these groups. If there are so few true composers among the “normal” (see: white, Western European, male) folk, how many fewer are likely to come from the margins?

On the other hand, this sense of mysticism is appropriate in one way: men have long viewed women as mystical creatures who are near-impossible to understand. Whether this conception plays a role in Philip Hale’s review when he says that “the mysticism [in the Mass in E-flat] at times approaches obscurity” is hard to say. It could, of course, be a genuine, objective critique (although musical critiques are rarely purely objective). And indeed, Hale claims Mrs. Beach as a part of the larger American musical identity, saying, “It is a pleasure to praise the sincerity of the composer’s purpose, to admit gladly the many excellences of the work, and to welcome it as an interesting contribution to the musical literature of the United States.”

Here, then, is one of Mrs. H.H.A. Beach’s many contributions to the American musical canon. Enjoy!

Works Cited:

1. Budds, Michael J., editor. “Music from 1830-1920.” Source Readings in American Choral Music, College Music Society, 1995, pp. 74–79.
2. “Amy Beach Kyrie from Mass in Eb Major.” Performance by Concerto Chamber Orchestra, YouTube, 8 Aug. 2018, youtu.be/B3FMp3OHDOE.
3. Curtis, Liane. “Amy Beach at 150 Proclaimed.” The Boston Musical Intelligencer, 5 Sept. 2017, www.classical-scene.com/2017/09/05/amy-beach-150-proclaimed/.

Aaron Copland is widely regarded as one of the greatest American composers of all time. “The open, slowly changing harmonies in much of his music are typical of what many people consider to be the sound of American music, evoking the vast American landscape and pioneer spirit [1].” Reading through his letters, I found some interesting correspondence between Copland and his peers.

I stumbled across several letters. The first was a correspondence between Copland and Carlos Chávez. Upon further research, I figured out that Carlos Chávez was “a Mexican composer, conductor, music theorist, educator, journalist, and founder and director of the Mexican Symphonic Orchestra [2],” who was greatly influenced by native Mexican cultures. The second and third letters were between Copland and Leonard Bernstein. The fourth letter was between Copland and Irving and Verna Fine, whom Copland knew from the Tanglewood festival. 

#1- to Carlos Chávez 

“I was so sorry you missed the opera. […] The end has something of the same ‘Freude, Freude’ feeling, tho in completely different terms. Of course the kids had everyone completely interested. Kids are like Negroes, you can’t go wrong if they are on the stage [4].”

#2- to Leonard Bernstein 

“What a music factory it is [in reference to the music of Havana, Cuba]! Thirteen black men and me— quite a piquant scene. The thing I like most is the quality of voice when the Negroes sing down here. It does things to me— it’s so sweet and moving. And just think, no serious Cuban composer is using any of this. Its awful tempting, but I’ll try to control myself [4].”

#3- to Leonard Bernstein

“You sound as if you were very much on the right track anyhow both as to ideas and composers’ names. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because a Gilbert used Negro material, there was therefore nothing American about it. There’s always the chance it might have an ‘American’ quality despite its material. Also, don’t try to prove too much. Composing in this country is still pretty young no matter how you look at it [4].”

#4- to Irving and Verna Fine

“The city itself is beautiful as ever. Streets are always full of people— no one ever seems to want to go home. Coffee every two hours till you are black in the face. A friendly, democratic feeling in the air that comes across because of the lack of color lines. Skins of all shades and faces of all shapes. Its endlessly amusing to sit at a sidewalk café and watch what passes [4].”

I found Copland’s remarks about race to be very interesting, especially in his correspondence from Cuba. He clearly wants to use the music he hears, but understands that he should “try to control himself.” I also found it interesting when he talks about “American Music” (those words sound familiar!). The “Gilbert” he is referencing is American composer Henry F. Gilbert, a white man who was greatly intrigued by (you could say appropriated) the music of African Americans. I think Copland is saying here that just because the source material isn’t white, does not mean that it is not American. 

In my opinion, Copland seems pretty “woke” for his time (1900-1999). He did have some questionable phrases in these letters, but overall I think It’s clear that Copland had a pretty good understanding of culture and was at least thinking about how culture was impacting the music he was composing. 

Sources

[1] Pollack, Howard (1999). Aaron Copland. NY: Henry Holt and Co.

[2] Chávez, Carlos. 1937. Toward a New Music: Music and Electricity, translated from the Spanish by Herbert Weinstock, with eight illustrations by Antonio Ruíz. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Reprinted, New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.

[3] Parker, Robert L. “Copland and Chávez: Brothers-in-Arms.” American Music 5, no. 4 (1987): 433-44.

[4] Copland, Aaron. The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland, edited by Elizabeth B. Crist, and Wayne Shirley, Yale University Press, 2006.

In the last Virgil Thomson reading, I was rather intrigued by a particular quote of his towards the end when he closed the chapter of “American Musical Traits” with some musings about America’s role in the opera genre:

“What Americans are wrestling with chiefly (and the British too) is opera- trying to make our language serviceable for serious dramatico-musical expression.  I cannot predict the success or failure of this enterprise.  I merely point out that American music, having become by now a musical speech notably different from European, is testing its maturity on the problem that has ever been the final test of a musical idiom, namely, can you put it on stage?” [1]

Being as this was written in the 1970s, I honestly was not sure if Thomson is trying to claim that American opera does not have its own identity or that American opera had not existed up until then.  Either way, it seemed interesting that he would bring up the importance of composers like Edward MacDowell or Charles Ives in their roles as composers that encapsulate the American classical tradition and disregard someone like, say, George Gershwin and his opera “Porgy and Bess.”

[2]

It seems odd that Thomson would disregard Gershwin’s contribution to the American opera genre (and I certainly argue “Porgy and Bess” to be a part of it, especially if the Met Opera is currently performing it).  Perhaps Thomson has a rather elitist perspective of American music in how it relates to European music rather than influences from African-American folk song traditions or African music.  He hardly acknowledges the role it plays in the landscape of American classical music for sure by only mentioning the use of blue notes or blues/jazz genres and their relation to Asian musics, which seems to be a strange point, but whatever floats his boat I guess.

The likely omission of African-American-inspired music by Virgil Thomson demonstrates the idea that the characteristics found in such music were not regularly accepted by music historians or musicologists as a part of American music and rather it became an other, which could be referred to as “black American music.”

Sources

[1] Thomson, Virgil. “American Musical Traits” in American Music Since 1910, ed. Anna Kallin and Nicolas Nabokov (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971) 14-21.

[2] Gershwin, George. “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” New York: Gershwin Pub. Co., 1935.

For many Americans, The Star-Spangled Banner may be one of the most recognizable tunes. With its message of patriotism and national triumph, it has firmly rooted itself within our national canon. Many of us, however, are only familiar with the first stanza of this song.

The third stanza reads as follows: (click the link)

Star Spangled Banner stanza 3

Other than the explicit reference to runaway slaves, this stanza is somewhat difficult to pick apart without an understanding of the historical context. Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to The Star-Spangled Banner, was a lawyer, and later, a U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, was a staunch anti-abolitionist who used his position as U.S. District Attorney to suppress and prosecute abolitionists for taking a public stance against slavery. Key wrote the lyrics to The Star-Spangled Banner while he observed the successful defense of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812.

Though some scholars as well as some widely held popular opinion would assert that the Star-Spangled Banner’s 3rd stanza is a celebration of the institution of slavery, I would like to provide a reading that is not so reductive. During the War of 1812, the British army raided southern coastal areas of the United States. As part of these raids, they would offer slaves their freedom if they would fight for the Crown during the ongoing conflict. Many now-former slaves took advantage of this offer and joined a regiment of the British army that would be known as the Corps of Colonial Marines. A detachment of the Corps assisted in the burning of Washington D.C. in August of 1814 (Blackburn 288-290).

With this context in mind, Key’s bitterness over freed slaves fighting against other Americans becomes clear. In addition to celebrating American success in the Battle of Baltimore, he also uses the poem as a denouncement, or a sort of “not so hot now, are you?” of these former slaves who would dare to fight for their freedom against their former masters. All the same, the stanza is not so much a celebration of the institution as it is a denouncement of those who would try to end it.

Bibliography:
Blackburn, Robin. The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848. London, Verso, 1988. P.p. 288-290.

Key, Francis Scott and John Stafford Smith. “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Sheet Music Consortium. Accessed 21 October 2019. http://webfiles.wulib.wustl.edu/units/music/supplcat/b10015188.pdf

As my first search in Sheet Music Consortium, I mindlessly typed in “Dvorak.” Mostly using this search as a test run to see how the database works, I expected to come up with a hundred and one variations on “The New World Symphony.” Instead, what I found was a conglomeration of pieces by Antonin Dvorak himself and American popular songs that were evidently based on these works.

William Arms Fisher, “Goin’ Home”, Melbourne: Allan & Co., c1922. Sheet Music Consortium.

In particular, the fourth result up was a song called “Goin’ Home,” billed as a “Negro Spiritual from the Largo of The New World Symphony.”¹
As it turns out, the Largo of the New World Symphony doesn’t really quote any particular spiritual directly, and “Goin’ Home” is not a preexisting spiritual but a song adapted from the Largo and set to words by one of Dvorak’s white students, William Arms Fisher.²
After reading in Douglas Shadle’s Orchestrating the Nation about Dvorak’s assertion that American music should be based upon spirituals, I found it extremely ironic to find that the chain of influence for one of the most well-known “spirituals” connected to Dvorak goes the opposite direction. Rather than finding any authentic spirituals on which Dvorak based his American symphony, I stumbled upon popular songs and “spirituals” that were manufactured from the precise melodies in Dvorak’s work.

Antonin Dvorak, Humoreske; Op. 101, no. 7. De Luxe Music Co. New York, 1911. Sheet Music Consortium.

“Goin’ Home” is not the only instance of this that I found right away. Another popular song, “In your moonlit bower,” by Jas. H. Harrington, popped up as a song “adapted from Humoresque by A. Dvorak.”³
While there was no actual sheet music available for the adapted song, the Humoresque is immediately recognizable to most of us by recording. The mere fact that American popular music seemed to conjure up some sense of American-ness by reverse engineering from Dvorak’s work, which may have contained minimal direct American influence in the first place, raises many questions for me.

Is it right to claim that we are placing African-American spirituals at the center of a new American music if the piece that started this new music only vaguely references this music? Is it right to create new music based on a piece which only gives a broad sense of what a white man perceived to be the “spirit” of spirituals? And how can we make sense of the Czech composer’s contributions to creating an American music when his direct exposure to actual American music was severely limited before the composition of “The New World Symphony?” All of these questions and more are issues we must grapple with as we consider the role Dvorak played in creating an “American music.”

Footnotes:

In 1936, photographer Walker Evans released a photograph of a woman named Allie Mae Burroughs. She lived in Hale County, Alabama, with her husband Floyd and their four children, where they owned nothing: not even their home, land, mule or farm tools. The family of six leased these items (and more) from their landlord. Floyd was a cotton “sharecropper,” so at harvest time, he had to give his landlord half his cotton and corn crop, as well as pay off any other debts from the year, such as food, seed, fertilizer, and medicine.¹

Allie Mae’s pursed lips, wrinkled brow, and tired eyes in the photo below record the hardships the family faced as a farm family during the Great Depression.

Walker Evans’ photo of Allie Mae Burroughs

The Burroughs’ story was not an uncommon one for farm families living during the Great Depression, which also coincided with the Dust Bowl in the Midwest. This photo, among other Depression-era photos by Walker Evans, are what prompted Aaron Copland to write the music for the opera, The Tender Land.  

Cover of “The Tender Land”

The Tender Land is set in the 1930s in the general Midwest and premiered at the New York City Opera on April 1, 1954. It takes place at the time of spring harvest and a high school graduation, and features a Midwest family experiencing challenges such as family expectations and unapproved love.

The opera was not received well by critics at the time of its premiere. According to Copland in a letter to Carlos Chavez on April 5, 1954 (only 4 days after the premiere of The Tender Land), the negative comments regarding the opera were “criticisms about the libretto, and the usual complaint about a few melodies” ²

However, Christopher W. Patton explains in his article, “Discovering ‘The Tender Land’: A New Look at Aaron Copland’s Opera” that The Tender Land first premiered in between the New York City Opera’s productions of Don Giovanni and Figaro. He writes, “The Tender Land’s small, intimate scale, meditative, introspective libretto and strong but finely wrought emotional content were lost somewhere in the vast reaches of City Center” ³

Between the humor and grandiosity of Don Giovanni and Figaro, the subdued The Tender Land was lost.

Additionally, there is also something to be said at the timing of the premiere of The Tender Lands; music and theater are often used as an escape from reality. In 1954, the memories of the Great Depression, as well as World War II and the Dust Bowl, were still fresh in the minds of many Americans. While the music of The Tender Land was lovely, the plot and themes brought Americans right back into the realities of the past 15-20 years, rather than allow them to escape. Therefore, if attending an opera, Don Giovanni or Figaro may have been more attractive.

Copland blamed the negative response to The Tender Land on complaints of just some melodies and plot issues.  But, based on his letters featured in “The Selected Correspondence of Aaron Copland”, it doesn’t appear that he considered that the melancholy themes of The Tender Land brought Americans too close to the reality of, specifically, the Depression that still haunted their minds.

Now, audiences have a more positive response to The Tender Lands. In fact, now, opera companies add The Tender Land to their season, such as the Berkeley Opera in April 2010.

After the trauma of the Great Depression and World War II, Americans may have not wanted to see such relatable, recent hardships depicted in art. In today’s opera scene, without the Depression looming over our generation as it did in the 1950’s, The Tender Land may succeed and receive high remarks, even between Don Giovanni and Figaro, as it was in its premiere.

Bibliography:

Virgil Thomson spent a considerable amount of effort trying to define traits of American music after 1910. I wanted to test his theories by comparing them to patriotic marches because they can be considered unambiguously American. The keyword “America” brought a number of such pieces to my attention, of which I picked three to study. I was interested in these particular pieces because of a number of similarities that immediately caught my eye, so they should not be considered a random selection.

First, some brief introductions: “Come On, America” was published in 1918 with words by Vance Cooke and music by Kenneth Murchison. “America First (Is Our Battle Cry! Tis the Land We Love!”  was published in 1916 lyrics by J. Will Callahan and music by Eddie Gray. Ironically, although published in Chicago this piece was distributed by an Australian company. “America My America“was published in 1917 with words by Ray B Powers and music by Edith Powers. An inscription reads “Dedicated to Elk’s Regiment Portland Oregon Lodge.” Elk’s Lodges are patriotic fraternal organizations, and I foundit timely to come across this note as I have just recently driven past many an Elk’s Lodge in my most recent journey through the Midwest.

Thomson covers such a wide range of genres that it seems laughable to apply common traits that are specific to American music. He particularly focuses on rhythm, noting that “a very large part of what has been composed in the last forty years assumes the existence… of a steady continuity of eighth-notes, on top of which other metrical patterns, regular and irregular, lead an independent life.” (American Musical Traits 19) All three of these pieces certainly fit this trend as they are in 2/4 with the eighth note driving the piano accompaniment. However, none of the pieces have more than a few instances of syncopation, let alone a “large amount” (19).

Another trait Thomson presents as “American” is the “non-accelerating crescendo and… the non-retarding diminuendo” (19). After the initial tempo markings of con brio, allegretto con spirito, and marcia respectively there are no subsequent marked tempo changes with the exception of a ritardando before the chorus of “Come on America.” In this instance there is indeed no dynamic change marked. Dynamic markings as a whole appear secondary to the marching drive of the eighth note. Crescendos and diminuendos appear only in “America First,” and “America My America” has only four dynamic markings with the final already appearing in the third line. Although all this may support Thomson’s assertion that “the American… inclines by instinct to keep his rhythm patterns independent of volume patterns” (19), these trends are perhaps due in larger part to the patriotic march sub-genre than their American origins.

The final trait was harder for me to understand, let alone identify in practice. Thomson speaks to a “phonetic distortion without loss of clarity.” I took this to mean that text setting often prioritizes music over the natural rhythm of speech patterns. One example of this in “Come On America” is the quarter-eighth-eighth-half rhythm of the syllables of “A-mer-i-ca” which causes the “a” and “ca” syllables to be emphasized whereas a native English speaker would accent “mer”. Besides this, however, there was little unusual text setting and based on my understanding of the term I do not believe any of the three pieces utilize “phonetic distortion” to a large extent.

Obviously, these three pieces are too small of a data sample to make any definite conclusions about the accuracy of Thomson’s generalizations of American music, but I did find it to be a useful exercise in thinking through the theories he presented. I chose to undergo this (admittedly arbitrary) project in order to better understand the arguments Thomson lay out, and to that end I achieved my goal.

(Unfortunately, I failed in my noble quest to dig up recordings of these pieces… I guess we will just have to use our imaginations?)

Works Cited

Gray, Eddie and J. Will Callahan. “America First (Is Our Battle Cry! ‘Tis the Land We Love).” Chicago: Frank K. Root & Co, 1916. http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/lilly/devincent/LL-SDV-94001.

Murchison, Kenneth and Edmund Vance Cooke. “Come On, America!” Red, White and Blue Series: New Patriotic and War Songs. Boston: Oliver Ditson Company, 1918. http://purl.dlib.indiana.edu/iudl/lilly/devincent/LL-SDV-257002.

Powers, Edith and Ray Powers. “America My America.” Oregon: Oregon Eiler’s Music House, 1917.
http://oregondigital.org/u?/sheetmusic,1957.

Thomson, Virgil. “American Musical Traits.” American Music Since 1910. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbIFi4rrwEU

It’s very likely that you know this famous American hymn – it’s been performed most famously by both Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, and seems to be well known today as a traditional Southern gospel tune. However, this piece was in fact composed by one of my ancestors: Joseph Philbrick Webster (1819-1875), who was born in Massachusetts and lived much of his adult life in Wisconsin. Originally a touring singer, JP Webster suffered from a bout of bronchitis that robbed him of his voice. From there, he became the composer of over 1,000 hymns, ballads, and patriotic songs, including “Lorena” and “In the Sweet By and By.”

JP Webster’s House in Elkhorn, WI

The publications of this song on the Sheet Music Consortium are from several different arrangers. The one I looked at was published and arranged during JP Webster’s lifetime, and is seen below. However, there are also several other interesting versions, including an arrangement in four parts as performed by the Kelly and Leon Troupe – upon a little digging, this turns out to have been a highly successful blackface minstrel troupe. Perhaps when minstrelsy became more of a Southern phenomenon, this song went with it, or perhaps it followed the pattern of musical traditions which migrated from the Puritan northeast after Lowell Mason’s hymn reforms (Mason was, in fact, one of Webster’s main music teachers).

My interest in this topic and song stem mostly from my family’s personal connection; however, it amazes me how well it ties into our course topics so far. Aside from the connection to minstrelsy, this song has clear connections to the complex history of Southern gospel and country music, having migrated South from traditional musical origins in the northeastern US.  JP Webster is also one example of a composer who may have been revived in the search for an American musical sound in the 1900s, since many of his songs (“Lorena” in particular) were written during and for the Civil War, and this was one of the musical periods mentioned by Annegret Fauser as a source for tracking American music. This is yet another possibility in explaining the revival of his music, so that it is well-known even today.

This song is merely one personal example of the relevance and complexity of what we have discussed in this course to our musical lives today. Few traditional songs have a clear path through history from their composition to how they exist in the public mind today, and while this is one example in which the composer is very clear, even it has its mysteries and complexities. Knowing the history is not merely interesting on a personal or intellectual level, it lends a great deal to our understanding (or recognition that really we know very little) of American musical history.

Works Cited:

1. Webster, Joseph Philbrick & Bennett, Fillmore. (1870). Sweet by and by Retrieved October 18, 2019, from https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/ref/collection/sheetmusic/id/33031.
2. Wikipedia contributors, “Joseph Philbrick Webster,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Joseph_Philbrick_Webster&oldid=882205755 (accessed October 17, 2019).
3. Tubb, Benjamin Robert. “The Music Of Joseph Philbrick Webster (1819-1875).” The Music of Joseph Philbrick Webster (1819-1875), Benjamin Robert Tubb, 9 Apr. 1999, www.pdmusic.org/webster.html.
4. Wisconsin Historical Society, Unknown, Joseph Philbrick Webster House, IM30910. Viewed online at https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Image/IM30910.

The 1890s were a turning point for black composers. For the most part, they were not able to rise to the level of white composers, except in the case of music written for minstrel shows. Performing in / composing for minstrel shows provided “chance for advancement and financial security” in a time of “shrinking possibilities” for black composers.

In my search on Sheet Music Consortium, I came across Gussie Davis (1853-1899), a composer from Ohio, who was a well known ballad writer. What I found particularly interesting about Davis is his involvement in northern minstrel shows. He wrote for minstrel shows, toured with minstrel groups, and even had his own minstrel troupe. What’s even more interesting? He was black. 

Won’t You Take Me Back to Dixie is a piece written by Davis from the perspective of a former (freed) slave. The lyrics use racial slurs, telling the story of a freed slave meeting their former master again and longing for plantation life, saying “and the old plantation, how I long to see dat home once mo’.” Taking this piece out of context and just examining it as a black person being nostalgic for slavery, the piece is very peculiar. However, it is likely that this piece was performed as a part of one of Davis’ minstrel shows. In this context, it makes sense that Davis would write as such, because black minstrel performers needed to commodify their “authentic blackness.” This provided a sense of comfort for audiences, who had never experienced the horrors of slavery, and allowed them to look past those atrocities. 

“Black minstrels felt the added responsibility to counter the stereotypes of black identity…on stage that balanced racist stereotypes and political commentary.” – Was Davis doing this? It seems, judging based on this piece, that he was not. He did not do enough (if anything) to counter racist stereotypes. Instead, Davis just plays into these stereotypes, but understandably so, because his livelihood depended on it.

Works Cited:

 “Blacks in Blackface.” Google Books, Google, books.google.com/books?id=DVsKAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA235#v=onepage&q=gussie&f=false.

“Won’t You Take Me Back to Dixie.” Frances G. Spencer Collection of American Popular Sheet Music, digitalcollections.baylor.edu/cdm/ref/collection/fa-spnc/id/15339.

“The History of Minstrelsy : African American Minstrel Performers · USF Library Special & Digital Collections Exhibits.” Omeka RSS, exhibits.lib.usf.edu/exhibits/show/minstrelsy/jimcrow-to-jolson/african-american-performers.