Modern Art: Striving for Meaning and Essence in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

Fauvism
Henri Matisse (1869-1954) was the central figure among a group of Parisian artists, somewhat misnamed les Fauves or "Wild Beasts," who reacted against the deliberate methods of Neo-Impressionism. For them, the construction of a painting through tiny dots created an effect in the retina not disimilar to the vibrato in music. For the Fauves, Pointillism destroyed the form and order, necessary to all great art, that could be created only through the organization of large areas of pure color. Here then was the first critical lesson that Matisse derived from Cezanne.

Cezanne also showed Matisse the way in other regards. As noted, the classical ordering that informed Cezanne's work attracted Matisse, and he adopted it as a doctrine of his own. Like Cezanne, Matisse believed that a work of art had to be intellectually worked-out in order to have enduring value; before even beginning, the artist had to have a clear vision of the entire composition in his mind. To be durable, a work of art had to be more than the record of the jumbled sensations of an instant.

After studying Egyptian, Greek, and Oriental art, Matisse came to the revelation that in abandoning the literal representation of movement one could attain a higher ideal of beauty. In Greek sculpture he saw that a figure could be depicted at the most precarious moment of an action, yet the moment within the action could be extracted and condensed, restoring balance, clarity, and calm. Of paramount importance to Matisse was the fact that in the hands of the ancient Greeks, scupture became durable without becoming static.

Hence the expressive character of a work of art and its ability to interact with the viewer did not involve the mere depiction of an emotion on a face or the capture of a violent gesture. Expression was a function of the dynamics of form. The choice of objects or figures, the arrangement of the objects, the placement of space around the objects, the proportions, and especially the choice and relationship of colors were wholly left to the artist to use to express himself. Matisse's colors tended to be iridescent. Indeed he regarded color as sensation, critical to imbuing a work with life, yet he always maintained balance among the colors he chose. He did not follow any formal hierarchy of color or color-theory as others, including Seurat, had tried to formulate, but instead relied upon his instincts or the sensations certain color combinations evoked in him. Neither objects nor colors were required to adhere to their appearance in nature.

Matisse's work tends also to have a decorative quality. Of its purpose he wrote, "what I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art which might be...like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue."

Henri Matisse, "Red Room" (1908)


Henri Matisse, "Still Life with Goldfish" (1911)

Cubism
Although paintings in the style continued to be produced throughout the first half of the century, the formative period of Cubism extends from 1906 or 1907 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Central to the movement was Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), undoubtedly the most important master of the twentieth century. Picasso began to absorb the visual aspects of Afrcian tribal sculpture after veiwing a museum exhibit at the invitation of his friend Matisse. The Fauves had been attracted by primitive art; Gaugin played a significant role in opening their attitudes to the exploration of African and Oceanic art.

As with other artists of the era, Picasso embraced Cezanne's advances of organization using the placement and rhythm of color, that is, his concepts of volume and displacement. To these ideas he married the squared, geometric shapes observed in African art. This marriage challenged the classical concept of beauty. Here the subject matter is fragmented, like shards of broken glass and not unlike the medieval stain-glass window. The field gains a certain three-dimensionality except that in viewing one is never sure if the shard is concave ro convex, solid or transluscent.

Picasso and Georges Braque (1882-1963), another cubist with whom Picasso often collaborated, discovered that depth of field could be created by pasting materials to the field. The method permitted the creation of a three-dimensional field without using the traditional methods of foreshortening or perspective, the device developed by Renaissance masters. The discovery was an extension of their concept of "picture as a tray" and resulted from the step of simply placing something on the tray. The process, called collage, permitted the image "to represent" (be part of an image) and "to present" (exist as themselves) at the same time. In time Picasso and Braque discovered that they did not need to paste materials to the canvas to create this new pictorial space. They could attain the same illusion by simply painting as if they were pasting. "Three Muisicans" employs the collage method of painting. The viewer cannot tell if the images in the foreground are painted or pasted.

Pablo Picasso, "Three Musicians" (1921)

Picasso's interest in African scuplture might have influenced his composer friend, Igor Stravinsky. The two worked together on various productions by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballet Russe. Stravinsky's "additive rhythms" (see subsequent Supplemental Lecture in the Modern section and "centonization" in New Millenium) likely have African origin, and several of Stravinsky's "jazz" compositions can be definitely ascribed to the influence of scores of African-American music that Diaghilev brought to Stravinsky from a trip to America. Most importantly, African influence was coming to fruitition in European art at the same time it blossomed, after a century of melding work songs and "field hollers" to Western harmony and form, in American music as jazz and blues.

Futurism
Cubism, as Picasso originally conceived it, was a classical discipline that could be applied to the traditional subject of painting such as protraits, still life scenes, and the nude. Other artists, however, saw in cubism a special affinity with the modern age, in particular the strides made in engineering and the manifestation of those strides in the contemporary landscape. The changes to the environment included, of course, power lines, suspension bridges and their complex system of cables, the lattice-work on airplane wings, and the like. A group of Italian artists who called themselves Futurists celebrated the machine. Their successes were found primarily in sculpture, but thier influence is also found in painting. Fernand Leger's (1881-1955) "The City" beautifully, concisely, and dynamically captures the modern industrial landscape.

Fernand Leger, "The City" (1919)

Another central facet of Futurism was the attempt to represent motion. The most significant outgrowth of experiments to capture the essence of motion, that is, speed, the preoccupation of modern man, was the impact upon upon viewer sensibilites in accepting of the beauty of the machine. Cinematography soon overtook Futurist painting. Marcel Duchamp, whose importance and oeuvre far exceeds Futurism, illustrates the representation of motion, here both real and symbolic, in "Le Passage de la vierge a la mariee" ("The Passage from Virgin to Bride").

Marcel Duchamp, "Le Passage de la vierge a la mariee" (1912)

Dadaism and Surrealism
Dada began almost as much as a political movement as an art movement. The aim of the Dadaist was the opposition of "bourgeosie" naturalism in any form as it appeared in contemporary art and hence the opposition of the companion "bourgeosie" morality inherent in naturalism. For the Dadaist, any imitation of nature, "however concealed," was a lie. Art must be neither realistic or idealistic to be true. Truth could be revealed only in its abstract essence.

In fact, the Dadaists had no clue what they stood for but they knew that they didn't stand for any style that existed harmoniously with society. True to their professed revolutionary confusion, they borrowed copiously and unwittingly from the styles of art around them, most notably futurism. From early on, the Dada movement had nihilistic tinges. Thier attempts to free themselves from all ancient social and artistic tradtions, set against the background of World War I and later the Russian Revolution, attracted not only 'activisits,' but also anarchists and fascists. Their slogan was chillingly straightforward: "Destruction is also Creation!"

First and foremost, the Dadaists wished to punish the bourgeosie, whom they blamed for the war. To this end, they embraced every conceivable ideal they could glean from the realm of the macabre and base to use as subject matter as an affront to the diginity of traditional subject matter. Duchamp painted a moustache on Mona Lisa and Picabia painted machines that had no functional capabilities or purpose but to mock science, engineering, and, ultimately, modern society.

Two Italian artists, Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carra, devised a new style, the scuola metafisica (Metaphysical School). It essentially involved a dream landscape, a Romantic offshoot, in which the images portrayed had no logical connection and which seemed almost to be dream-derived.

Carlo Carra, "The Metaphysical Muse" (1917)

De Chirico used older devices of art, but in new ways. He used perspective, for example, for its emotional value, and in his landscapes he used objects, architecture, and light and dark to create a sense of dramatic expectancy. The viewer stands on the verge of something that will occur, though he knows the event will not be good.

Giorgio de Chirico "Place d'Italie" (1912)

Surrealism had literary origins that encompassed an experiemtnal style of writing, a variey of "stream of consciousness" that had psychoanalytical overtones. In Surrealism, symbolic imagery presented in dreams and dream analysis form the basis of poetic effect. Although the principal Surrealists began with a sympathy for Dada, the different aims of the former, a more constructive message and an underpinning in psychoanalysis, caused a historic and permanent rift.

The art of Marc Chagall (1887-1985) does not entirely fit into the category of Surrealism. Its characteristics owe a debt to Cubism and his vibrant colors, what he called his 'primordial palette,' seem derived from Impressionism, at least on a superificial level. He denied these affinities, despite the fact that in the early years he exhibited as a Cubist.

Chagall, a Russian born painter, brought to his art a poetic vision that had roots in the folklore of his native country, Jewish tales, and the Russian countryside. Later in life he painted and repainted scenes from his childhood, none of which seem to have lost their persistence with the passage of time. The fantasy component causes his work to be considered with the Surrealists, and certainly his work offered to younger painters an alternative vision to that of De Chirico.

Marc Chagall, "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers" (1912)

The art of Spanish artist Joan Miro (1893-1983) represents a boldy imaginative and playful branch of Surrealism. His designs have been called 'biomorphic abstractions' since they consist more of curved lines than geometric shapes. Despite the fluidity of shape, the vitality, and the light-hearted character of his work, it is no less disciplined than Cubism.

Joan Miro, "Dutch Interior" (1928)

Salvador Dali (b1904) has not been very well regarded among either his fellow Surrealists or art critics. Both his art and his presentation of it have had an ingenuity and theatrical component that have propelled art and artist alike into the popular consciousness. Collegues regarded his techniques as "ultra-retrograde" and his subject matter contrived. He has, however, enjoyed tremondous commercial success.

Salvador Dali, "Premonition of Civil War" (1936)

Abstraction
Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) had already developed a mature mastery of Van Gogh's style of Expressionism when he immigrated to Paris in 1912. Under the influence of Cubism, his work began a process of transformation. In each subsequent stage of evolution Mondrian moved closer to the "balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions." His quest led to find the 'right' relationship caused him to reduce his materials to black bands and three primary colors and black and white. Despite the elimination fo any representative possiblility in his work, he often assigned titles, such as "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," that suggest some relationship to observed reality.

Piet Mondrian, "Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue" (1921), detail

Abstract Expressionism
Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) was one of the originators of a school of painting that enjoyed currency for a decade or so after the Second World War. Pollock abandoned the paintbrush for dribbling, spattering, and flinging as the methods of applying paint. Despite his mthods, his canvases have an undeniable emotional and aesthetic appeal. Pollock sought to "get into" his paintings, walking about on and across them and working on them from all sides. To Pollock, paint was not a passive suppstance to be applied and mainpulated. Instead, it was a store house of energy to be released. In his work methods, the internal dyanamics of a painting took care of itself. The surface and materials itself could offer its own interest including the visocsity of the paint, the interaction of the hues, the shape of the figuration as a function of the speed and angle of the impact of the paint,and the like. Undeinably, his canvases express an intense vitality.

Jackson Pollock, "One (#31)" (1950)

Pop Art
Pop Art, generally regarded to have its ken exclusively in American culture, actually had its origins in London in the 1950s. Throughout its most viable years it remained centered between NewYork and London. Its imagery, even of the earliest works, were derived from American mass media. In the style, commercial culture is viewed as an endless source of material rather than with revulsion. The most important qualities of mass-media images suitable for absorption into Pop Art are that they are popular, short-term, easily forgotten, low-cost, mass produced, designed for youth consumption, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and representative of big business.

American artist Paul Demuth had actually anticipated the Pop Art style before it became established. The title echoes that of a poem written by Willam Carlos William, and the fact explains the "Bill," "Carlos," and "W.C.W" that also appear in the design. The number five appears, in the poem, on the side of a firetruck, and its repetition in the painting reinforces the impression fo the firetruck as it races past us, the pedestrian observer, in the night.

Charles Demuth, "I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold" (1928)

Andy Warhol emerged in the 1960s as the principle exponent of the Pop Art movement. He is best known for his rendition of the Campbell's soup can. He also produced series using photographs of celebrities, including Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, and Jackie Kennedy, as well as photographs of flowers and even the electric chair. Warhol reduced the images to icons by silk-screening them onto canvas, proving their capacity for mass production.

Andy Warhol, "Marilyn" (1962)

Giants of the Early Modern Style: Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Bartok, and Ives

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw musical developments that would determine the direction of Classical music to mid-century and beyond. Three giants stand out above the others, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Bela Bartok.

Upon his death, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was regarded as the most important composers, if not the most important composer, of the modern era. In fact, Stravinsky and his experimentation led the way for many modern developments and furnished the tools for many composers who followed. Stravinsky’s creative life may be divided into three periods, with the central neo-classical period probably being the most important. Stravinsky’s life was also one of westward migration in which the life begun in Russia ended in Los Angeles.

Stravinsky’s earliest important works were produced in Paris in the first two decades of the century in association with the Ballet Russe. The greatest influences of this period come from two sources—his native Russia and the African art to which his friend Pablo Picasso introduced him. From Russia came unusual scales, in particular, the octotonic scale (today called the “diminished” scale in jazz). The scale is found in Russian music although it is not Russian but rather Turkish. The octotonic scale implies the simultaneous function of major and minor tonality by permitting the simultaneous sounding of the tonic chords of both. It is likely in this tonal anomaly that Stravinsky developed his most effective and influential treatment of modern music: polytonality. Polytonality is first evident in the ballets (i.e. the woodwinds of the “Omens of Spring” portion of Sacred du printemps) and remained a vital feature of Stravinsky’s music until the experimentation with dodecaphony near the end of his life. Moreover, a significant number of contemporary composers understood the value of the procedure and embraced it in their own music.

The octotonic scale beginning on the note C contains the notes C-D flat-E flat-E-G flat-G-A-B flat-C. The tonic chord of the key of C major contains the notes C-E-G; the tonic chord of the key of C minor contains the notes C-E flat-G. Curiously, there are only two possible octotonic scales. The one scale begins with a half step, as above, and the remaining notes in the pattern must fall into alternating half steps and whole steps. The other possible scale must also alternate half and whole steps, but begins with a whole step (D-E-F-G-A flat-B flat-B-D flat-D). Curiously, music based on octotonic scales did not reach its acme in the hands of Russian composers, but in the hands of contemporary Dutch composers.

The African influence that informed Pablo Picasso’s cubism also exerted heavy influence upon the music of Stravinsky. African art found its way into Paris from France’s territorial holdings in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Exhibitions and concerts were mounted frequently enough for both men to have experienced the art and the music directly. Stravinsky was so fascinated with the rhythmic aspects of African and African-influenced music that he even imposed upon the great impresario behind the Ballet Russe, Sergei Diaghilev, to bring ragtime music scores back to France during his frequent promotional trips to the United States.

The African influence is found in Stravinsky’s music in polyrhythm and his special brand of rhythmic alteration, additive rhythm. In polyrhythm, a common beat is shared, but the meter, rhythmic patterns, or accent patterns spin out independently in each drum part. In additive rhythm, beats are added to the initial meter. For example, a four-beat metric might be expanded from 1-2-3-4 to 1-2-3-4/1-2-3-4-5/1-2-3-4-5-6, etc. The effect is that of rhythmic “chugging.” The effect is primitive but vital, and very much in evidence in the early ballets. The polyrhythmic chugging is found in the “Dances of the Youth and Maidens” portion of Sacred du printemps, and is possibly the feature of the music that so offended the French public at the premiere of the ballet in 1913.

Stravinsky’s longest and most influential creative period was his second, which extended from about 1920 until 1951. During this time, Stravinsky no longer drew upon Russian and African sources for inspiration, but from eighteenth-century European classical music. The period is described stylistically as “neo-classical.” Neoclassicism was not exclusive to Stravinsky. It is defined as the use of any older forms as scaffolds for compositions in modern tonality. Hence a composer might use a trio sonata form, suite, or a sonata allegro to define the events within his music, but would compose the music using polytonal, dodecaphonic, or any other modern tonal method.

Stravinsky’s sense of neoclassicism went beyond just the use of older formal structures—he often started with an existing composition and reworked it to his liking. He affectionately and frequently referred to this procedure as his “raids upon the past.” One of the most readily recognizable “raids” is Stravinsky’s the ballet Pulcinella (1920) a reworking of a suite by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. The music is quite distinctive, with entire sections of Pergolesi’s works remaining intact and others modified by Stravinsky’s modern tonality. Doubtless, this hybridization by juxtaposition of two different musical styles is the starting point for the later “quotation music” of Eileen Zwilich. Pulcinella was clearly a stylistic turning point for Stravinsky, and the curiosity of its contrasts is likely the proof of his experimentation. Later neoclassical works do not so easily betray older pre-existent music, if older music was used, though the influence of older forms and older procedures remains evident.

Stravinsky’s interest also shifted in the late 1920s and early 1930s to the use of ideas and texts from both antiquity and sacred sources. As noted, other works draw upon forms such as the Baroque concerto, such as > Dumbarton Oaks, his orchestral concerto in the style of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti. The last work in the neoclassical style, the opera The Rake’s Progress, was modeled upon the general characteristics of Mozart’s operas.

Stravinsky’s final years were spent exploring the possibilities of Schoenberg’s twelve tone system. Curiously, Schoenberg and Stravinsky lived only a few miles from each other on Los Angeles, knew of each other, yet they did not meet. It was not until after Schoenberg’s death that Stravinsky, with the prodding of his personal assistant Robert Kraft, began to experiment with the twelve-tone system. Even then, Stravinsky did not draw directly upon Schoenberg’s music for inspiration, but instead upon that of Schoenberg’s disciple, Anton Webern. Webern’s music, despite the twelve-tone system, put to the fore intense “classicism” and consequently great economy of means, and hence appealed to Stravinsky.

Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) was the link between high Romantic and Modern music. His earliest musical endeavors as a composer were heavily influenced by the neo-classicist Brahms and later by the apogee of Romantic music, Richard Wagner. His obsession with Wagner’s continuous polyphony and advanced harmony led Schoenberg to study the music in earnest, and his early compositions, such as Verklarte Nacht, are firmly in the emotionally intense, larger-than-life, late Romantic idiom.

By 1908, Schoenberg concluded through his own compositional efforts that the harmonic language of the late Romantics, epitomized by the music of Wagner, had run through its possibilities. Schoenberg began to experiment, going one the step beyond chromatic harmony, the device Wagner had so completely mastered and implemented. Wagner’s unusual harmonies, unresolved dissonances, and rapid key cycling essentially resulted in the obscuring of any key center; Schoenberg sought to obliterate tonal reference.

His earliest efforts are called atonality. Chromatic harmony used all twelve chromatic notes in the scale. In Schoenberg compositions of this period, he sought to retain the use of all twelve notes but to avoid any reference to the traditional major and minor scales, any of the normal melodic contours or harmonic progressions, and any of the intervallic relationships that had ‘signal’ functions in traditional triadic tonality. His treatment of dissonance also radically differed from the traditional concepts of its handling. Schoenberg simply did not resolve dissonant note combinations, nor saw a need to do so. In his view, his music represented the “emancipation of dissonance.”

Schoenberg’s atonal period is also identified as the musical equivalent of Expressionism in art. The best known work from this period, from about 1908-1914, is Mondestrunken (1912) a chamber work for female voice, piano, piccolo, flute, violin, viola, clarinet, bass clarinet, and cello. Based a series of poems and embodying the isolated modern artist as the puppet Pierrot Lunaire, the tragic clown character from the commedia dell’arte, Mondestrunken seems at first more like a study in distortion on the rhythmic, tonal, timbral, dynamic, and formal levels. In fact, it simply carries all the features that had become the normative in Romanticism one step further, and even the most bizarre feature can be traced to a source earlier in the Romantic style. Moreoever, both atonality and later dodecaphony are direct continuations of Western traditions reaching back centuries. To be sure, Mondestrunken uses Expressionist means to convey the unease of the early twentieth century, doubtless reflected more acutely in the music because it was composed on the eve of World War I. Other contemporary art styles sought to understand alienation and the increasing perception of the meaningless of life, and Mondestrunken perhaps draws some of its personality from the same sources as Surrealism and Dada.

Schoenberg also developed two new techniques that are found in Mondestrunken. and other works of the period: Sprechstimmeand Klangfarbenmelodie. Sprechstimme is a style of vocalizing that falls somewhere between singing and speech. Small “x”s in the score indicate that the pitches are approximated. In Klangfarbenmelodie, which is more common in instrumental compositions, the timbre of each note of a melody is varied when each successive note is played by a different instrument.

Atonality did not permit the creation of longer compositions unless a text served as the scaffold. From about 1917 until the early 1920s, Schoenberg worked to systematize his early advances. The result was his Twelve-Tone System, which is also today called Dodecaphony. It would inform all his later works and impact as well as the later works of his two students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Collectively, the three composers are known as the Second Viennese School. In the briefest of explanations, the composer constructs a tone row, that is, a melody that uses each of the twelve chromatic pitches within the octave. No pitch may be used a second time until all of the other pitches have been sounded. The composer can manipulate the row in a variety of ways to generate new melodies, pitch levels, and even “chords.”

Schoenberg’s students had very different temperaments. Alban Berg is regarded as the ‘Romantic’ of the group. The texts of his works reflect the same frightening assessment of life as Schoenberg’s. They are more tangible and perhaps more disturbing because they are set to stories that do not unfold in the bizarre but remote “other” world of Pierrot Lunaire, but in horrifying and potentially real-life situations. As in late Expressionist art and later Existential literature, life and the environment are hostile entities against which man cannot win. The opera Wozzeck is studied in the text. In the opera Lulu, the greatest of his masterpieces, Lulu is a high-born woman who is reduced by a series of circumstances to prostitution: her first client is Jack the Ripper.

Despite disturbing libretti, Berg did not seek, as Schoenberg had, to avoid all tonal references. Not only were tonal references permitted to stand when they inadvertently occurred as one of the functions of the tone row. Berg sometimes altered dissonances that occurred in the row to be more consonant if they did not support the dramatic action. Hence, Berg made his music more accessible and less rigid. Although his works can be unsettling, at least they are not incomprehensible. Berg died of a bee sting in the late 1930s.

Anton Webern is regarded as the classicist of the group. His methods embrace the utmost economy in his quest to define the absolute. In each work, Webern used only the minimal number of pitches to express his ideas, as if to distill all musical thought to its essence. Consequently, his compositions tend to be very poetic in gesture but also very short in duration, and the entirety of his life work can be heard in fewer than four hours. A central characteristic of Webern’s music for ensemble is Klangfarbenmelodie. Webern was shot dead on his front porch by a G.I. at the close of World War II. Webern violated curfew to light up a cigar and thus added to the common wisdom that smoking is not good for one’s health.

Bela Bartok: the Nationalist Thread in Modern Music

Bela Bartok (1881-1945) established himself first as a piano teacher and concert pianist in his native Hungary. By the 1900s, he became deeply immersed in the fever of nationalism that swept Europe. His interest in national music styles piqued, he devoted, along with friend and fellow composer Zoltan Kodaly, a significant amount of time and effort to making field recordings of the folk music of Hungary and neighboring countries. He developed an authority on the music of the Romanians, Turks, and Slovaks, as well as the Arab populations of North Africa. His field research was one of the first of the discipline known today as enthnomusicology.

Bartok shared his research by publishing piano versions of folksong melodies to which he added only rudimentary accompaniment. The labor reinforced his love of Hungarian and other ethnic music, and the exercise of setting only sparse but meaningful accompaniments that would enhance without obscuring the character or rhythm of the ethnic melody taught him to weigh the meaning of each added note.

In Bartok’s earliest period as a composer, the twenty years of the twentieth century, the profound influence of folksong is evident. The music could almost be described as “synthetic” folk music, that is, it retained all the authentic characteristics of ethnic music without being authentic ethnic music.

Later music reflected strong neo-classical tendencies, from media (i.e. string quartet) to form (i.e. sonata, passacaille). His harmonic and rhythmic language, however, even with the use of polytonality, drew heavily and unashamedly upon his Hungarian culture. His treatment of dissonance reflected his native musical origins, adding to the modern palette. Likewise, his rhythmic organization reflected the characteristic sophisticated syncopation of Hungarian folk song and dance. Bartok frequently delighted in watching famous pianists stumble through the counting during sight-reading.

Bartok excelled at instrumental rather than vocal music. As the text points out, much of Bartok’s music reflects a variety of moods and textures. Some pieces are atmospheric, almost Impressionist; others are primitive and brutal in the manner of Stravinsky’s early ballets; and still others delight in the rhythms of Eastern European folk dance. These descriptions tend to apply more to the piano music and the early music rather than later works. His compositions for instrumental ensemble adhere more to neoclassical tenets and, despite the ethnic influences, are truly cosmopolitan in character. The String Quartets, for example, stand as neoclassical exercises in the purest and most absolute of cerebral styles. As one might expect in neoclassical compositions, imitation, polyphony, and thematic transformation are often used to create tension and drive his music forward.

The Concerto for Orchestra is a notable exception to the severity of the late style. He had immigrated to New York in the early 1940s, where he had a grant as a research scholar at Columbia University. His grant ran out before he could finish his work and, in 1943, his health took a sharp and alarming decline. He received a commission for an orchestral composition and began work on the concerto in the same year. Realizing that he was dying, he set about to make the work one of his finest, but he also determined to incorporate in it features that would assure its protracted success. Hence the concerto is not difficult listening for the uninitiated, but rather geared to popular tastes. His purpose was not musical “immortality.” Instead he sought to make a vehicle that would support his family after his death. He ruefully referred to the concerto as “my life insurance policy.”

Honorable Mention: Charles Ives

American Charles Ives (1874-1954) had a less than exhilarating experience in his music composition studies at Yale University, and the condemnation of his experiments by the academy led him to the conclusion to seek employment outside the music business. Ives entered his father’s insurance brokerage, there achieving his first strokes of immortality with the invention of term life insurance and estate planning.

Like Bela Bartok, the music of Ives was rooted in the folk and popular music of his native land. For Ives, this music included ragtime, Protestant hymns (both traditional and revival), parlor and Minstrel songs, patriotic tunes, barn dance fiddle tunes, and the marching band music offered by every band in America since the Civil War. Many nineteenth-century American composers, especially those composers like Stephen Foster who worked in popular genres, forced the folk and popular music that had evolved through cross-cultural hybridization into the models furnished by European classical music.

Ives’ inspiration drew not upon European classical models, however, but upon the traditions of American improvised music, with all its mistakes, and the influence Ives heard in African influenced American music. These latter influences included polyrhythm and syncopation, irregular phrase lengths, and implied polytonality in the “blue” note. Ives reaction to these influences was not to absorb them and recombine them, but to use them as the starting point to strike out in startling new directions.

Ives worked at a time almost exactly contemporary to Stravinsky’s period with the Ballet Russe. He worked, however, in almost complete musical isolation and, consequently, his approach to polyrhythm and polytonality was unique and outside the European mainstream. In addition, Ives was extremely patriotic, and nearly all his works embrace and celebrate Americana.

Whereas Stravinsky applied the polyrhythm he heard in African music and ragtime to polytonality he adapted from the ocototonic scales, Ives took one step further out and combined entire pieces in a “poly” musical fabric. Ives, of course favored familiar American melodies, especially tunes of common folk, and he loved to quote these tunes in his compositions. His use went far beyond just quotation; rather he interwove and developed them within the larger structure. Hence one finds an implied interrelationship of music, time, and “space.” In the music of Ives, “poly” might mean something more akin what one might hear standing stationary as a parade passes and the music of successive bands overlaps. In the music of Stravinsky and his contemporaries, polytonality and polyrhythm are anchored to a common thread of superstructure. This common reference is also true of much of Ives’ music, but there are moments when Ives takes one step further out. His musical events can be completely independent of each other, ending only when one eclipses the other or they blend into a single, advanced and, to some ears, cacophonous texture.

African Influences in the Popular Music of the United States

An Overview of Slavery in the New World and Its Music
The first African immigrants arrived at Jamestown in 1619. Initially, their relationship to the white English settlers was one of semi-free indentured servants. African servants were treated humanly and regarded by their early masters as a part of the family. Acculturation of the African to European customs was rapid in part because white and black worked side by side on a roughly equal footing and because the African was part of a very small minority of the overall population.

American slave ownership was not extensive in the first century. In 1624, the total slave population of Virginia was twenty-two. By 1640, there were one hundred-fifty slaves. By 1649, the number had grown to three hundred among a population of fifteen thousand whites. Ratios of the white population varied from 25:1 to 5:1 depending upon region, with the coastal areas such as the Sea Islands of South Carolina having greater numbers among the African population. In areas with high concentrations of blacks, African culture survived far longer.

The numbers of slaves dramatically increased in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as the plantation system became the agrarian equivalent of the large corporation. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 turned around the sagging economy of the South and ensured the establishment of the cotton-based plantation system. More and more slaves, essentially chattel labor, were needed to make the plantation profitable.

The slave trade was abolished in 1808, though slavery did not legally end in the United States until Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (1863) during the Civil War. By 1860, the number of African slaves in the United States was 4,441,830.

African culture changed radically during this period. For one, the end of the slave trade meant that African culture was not reinforced or reinvigorated by new arrivals from Africa. Moreover, the majority of this group had been born in the United States, and their concept of “African” was based upon songs and stories handed down from their parents and grandparents. Hence the culture of the slave increasingly became a hybrid of African and European, as did that of the white master.

Pathways from Africa to the New World
The majority of the slaves came from West Africa and a geographical area that extends on the west side of the continent from West Africa southward to the lowest tip. They came from a large variety of tribes with a great diversity of customs. A partial list of the the tribes includes, moving from north to south, Wollofs and Malinkes (19%), Mandingos and Ashantes(11%), Yorubas (16%), Hausas, Ibos, and Sekes (27%), Bakongos and Mbundus (25%), with a miscellaneous final 2% snatched from the east coast of Angola.

The Caribbean islands served as home for some unfortunate Africans, and a “seasoning” ground for all. Those who remained in the islands worked in the fields, most notably in the growing of a second New World “gold,” sugar cane. All slaves underwent a period of “socialization” and standardization before being sent to work in the fields, whether on a Caribbean island, in the United States, or in the countries of South America that ring the Caribbean. The slave newly arrived in the islands was a representative of one of the manifold tribal groups. He not only had to be introduced to the language of his master (English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.) and be forced to accept the expectations and realities of his new life, but also had to be reconciled with the customs and languages of other slaves from other tribal groups and regions. The slave population on the Caribbean islands invariably outnumbered the white population. As a consequence, aspects of African culture remained quite intact for a far longer period than on the mainland.

Among all African groups, several commonalities existed with regards to music. Music was an integral part of life and was regarded as a celebration to be shared and made by all members according to his tastes and abilities. Activities crucial to survival, such as sowing, harvest, and hunting, were accompanied by music, as well as the recreations contingent to the activities. Cultural cohesion was also a critical function of music, and tribal history and social information was transmitted from one generation to the next through songs and even dance. Music emerged that suited the circumstance, gender, age, status, and occasion. The community created among Africans by the participation of all members in singing, dancing, and drumming stands in sharp contrast to European attitudes toward music. That European music was irrevocably linked to the Church for the first 1500 years is evident in the quiet and respectful deportment of the modern classical concertgoer. African music, with its emphasis on melodic improvisation and the use of sophisticated rhythms played on a wide variety of percussion instruments shares very strong similarities to Arab and Indian music.

Early Musical Acculturation of the Slave in the United States
As noted, the African worker in the New World in the seventeenth century was absorbed rapidly into the prevailing European culture. During this time, he learned to play European instruments, especially the violin, but also the French horn, the flute, the trumpet, the fife, and the variety of European military instruments. By the mid-eighteenth century, black fiddlers routinely began to supply the music for dancing and other casual entertainments, both white and black. Since the written recording of African American music did not begin until the mid-nineteenth century, we do not know exactly what music the black fiddler played on the fiddle but is not unlikely that he reproduced African music and altered European tunes to suit. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, jigs by black fiddlers were common in the repertory. By 1734, a slave’s musical prowess became a significant aspect of his identity, and the description of his musical ability was included in the “wanted” poster. Most black fiddlers, regardless of the time period, were “ear players,” not trained, reading musicians except perhaps in New Orleans.

Not all instruments played in the New World by slaves were European ones favored by the masters. Slaves fashioned their own drums, of course, but also reproduced facsimiles of instruments they had know in Africa. One of these, the balafo, is a variant of the xylophone. The different pitches are determined by the length of the wooden slats, and the gourds underneath each slat acts as a resonating chamber. Other improvised instruments included the “bones,” which were really animal bones struck together, the triangle, and the tambourine. The tambourine might very well be a hybrid of the drum and the banjo.

Balafo

Another important instrument is one many Americans believe is American: the banjo. In fact, slaves first fashioned necked-string instruments after ones in Africa. These instruments closely resemble the Arab lute (see the European lute featured in my introduction—it too was derived from the Arab equivalent). The resemblance of this forerunner is not surprising when one takes stock that many slaves came from areas of Africa that were heavily influenced by Arab culture. The earliest written mention of the banjo occurred in 1621 in the journal of a white trader in Gambia. In the New World, most written references to the banjo, written between 1678 and 1740, occurred in the historical accounts of Jamaica and Martinique by British and French scholars. The written mention in America dates from 1754, in an advertisement for slaves in the Maryland Gazette. Throughout its life the banjo went by a range of names including banza, strum-strum, espece de guitarre, bangil, banjer, banshaw, merry-wang, bandore, bonjour, banjah, violon des Negres, banjay, banjaw, bonja, banjoe, bongau, bonjaw, and bangoe, in case you are interested.

In the foreground, early banjos that resemble Arab and Indian musical instruments

Dancing was a critical component of the social lives of both the African American and the white master. As noted, African dancing, in the form of the "black" jig, had found acceptance by the mid-eighteenth century in formal white circles. Two illustrations follow that depict slave dance scenes and the instruments used to make the music.

Slave Dance featuring European and African Instruments. Pictured are the European fiddle, the lute-like banjo, and the bones. Note the Europeanized dress. The sketch was made in Virginia in 1853.

Slave Music: Types According to Use and Features of the Music

Slave Music: Types by Use and Features of the Music
A uniform cultural characteristic of all the African tribal groups brought to the New World as slaves was the pervasive role of music in all aspects of life. Music had a place in play and work, in mourning and worship, and often the lines between purposes blurred. Making music was a community effort, and all participated to his ability. Music continued to be central to life, even after the participant was plucked from his home and transported and forced to live in an alien land and culture. Slave songs may be divided into categories including work songs, dance music, and worship music.

Work Songs: “Gang” Songs and Field Hollers
Work songs differed according to the type of labor, but always served to pace the labor, pass the time, and make life bearable. The kinds of labor included flashing rice, grinding hominy, spinning, making baskets, loading cargo, processing tobacco or hemp, firing engines, rowing (in coastal areas from Maryland to Florida), tilling fields, clearing land, harvest work, chopping trees (often involving several workers at once), construction, and road building. Descriptions of work songs are not common before 1800, so the modern understanding of them is based on an intermediate stage of development.

The “gang” work song regulated heavy labor that involved dangerous tools such as axes, pick ages, sledge hammers, etc. The song not only paced the work in the speed of the activity but more importantly determined when the men, standing in a row, would strike with the axe or sledge hammer. Since the workers lived together on the same plantation, each knew the songs. The songs often began life as improvised music, but necessarily settled into roughly predictable rhythmic and metric patterns with use. The texts still retained their improvisatory nature, with stanzas and ideas added or deleted for amusement.

Although the audio example does not demonstrate the point, most of the music was responsorial in delivery, that is, one singer led the group by singing part of the line, and all the others joined in to finish it. Responsorial singing is very ancient and here is likely the extension of singing practices used in Africa. Most slave music was sung in responsorial fashion because it built community, but in heavy labor, responsorial singing was essential to assure worker safety.

A critical component of all African American music, then, is the “call and answer” structure of the musical and textual lines. The structure is retained, even when there is only one singer, in both black and white modern popular music. The structure differs significantly to the European approach to melody, which often embraces protracted and unbroken lines. An example is Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The first line alone requires sixteen beats to state. In African American music such as Blues, the “call” portion might require on a beat or two. Call and answer singing survived in the building by free men of the transcontinental railroad, the prison work gangs of southern penitentiaries into the 1930s, and in the songs of basic training in the U.S. military. The vestiges exist today in popular music.

Field work, such as hoeing, often required work lines to be efficient, and in these circumstances the music did not differ significantly from “gang” songs. Call and answer melodic lines were still the rule, but the absence of the danger of serious injury permitted greater improvisational freedom and exploration, as well as irregular line lengths and more dramatic delivery. There was never a concern among black improvisation for rhyme or syllabification. Syllables were contracted or extended to fit the metric unit. It is also in the field holler, or “arhoolie,” that one can likely find the origin of the modern guitar “lick.” The regional differences in field hollers might also partially explain the regional differences in Blues styles.

Field hollers often included snarls, growls, and other non-musical language or animal sounds, as well as swoops and glissandi (the bluriing of one note into the next without a break between). All slave music, regardless of its use, featured the use of quarter-tone inflections. A quarter-tone is the note between two that are recognized in Western music. An example might be the pitch between the notes E flat and E, that is, the pitch is too high to be E flat and too low to be E.. In Blues, these notes are called "bends."

Work in the cotton fields

Slave owners understood the importance of the work song. They quickly recognized that the slave who would not sing could be a source of trouble. Slave owners also quickly assessed that the tempo of the music (the speed of the beat) and character of the music were important. The tempo made a difference in the amount of work accomplished, hence they encouraged up-tempo songs. Mournful or sorrowful songs, usually in minor keys, were discouraged since they affected mood. Work slowed and the slave could become troublesome and even dangerous. The slave owner’s emphasis on faster, cheerier, major-key music explains the dearth of sorrow songs before the Civil War. Finally, tempo cues were sometimes determined by neither the slave nor the master, but instead by the tempo of the machines used in the work, as in grinding.

The textual content and musical characteristics of the work song did not evolve solely along African lines or in a cultural vacuum. Slaves who worked in the coastal regions worked alongside newly-arrived blacks from the West Indies and immigrants from England and Ireland. The music that regulated work then came from a variety of cultures. West Indian music brought afresh African elements into slave music, and the music of the immigrants from the British Isles reinforced the initial British influence upon the slave of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Spiritual became a dominant music type during the evangelical crusades of the nineteenth century and, in some regions where the teaching of religion had been particularly successful, the spiritual texts supplanted the normal text of the work song. Throughout its history, the work song also furnished the opportunity for the slave to vent emotionally by praising or satirizing in song his master.

Loading cargo onto the river boat

“Marching” songs might also be grouped with work songs. The slave had several occasions to march. First, he marched out to labor and back to his living quarters daily. He also marched to the “big house” for his weekly rations. After the abolition of slave importation from Africa in the early nineteenth century, domestic traders often marched groups of slaves to auction, usually from the northernmost regions of the south to the Deep South. These migrations by marching were cheaper than transport by rail or water. March songs also passed into military in the late nineteenth century as blacks became soldiers. Each troop-unit, like the workers on the plantations, developed its own songs.

Dancing
Taking his cues from Christian worship practices, the plantation owner did not generally require his slaves to work on Sundays. Sunday became, then, the slave’s day for recreation, and the most common form of recreation for him was dancing. Slaves gathered on their own plantations, on a nearby one, or in a back square in a nearby town and spent the day in dance. Dancing commenced in the afternoon and often lasted late into the night.

Eyewitness accounts tell us that the music consisted of percussion furnished by a variety of instruments and music from the banjo, fiddle, and balafo. The percussion instruments ranged from tall Congo drums to bones and gourds filled with pebbles or dried corn. The accounts are consistent with the illustrations of the previous lecture.

On the islands of the West Indies and in urban squares such as Place Congo in New Orleans, the occasion of the Sunday dance called for formality of dress. Impromptu dancing on the plantation after work hours was less formal. Slave owners feared large gatherings of blacks and the potential for conspiracy, advanced and communicated, they believed, in drum messages. As a consequence, the large dance gatherings of the slave in city squares were outlawed in the eighteenth century. Place Congo is unusual because dancing, legal or not, was permitted until around 1835.

An engraving from 1779 depicts Sunday dance on Santa Domingo. Note the European formal attire.

Dancing continued on the plantation and, despite legislation against it in urban areas, reports as late as the 1860s indicate dancing continued in secret. A second feature that might have made dancing in secret more desirable was an increasing association of dancing with voodoo, especially in Deep South states such as Mississippi and Louisiana. Union army recruiters found the best places to drum up new enlistments was at these secret dances, which by 1864 were called “shindigs.”

A nineteenth-century development in dancing was called “Pattin’ Juba.” Pattin’ juba was an extension of hand clapping that incorporated the differences in sound created by slapping parts of the body other than the hands. It is not found anywhere in the Caribbean islands. It likely evolved as an answer to the implementation of legal restrictions against drumming. It served as an alternative to drums as a means to accompany dance. A typical pattern of pattin’ juba might be described:

1.) clap hands
2.) both hands to knees
3.) right hand to left shoulder
4.) left hand to right shoulder

All the while, the patter stamps time with his feet and sings. Tap dancing, some vaudeville specialty dance routines, and modern popular dancing might all have origins in pattin' juba.

Evangelical Fervor: the Spiritual
The evangelical fervor of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries changed the musical landscape, pushing British-influenced white music and African American music together once again and helping to shape many of the musical features that we recognize today as modern. The conversion of the slaves to Christianity was an absolute prerequisite to the emergence of the Spiritual, a music form that not only profoundly influenced African American music of the nineteenth century but also white music.

The evangelical movement was a Protestant one. The Anglican Church (“Episcopal” to Americans) organized the earliest attempt to save the slave’s immortal soul, but this effort actually came as incidental to the decision in the 1750s by the Church of England to strengthen its presence in the colonies of the New World. Other Protestant denominations (Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists) came to the same fervor pitch around the same time, and serious efforts began in earnest.

Eighteenth-century evangelical missionaries faced serious impediments. For one, many slave owners opposed the movement, fearing that Christian teachings of equality carried with them the danger of uprisings. Practical problems were also serious. The distance between plantations slowed effective ministry. Language barriers arose with newly-arrived Africans. The limited number of clergy was barely adequate to serve the white population, much less convert a significant slave one.

In devising effective strategies to conversion, the Anglican bishop Beilly Porteus made several far-reaching suggestions in his Essay towards a Plan for the More Effectual Civilization of the Negroe [sic] Slaves (1784). He observed that since “many Negroes have a natural turn for music… this propensity, displayed as they are heard to sing in their rude and artless way at their work,” could be used as a tool for conversion. He proposed that “short hymns set to plain, easy, and solemn psalm tunes, as nearly resembling their own simple melody as possible” might be used for instruction in church and as music for slave occasions. He further advised that great progress could be made “by mingling in their entertainments, their festivities, and amusements, and turning every little incident into an instrument of moral and religious improvement.” Concurrently and independently, many Presbyterian clergy concluded that Psalm-singing represented the most pleasant and effective way to instruct slaves.

Progress toward slave conversion made slow progress prior to 1850. The strategy to conversion was comprehensive and aimed at changing all aspects of the slaves’ lives. Camp meetings were organized for worship and instruction and slow replaced Sunday dancing. The worship at camp meetings set the precedent for later Black worship, including displays of high emotion, great zeal, and dance-induced trances. Religious dancing usually occurred after the formal service, and these were called “shouts.” Camp meetings were also organized by black religious leaders, and these meetings were often very similar to the earlier secret dances. They were held in the deep woods away from urban centers and populated areas and, most importantly, the discomfort felt under the scrutiny of white eyes.

Camp meetings organized in the late 1820s by the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist sects often lasted several days and used open fields for their sites. Ecstatic and zealous singing and dancing were typical features. The leader of the worship service was called the “exhorter.” The preaching was not as great an interest as the music, the strong rhythm, and the body motion.

Camp Meeting

White hymns were taught by “lining out,” a colonial practice of teaching hymns to musically illiterate congregations. The white hymns were dutifully sung in the presence of white clergy, but as soon as out of earshot, slaves began to graft religious texts of their own making unto the music that had evolved in the fields. The influence went both ways, however. If hymns served to convey the Western features of harmony and scales to black musicians, the emotive quality and rhythmic subtlety of black music filtered back into white music. “Amazing Grace,” a white spiritual written by a repentant former slave owner, uses a scale typical of Scottish music and a regular melodic rhythm typical of European music, but the strong emotive quality of the text and music is more akin in spirit and character to the African American spiritual than to any Protestant hymn. The black spiritual also had an impact upon white folksong of the period, and it is often impossible to tell from hearing the race or ethnicity of the author. In the end, conversion of the slave to Christianity did little to change his cultural practices and entertainments. Instead, religion merely subsumed the slave's activities and put on them a new face.

American Music Takes Shape: the Musical Melding of Two Cultures

The hybrid musical styles of the early twentieth century that are familiar to us, especially blues, jazz, and folk music, began to congeal into styles by the late nineteenth century. Both European and African music traditions in America borrowed from each other in this period, and the cross-pollination started to become evident in a music that was neither European nor African, but American. Identifying and sorting traits is a daunting task. In the simplest description, one could say that Europeans brought to music a sophisticated harmonic system (standard scales and chords), a high level of organization of materials, and clarity of form. Africans brought sophisticated rhythmic interplay, non-Western scales, and a heartfelt and flexible style of singing.

"Anglo" Versus AfricanScales
Since the late sixteenth century, European music has been characterized by melodies that are composed using either the major or the minor scale supported by chords derived from those scales. Curiously, many of the folksong and fiddle tune/dance tunes of the British Isles, especially Scottish music, uses a variant in which the fourth and seventh notes of the major scale are omitted. African musicians, especially fiddle players, were first exposed in the colonial days to this scale. The adaptation of existing melodies to make new ones is not unlikely. Today the scale is called the “major” pentatonic. African Americans absorbed it into their music, almost as the preferred scale, from their master’s culture. The majority of Spirituals utilize the major pentatontic scale. The spiritual "You Can't Cross Here" exemplifies the sound of the major pentatonic scale.

A partial explanation for the heavy emphasis in slave music upon the major and major pentatonic scales is found in the rules established by the slave owner; up tempo, major-key songs kept the work moving and the slaves’ spirits high. African American songs that utilized the minor scale were rare before the late nineteenth century. Because minor-key music was suppressed, music such as the “sorrow song” spiritual could not emerge until mid-century or later, when former slaves were free to sing what they pleased. “Gang” work songs, one of the musical staples of slave life virtually disappeared with the end of the plantation system. As noted, this type of work song lived on in the penal and military systems.

Minor keys, discouraged by work overseers, found use in "sorrow songs" that emerged at mid-century. The sorrow song may be regarded as the prototype for blues. The scale used by African American singers was a variant of the European minor called the "minor pentatonic." Like the major pentatonic, it was a gapped scale that omitted the second and sixth notes of the scale. The minor pentatonic scale is the most prominent scale in early rock ‘n’ roll and in white blues of the 1960s. The minor pentatonic scale is exemplified in the video "Motherless Child".

Comparision of European to Penatatonic Scales (as used in Amercian music)

It was not unusual for African American musicians to combine the major and minor pentatonic scales. Often, a spiritual might be sung nearly all the way through using the major pentatonic. In the closing measures, however, the sing might opt to borrow the third from the minor pentatonic, effectively creating what would later be called in in blues and jazz, a "blue note."

In the nineteenth-century, Spiritual-influenced folksong "Froggy Went a Courtin,'" the melody uses the major pentatonic scale until the sixth measure. Here the third note of the scale, C#, is lowered to become the C natural note of the minor pentatonic scale. Here the musician actually sings or plays the third from minor in a song in a major key. The shifts between the major and minor pentatonic scales became the backbone of blues and supplied the notes, primary among them the minor third, that we today call "blue notes."

"Froggy Went A Courtin'"

Harmony
Harmony, or the interrelated quality of the notes of a scale as they are sounded simultaneously with other notes from the same scale, is one of the crowning achievements of Western culture. African musicians encountered it when they were brought to the mainland from the islands of the Caribbean in white songs, hymns, and dance music. The earliest slave usage would seem to be in the music of the “strum-strum,” or banjo. Since very little African American music was recorded earlier than the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature and sophistication of chords used in dance music, if chords were used at all, is unknown. Usage of harmony in a way more consistent with European tradition, that is, in the regular repetition of a pattern of chords as a background or superstructure for a melody, is implicit if not explicit in the melodies of the Spiritual.

The chords most frequently used are those built upon the first, fourth, and fifth notes of the scale, also called the primary chords. They are named after the number in the scale of the pitch, or I, IV, and V. They are still the most common chords in popular music, ranging from the spiritual and the blues to country, folk, rock, metal, etc. Two styles that stand as exceptions are jazz, in which the chord progressions are often as advanced as those of European classical music, and rap, which often does not use chords at all.

Rhythm
No sharper is the contrast of musical styles between European and African music than in rhythm. European music evolved over the centuries to place harmony, a strict system that governs the simultaneous sounding of three notes, the chord, over rhythmic subtlety. As noted, harmony is the greatest music triumph of Western culture, and other cultures that use harmony absorbed it from the West in recent times.

The use of a repeated pattern of chords as a musical superstructure is the single greatest obstacle to sophisticated rhythms. The important notes must be sung at the same time as the arrival of the chord that contains that note. The movement of the chords, then, must be regular and predictable. If you listen to any composition in the classical repertory, you will be immediately struck by the sophistication of the melody and harmony, especially in the ability of the composer to build an extended composition that is derived from a short, basic melodic idea. Listening with new ears, however, you will notice that the rhythmic components, even in the music of Europe’s most significant composers such as Beethoven, are really quite simple.

Systemized harmony did not play a significant part in African music. Melodic lines were sung monophonically. Monophony indicates a single melody (the number of singers does not matter if all sing the same tune) without harmony or second melodies. The supporting drumming patterns do not have to be linked directly to the melody except in that the melody and basic time of the drums must follow the same basic beat. As a consequence, sophisticated rhythms were used to compensate for the lack of harmony in African music. Remember that descriptions of the dancing in places like Place Congo did not need anything but a drum beat to occur!

The sophistication of African rhythms often overwhelms the Western ear. Often they do not make sense at first hearing but reward anyone who is willing to sit and listen really carefully. The apparent cacophony of African drumming is often the result of polyrhythm—two or more independent rhythms beat simultaneously! Here only the basic beat is shared, the rhythms are otherwise independent of each other. Each will share the same first accented beat when the music begins, and then the patterns will get out of synchronization with each other. At some point, however, the various rhythms will cycle through and all the patterns will come together on that first accented beat!

Another point of confusion is another African feature, additive rhythm. Here the basic number of the beat unit does not remain constant, as in European music. Hence the count or measure might feature three beats at the onset. At some point, the count or measure shifts to four beats, then five, and so on. At some point it reverts to the basic unit.

The effect, at least in the experiments in European music by early twentieth-century composers such as Igor Stravinsky, is one “chugging.” Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) features additive rhythm, and these rhythms actually caused a riot at the debut in Paris! In his years with the Ballet Russe in Paris, Stravinsky was exposed by Pablo Picasso and various exhibitions and concerts to African art and music. His interest is manifest in the polyrhythms and additive rhythms that he often employed in his ballet compositions.

The predominant character of American music in part rests upon the melding of European harmony and African polyrhythm. Slaves were exposed to harmony from their first days in the New World in hymns, white folksongs (mostly English ballads) and even white dance music. Harmony required that chords supporting the melody occurred at regular intervals of time, usually every four beats. European composers were historically content to fashion melodies in which the important notes occurred at the time of the chord change.

African American musicians found great value in harmony, but also wished to retain the polyrhythmic character of their music. Their solution was syncopation. In the narrowest sense, syncopation is defined as an accent where not accent is expected. You can demonstrate the principle by counting or beating out loud 1-2-3-4 for several cycles. First stress “1” by making it louder. Then count again, but stress “2” in one of the cycles.

The African American musician was able to create a sense of polyrhythm, essentially a “quasi-” polyrhythm, in his adoption and adaptation of Western harmonic concepts. Like European music, the chords changed regularly and predictably on the first beat of a predetermined cycle in the count. The melody, however, did not begin, end, or feature important melodic notes on the first beat of the count. Instead, he avoided the first beat, essentially putting the melody out of phase with the unfolding of the chords. The effect is a normal and accepted feature of American music and a feature that sets American music in the fore with regard to the music European music of the twentieth century. American cutting-edge music was a popular music that was so good that it could stand favorably with some of the best European classical music of the time.

The syncopation of African music, as it has been absorbed into American music, is the feature that gives our music its rhythmic forward drive, its “up” character, and its swing. It pervades nearly all styles of our music, from the geriatric tunes of the elevator-music orchestra to the most raw from the street. We’ve all grown up accustomed to hearing these syncopations. Curiously, most Americans become aware of the complexity of syncopation when they take music lessons and see it for the first time written on the page!

A student-participation comparison follows. “Jingle Bells” demonstrates European rhythmic sensibilities. The "sorrow song" spiritual “Motherless Child” demonstrates the African American compromise of chords and polyrhythm (see below for full text and music). In the latter, the melody “straddles the bar,” that is, begins and ends in mid-count. Tap your foot down on each number. This "down tap" is called the "downbeat." The symbol “+” represents the "upbeat," or the highest position of the toes when one lifts his foot to tap. In each example the appropriate chord is stummed on each "1."

Comparison of melodic rhythmic distribution in "European" and African-American music (it was a standard practice to sell apart families, hence the source of the title "Motherless Child")

Song Stanza and Text Forms
The formal influence of strophic art song (songs that have repeated musical stanzas and high brow texts) and the Protestant hymn upon the British ballad is apparent. Dance music, with its clear sections of music, was also influential. Both aspects found their way into white American folk songs in the four–line stanza that remains in use today. Another salient poetic feature is the presence of rhymed line ends:

Yankee Doodle went to town a’ riding on a pony,

Stuck a feather in his hat and called it ‘macaroni.’

The form of slave songs, by necessity, evolved quite differently. Responsorial singing, especially in work gangs, gave rise to forms in which the first part of the line, the “call” was sung by the soloist and the “answer” was sung by the gang. The call presented the new information that moved the song along. Often the texts were improvised by the leaders, and didn’t make a great deal of sense. The answer contained the same text, usually an affirmation. An excerpt from an 1841 Virginia “corn” song illustrates the form:

Call: I loves old Virginny
Answer: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: I love to shuck corn
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Now’s pickin’ cotton time
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: We’ll make the money boys
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: My master is a gentleman
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: He came from the old Dominion
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: And mistress is a lady!
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Right from the land of Washington
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: We all live in Mississippi
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: The land for making cotton
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: They used to tell of cotton seed
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: As dinner for the negro man
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: But boys and gals it’s all a lie
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: We live in a fat land
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Hogmeat and hominy
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Good bread and Indian dumplin’s
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Music roots and rich molasses
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: An old ox broke his neck
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: He belong to old Joe R---
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: He cut him up for negro meat
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: My master say he be a rascal
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: His negroes shall not shuck is corn
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: No negro will pick his cotton
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Old Joe hire Indian
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: I gwine home to Africa
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: My overseer says so
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: He scold only bad negroes
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

C: Here goes the corn, boys
A: So ho! Boys! So ho!

Once the original leader has run out of ideas, a new leader steps in without missing a beat! The soloist was free to improvise the melody of the call as well as the words, but the answer was sung to the same words and music. The answer, then, may be regarded as a refrain.

The impact of the Spiritual, which was modeled after the Protestant hymn, upon form is evident in stanza structures that began to emerge in the nineteenth century. Each line of the first three lines is sung to a similar melody; the last line of the stanza, the one containing the important information or the “punch line,” is sung to a different melody. Variants also may be found in which two lines are repeated and the third line is the punch line. The melodic structure is still call and answer, but both parts of the line are sung by a single singer. Note that the text changes in the three line portion. The form is a crucial one in the early blues.

The aforementioned sorrow song spiritual “Motherless Child” follows, and two stanzas of the music are given in the video. It dates from the nineteenth century and clearly, on the basis of the content of the text, was a heart-wrenching product of slave life. Again, it must be stressed that the sorrow song is a minor key Spiritual and, as such, is the likely prototype for blues!

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Den I git down on my knees and pray.

Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
I wonder where my mother’s gone.

Sometimes I feel I’d never been borned,
Sometimes I feel I’d never been borned,
Sometimes I feel I’d never been borned,
Den I git down on my knees and pray.

Wonder where my baby’s done gone,
Wonder where my baby’s done gone,
Wonder where my baby’s done gone,
Git down on my knees and pray.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
I wonder where my sister’s done gone.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
I wonder where my brother’s done gone.

Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
Sometimes I feel like I’m a long way from home,
I wonder where de preacher’s done gone.

Etc.

Slave auction

Some spirituals modfied the form to feature two lines of the same text followed by a punch line. This form ultimately served as the basis of the twelve-bar blues discussed in a subsequent section.

By mid-century, Spirituals began to utilize hybridized forms. The four line stanza was retained but now it was turned into a refrain to be sung by the group in the same manner as the “answer” refrain of the earlier corn song. The first two or three lines are sung to the same melody, the last line (punch line) uses a different melody. The “call” portion still gives the content, but now the song might actually start with the refrain. The “call” portion also shows the evidence of the same Protestant hymn influences that lead to the formulation of the four-line stanza of “Motherless Child.” It is obviously a three-line variant of the four-line stanza form. The first two lines are sung to one melody; the third line (punch line) is sung to a different one. The melodies of the “answer” refrain and the “call” stanza are not the same except for the final shared line. The line features the same text sung to the same melody and offered the opportunity for responsorial singing in the “call” stanza. More accurately, it should be called “stanza-refrain” since a verse is a single line. This form is actually a forerunner of the “verse-chorus” form of early rock and role and contemporary popular music. It is today especially prevalent in country songs. (Note that the author of your text got this form wrong, citing it as a rock 'n' roll innovation rather than the continuation of an older practice of singing Spirituals. Getting caught out, in a printed, very public forum, is a research scholar's worst nightmare!). The text of “Sinner, You Better Get Ready” follows. Note the attempts at rhyme in some of the "call stanzas."

“Answer” refrain:
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

“Call” stanza:
I looked at my hands, my hands was new
I looked at my feet, my feet was, too!
The hour is comin’ that a sinner must die.

“Answer” refrain:
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

“Call” stanza:
My name’s written in de book of life,
If you look in de book youll find it there,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

“Answer” refrain:
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

“Call” stanza:
De good old chariot passing by,
She jarred the earth and shook the sky,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

“Answer” refrain:
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
Sinner, you better get ready,
For the hour is comin’ that a sinner must die!

Early American Musical Theater: Minstrelsy

Nineteenth-century musical theater in the United States took the form of Minstrelsy. The minstrel show mixed song, dance, and comedy in a loose aggregate. Portions of the show also purported to portray the life of the slave on the plantation, his culture, and his music. In reality, minstrelsy portrayed the slave in the worst racial stereotypes. The life, culture, and music minstrels claimed to convey were, in fact, not even close to accurate.

A great part of the disparity of characterization is ascribed to the region that spawned the minstrel show. Minstrelsy was not a southern invention, but a northern one! Although the little skits that led to the minstrel show existed for at least two decades, the first formal minstrel show was mounted in Boston in 1844. Northern cities, including New York, became the home of this new type of entertainment.

Two Racial Stereotypes: Jim Crow and Zip Coon
Two particularly vicious racial stereotypes emerged as principal characters in Minstrelsy, "Jim Crow" and "Zip Coon." The earlier Jim Crow character emerged in the 1820s, the product of a stage persona/negro impersonation developed by Thomas Dartmouth ("Daddy") Rice. Jim Crow was protrayed as an embittered and raggedy servant who believes, perhaps correctly, that he is more intelligent and knows more than his master. Jim Crow was often portrayed as suffering an infirmity in one of his legs, and his grotesque dance added to the amusement of the audience. The character is believed to be based upon a real servant that Rice observed. Segregation laws enacted in the first decade of the twentieth century, the "Jim Crow" laws, derive their name from the Minstrel character.

Jim Crow

The persona of "Zip Coon" was developed by George Washington Dixon, an outgrowth of his circus act modified for the New York City burlesque stage. The character, whom he introduced around 1929, became his greatest theatrical success. Dixon portrayed Zip Coon as a dandy and a blowhard who both portrayed himself as a "educated scholar" and incessantly bragged about his sexual conquests. Zip Coon was also known to frequently bother with his advances one of the female kitchen help named Dinah. Dixon's black-face impersonation was acccompanied by singing and dancing, and the melody of the "theme song" Dixon associated with the character comes to us today as "Turkey in the Straw." The lyrics follow:

O ole Zip Coon he is a larned skoler,
Sings posum up a gum tree an coony in a holler.
Posum up a gum tree, coony on a stump,
Den over dubbler trubble, Zip coon will jump.

Zip Coon

Stephen Foster: the Commerical Aspects of the Parlor and Minstrel Song
Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is credited with fusing the disparate elements of American music into the first coherent national song style. Foster was also, however, one of the first to have helped to forge Minstrel and parlor music into a specific style and to capitalize on them.

Foster was born into a middle class family in Pittsburgh in 1826. As a child, he showed a keen interest in music and throughout his early years was tutored in the subject. His most imfluential teacher was a prominent and versatile local musician, a German immigrant named Henry Kleber. As an adolescent, Foster enjoyed the friendship of children from prominent Pittsburgh families, many of who gathered in his home to sing. One of his best-known songs, "Oh, Susanna," might have been composed for these meetings.

Foster's first song was published when he was only 18. His earliest professional endeavors, however, were not in the field of music, but as a book-keeper in his brother's steamship firm in Cincinnati, Ohio. During this time, Foster continued to publish with a local firm. Among the pieces he published was "Oh, Susannah," and the song proved not only to be his first big hit, but also the event that convinced him to turn professional.

In 1850, the young Foster, already with 12 published songs to his credit, returned to Pittsburgh. Between 1850 and 1860, he moved back and forth between Pittsburgh and New York, where his publisher was located. After 1860, he moved permanently to New York. His honeymoon trup of 1852, a month-long steamship ride up the Mississippi River was the only time Foster ever spent in the Deep South.

Foster's work method included the study of all the popular styles of music of his time, including the music brought to America by the burgeoning immigrant population. He crafted the melodies and lyrics of his songs to be immediately understood by every member of the working class. His early musical training and study of the music of immigrants was the likely source of the formality of his songs, a formality that typified the European piano art song by composers such as Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann.

Foster's early minstrel songs, which were called "Ethiopian" songs, contained racial stereotyping as well as "dialectic" language (see Zip Coon" above for an exampel). As he grew more ambivalent toward slavery, the character of his lyrics evolved in character. They did not view the Old South in a wholly sentimental light. Instead, his characters lived in the present, had identities and personalities and emotions, and interacted with each other.

"Nelly was a Lady" (1849) was likely the first song composed for a white audience by a white composer that depicted a slave couple as a loving and dedicated husband and wife. The title "lady" was one that, in its day, was reserved only for well-born white women. In time, Foster replaced the term "Ethopian" with "plantation" in referring to his songs, and ultimately replaced "planatation" with "American."
Foster even informed Christy, the leader of the tmilieu's most important minstrel troupe, that some of his songs should not be performed in a comedic spirit, but in a "pathetic," compassionate one. Likely inspired by contact with important abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas, Foster helped to publish an anti-slavery newspaper and even produced a volume of anti-slavery verse.

From the 1850s until his death, the topics of Foster's songs focused less on race issues and more on universl themes such as the longing for home and the times spent there. "Old Folks at Home" was composed during this period. Foster also understood the realities of the marketplace, and devoted significant energy to the composition of parlor music, songs intended for amateur rendering in the home.

Foster's earnings came only from the 5-10% royalties on sheet music sales. Copyright laws did not provide income from other composers' settings of his songs, pirate broadsheet printings, or performances. Despite limited avenues, Foster's yearly income would be worth, in today's terms, millions of dollars. In his later years, much of this income was devoted to a life of dissolution. He died in a Bowery hotel in 1864, at age thirty-seven, after gouging his throat in a bathroom fall. At the time of his death, Foster had about forty cents in his pocket.

Stephen Foster

Ugly Performance Realities of Minstrelsy: Blackface
It was not enough to humiliate the black man with songs, language, and dancing that demeaned nearly every aspect of his existence. The Minstrel show also found cheap laughs in attacking the very physical appearance of the African American in the practice of blackface, the application of burnt cork to the faces of white performers. White audiences grew so accustomed to blackface that later when black minstrels, called delineators, took to the stage, they too had to wear blackface in order to be well received! The delineator was purported to give a more true rendering of life and song on the plantation but, in reality, audience tastes forced them to adhere to the racial stereotyping already established in the genre.

Blackface Minstrelsy

Blackface was parlayed in the twentieth century into a larger than life phenomenon, with the invaluable assistance of the new recording and movie industry, by Al Jolson (1889-1950). Born of Jewish Lithuanian parents, Jolson had, by 1911, already developed with immense success on Broadway the key elements of his performance style. These included blackface, direct address of the audience and a remarkable rapport, exhuberant gestures, operatic-style singing, whistling, and his signature expression "you ain't seen nothing yet!"

The achievements of Jolson's career are staggering. He starred in The Jazz Singer, one of the first highly successful "talking" flims. Like Neil Diamond's version of the film, The Jazz Singer featured very little, if any, jazz. Jolson's singing and performance style were rooted in vaudeville at the turn of the century, not jazz. The song he introduced in The Jazz Singer, "Mamee," later became a racial slur.

Jolson's recording career included sales that topped the million mark, and it is estimated that the total sales of his records to 1950 trails only those of Bing Crosby, Paul Whiteman, and Guy Lombardo. Among the songs he popularized include "You Made Me Love You," George Gershwin's "Swanee," "April Showers," "When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along," and "Avalon." After his retirement from the stage, Jolson found a career in radio.

As late as 1948, well after his retirement from the stage and despite competition from Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Perry Como, the various popularity polls still voted him as the "Greatest Entertainer Ever." Later important entertainers such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart, and Jackie Wilson have publically referred to Jolson as such, and have acknowledged a debt to him in the formulation of their stage acts. Jolson is often ignored today because his use of blackface is considered racially insensitive, but it should be noted in his defence that his usage was no different than other white and black performers of his time.

Al Jolson