The Ellington Century (37 page)

Op. 23 no. 2 seems compelling even though it wavers between strict serial development and freer developing variation. Even its rigorous restatements of pitch material vary so much in rhythm that the connections are not obvious—nor should they be. Schoenberg's other biblical hero was Jacob; in the years leading up to the invention of the twelve-tone method he struggled with and failed to complete a vast cantata called
Jacob's Ladder.
Op. 23 no. 2 sounds like a man wrestling with an angel. Its harmonies are at once visionary and tactile; even the clustering of adjacent melody notes into chords calls attention to the physicality of fingers, muscles, and arm weight, and the gradually slowing coda is a picture of bodily exhaustion. In ending with a bare but reconfigured restatement of the opening motive it still clings to a hope of transcendence, the promise that this seedling might again spring to life.

Schoenberg believed that the twelve-tone method would sustain larger forms without compromising the emancipation of the dissonance. Other composers of the interwar period, however, felt that the new harmonic possibilities created by emancipation could also retain some aspects of older tonal thinking. Bartók and Berg worked out complex syntheses of tonal and atonal idioms. Although much has been written about both composers, their achievements have become enshrouded by arcane systematic elements either of their own devising or imagined by their proponents. Even today many of the riches of their harmonies remain untapped.

Let's look at a movement by Bartók that has achieved masterpiece status and yet remains resistant to harmonic analysis: the third movement, Lento, of his Quartet no. 2, composed in 1917, just a few years before Schoenberg's Op. 23 no. 2, and similarly impacted by the Great War. The movement might be described as a modified sonata form:

  1. Opening to rehearsal no. 2: Theme I

  2. Rehearsal no. 2 to no. 4: Theme II (sounds, vaguely, like a variation of Theme I)

  3. Rehearsal no. 4 to three bars after no. 6: Theme III

  4. Fourth bar of rehearsal no. 6 to six bars before no. 7: Development

  5. Five bars before rehearsal no. 7 to six bars after no. 8: Episode

  6. Seven bars after rehearsal no. 8 to end: compressed recapitulation of Themes I, III, and II.

The problem with this generic description, however, is that, in addition to its odd proportions, all three themes are in the same tonality of A.

I hear the movement in different terms, as a tone parallel to a funeral:

  1. Gathering of mourners (the theme in violin I three bars after rehearsal no. 1 represents the deceased)

  2. Dirge

  3. Hymn

  4. Cortege

  5. Interment

  6. Departure and dispersal of mourners with a climactic recall of the Hymn.

In his book on Bartók's chamber music János Kárpáti identifies the melody of the dirge as a “Transdanubian lament melody” from the collection made by Bartók and Kodály.
¹⁶
Bartók's great dirges form a Mahleresque subgenre that is as characteristic of his personality as his better-known night musics. (Perhaps Bartók was as scarred by the loss of his father, when he was just seven, as Mahler was by the premature deaths of many of his siblings.) We might term these despairing pieces the shadows of those ecstatic nocturnes. His early symphony
Kossuth
contained his first funeral march, but a more original style of elegy appeared in his piano music of 1907-10, Bagatelles no. 6 and 13 from his op. 6, the two Elegies, the last of the Seven Sketches, and the Four Dirges. All of these increasingly desolate pieces prepare for two greater examples written during the war, the last movements of the Suite for Piano and the Quartet no. 2, and these in turn prepare for the great elegiac movements of his later years, in the Divertimento, Quartet no. 6, and Concerto for Orchestra. Also part of the subgenre is the seventh Improvisation on Hungarian folk songs, written in 1920, which Bartók dedicated to the memory of Debussy.

To understand the harmonic idiom of the string quartet movement we first need to note the distinctive stylistic features of Bartók's dirge genre. Their source in folk music is clear both in the volume of transcribed laments and, more accessibly, in the second series of
For Children
, based on Slovak folk songs, which ends with the Mourning Song
and Funeral Song. In these two dirges Bartók combined a plaintive melody with a simple dronelike accompaniment. This texture, which resembles the relation of bluesman and guitar, appears in most of the composed dirges as well and is clearly elaborated in the
Four Dirges
, op. 9a. All four pieces contrast a folk melody with an accompaniment that is less a harmony than an Other; the two elements seem to go their own way, so that, for instance, at the end of the last Dirge the melody cadences on the pitches C# and A# while the accompaniment ends on a G major triad. In all these pieces the accompanying harmonies serve to set off and amplify the expressive intensity of the melody rather than assimilating it to tonal progressions. To a large extent, therefore, melody and harmony use different pitches. Reversing usual tonal practice, shared notes, or melodic notes that complete a triad with the accompaniment, often resolve to nonharmonic tones, an effect first heard at the end of Bagatelle op. 6 no. 6.

In the Lento of String Quartet no. 2 Bartók presents the opposition of melody and drone clearly at the very opening by separating the two violins musically from the viola and cello. This opposition reappears in what I term the Dirge section, and in the Cortege, and at the very end. According to Kárpáti, Bartók composed his thematic ideas first and then added the connecting sections. The two main themes, which I call the Dirge and Hymn, contrast sharply in texture; the first is the folklike contrast of melody and drone, the second a chorale. The Interment episode has its own uniquely woven texture, a two-part counterpoint in which the first violin plays one line in octaves while the second violin and cello play the other, a unique occurrence. Bartók linked these carefully differentiated textures with mediating transitional passages that also have the most directional sense of harmony, and, not incidentally, the most traditional voice leading.

Like Schoenberg's Op. 23 no. 2, the Lento of Bartók's Quartet no. 2 breaks with nearly all the conditions of earlier tonality. Not a single major or minor triad appears. The most coherent and affirmative-sounding harmonies, heard in the Hymn, are built out of fourths rather than thirds. Also like the Schoenberg, but more consistently, Bartók pursued “developing variation.” Ideas do not repeat but evolve or mutate. We hear this at the very opening, where the violins state an idea four times: a held note and a descending interval that gradually expands, in each statement, from a minor third to a perfect fifth.

In keeping with this movement's theme of loss, its musical ideas rarely sustain their initial form. Even the relatively affirmative-sounding rising
fourth that begins the new section at rehearsal number 4 shrinks to a major third when it begins to be developed after rehearsal number 6. The wraithlike, insubstantial quality of the themes becomes even more apparent when we begin to notice how they are related to motives from the previous two movements. The main motive of the first movement, E-A-D-C#, returns in shriveled form three bars after rehearsal number 1 in the first violin, G#-C#-F-E, and in a distended variant in the cello four bars before rehearsal number 2, C#-F-B-A. The melody played by the first violin at rehearsal number 2 is a beheaded version of the opening theme of the first movement, but it also recalls the ironic, acerbic melodic idea from the trio of the central Scherzo, drained, however, of its sassiness. The episode at the center of the movement sounds like an even more distant allusion, to the opening of the lachrymose fifth act of Debussy's
Pelléas et Mélisande.
¹⁷
Piling despair on despair Bartók quoted a motive, note for note, E-F-A
-F, which itself is a shrunken, death-ridden version of the leitmotif associated with Mélisande in the opera: E-F#-A-F#.

Harmonically the movement similarly presents a ghost tonality of A, a tonal center more clearly, if not traditionally, affirmed in the first movement with a memorable cantabile theme. In creating a ghostly, “deceased” tonality Bartók reinvented the traditional distinction between minor and major modes and between harmonic stasis and motion. The Dirge and Hymn represent grief and hope with two different kinds of static harmony, the drone on the pitches A and C, implying the minor mode, and chords constructed in fourths, which sound here like a parallel major mode. This opposition appears in stark contrast in the climax, seven bars after rehearsal number 9,where a five-note chord in fourths (E-A-D-G-C), all on the white keys, alternates with intensifying fourth chords, climaxing in a six-note tower of fourths (A#-D#-G#-C#-F#-B). The harmonies convey some sense of progression and also present a clear range, from the relatively consonant to the dissonant.

Somehow Bartók also preserved the distinction between chord tones and nonchord (or nonharmonic) tones, distinctions lost in Schoenberg's music, even while he avoided familiar chordal types. In the dirge-style passages melody and drone use different pitches; we might say that Bartók constructed his dirge melodies entirely from nonharmonic tones, but since the melodies came first it would be more accurate to say that he constructed the drone so that it would form dissonant intervals with the melodies, a process cognate with Charles Mingus's harmonization of the blues in “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.”

Bartók, by most accounts, was as humble as Schoenberg was mega-lomaniacal (one graphologist interpreted Schoenberg's handwriting as the work of someone who thought he was the emperor of China).
¹⁸
In many ways they pursued similarly grandiose ambitions of musical renewal. Bartók's quest, which the Second Quartet reflects in mid-course, was perhaps more visionary even than Schoenberg's. Bartók reanimated musical diversity in an idiom that allowed different styles (and even different species) to interact rather than flattening them into an all-encompassing unity. Small wonder, then, that when opportunity knocked he was ready to compose his
Contrasts
for Benny Goodman.

I am just getting a chance to work out some of my own ideas of Negro music. I stick to that. We as a race have a good deal to pay our way with in a white world. The tragedy is that so few records have been kept of the Negro music of the past. Is has to be pieced together so slowly. But it pleases me to have a chance to work at it.

—Duke Ellington

 

 

 

Timbre, rhythm, melody, and harmony are means to an end. Composers, like poets, novelists and filmmakers, have a story to tell, though most prefer just to say it with music. Duke Ellington, however, spelled out the terms of his expressive project throughout his career and summed it up with the title of his radio theme “Sepia Panorama.” As early as 1930 he announced his intention to compose a suite that would be “an authentic record of my race
written by a member of it.
”
¹
Mark Tucker traced the source of this project back to the historical pageants of Ellington's childhood in Washington, D.C. In 1911 the Howard Theater put on a production called “The Evolution of the Negro in Picture, Song, and Story,” divided in four parts: Overture, Night of Slavery—Sorrow Songs, Dawn of Freedom, and Day of Opportunity.
²
The format looks forward to
Black, Brown and Beige
, but in works like the
Perfume Suite
and
Night Creature
Ellington took his music far beyond the model of a civics lesson. Keeping his eyes on the prize, Ellington never allowed his works to become generically didactic; although he often appeared at left-leaning events, he marched to his own political beat and told his story in his own way and on his own far-reaching terms. With more than a little help from the members of his orchestra, he contained multitudes.
His music evoked a panorama of people, places, and moods, and, while focusing on African American experiences, it also addressed a broad American and international audience.

Ellington's phrase
written by a member of it
indicates the urgency of his project. Whether for base or noble reasons, in minstrel shows or
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, the history and experience of African Americans had been scripted by whites. In the 1920s Broadway was ablaze with secondhand accounts of black experience by Eugene O'Neill
(The Emperor Jones)
and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, whose
Porgy
was destined, just a few years after Ellington's statement, to become the most enduring and problematic picture of African American life in the musical theater.

The institutions and habits of American racism thwarted the musical careers of Ellington's African American predecessors, especially Will Marion Cook and James P. Johnson. The stereotypes of the minstrel show still poisoned entertainment; puritanism, high-minded sacralization, and, most of all, segregation contaminated education. For Ellington to realize his ambitions he would have to redefine pleasure and uplift and everything in between.

Scholars and critics have found it easier to cite Ellington's many statements about his project than to describe how it actually took shape in music that defies the norms of jazz and classical idioms. At times Ellington himself muddied the waters; some works, like the opera
Boola
, which promised to fulfill his most ambitious goals, never appeared. Others, most notably
Black, Brown and Beige
, had a confusingly protean performance history, never settling down to one finished form.
³
Ellington's nonstop gig-filled schedule made his determination to take on large historical and cultural issues all the more heroic, if not quixotic; usually he found time to compose only after a show, between 3
A.M.
and 7
A.M.
⁴
Even when writing the extended pieces that were meant to bear the burden of his expressive goals he composed on the fly, phoning in music for musical theater and movie projects from the road and leaving elements large and small to his musical alter ego Billy Strayhorn and Tom Whaley, the band's copyist.
⁵
While Leonard Bernstein could take a yearlong sabbatical from his reign at the New York Philharmonic to compose the eighteen-minute
Chichester Psalms
, Ellington spent little time away from the band. He never applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship and never received any awards equivalent to a “genius” grant.

Finding his extended compositions either pretentious or slapdash, critics like John Hammond and James Lincoln Collier cited Ellington's
apparently casual attitude toward thematically important works like
Jump for Joy
or the
Deep South Suite
as a symptom of artistic failings, particularly in regard to large forms. Ellington's odd behavior (relative to some Platonic notion of how composers are supposed to behave) can serve as proof, however, of an integrity that was principled and tenacious. Ellington never composed “crossover” music. In pursuing his artistic project he sidestepped the available European genres of high seriousness: symphony, opera, oratorio. When a work like
Harlem
or
Night Creature
would involve an orchestra, he farmed out the orchestration (usually to the Juilliard-trained Luther Henderson) and made sure that the music that mattered was assigned to his own musicians.
⁶
Though it still maddens some critics, he never played the role of the isolated genius. For Ellington composition was collaborative and open-ended; his reluctance to terminate things (compositions or marriages), often described as a superstition, can also be taken as an aesthetic stance. Refusing to merge the idiom of jazz with the forms and ensembles of European concert music, he set himself on a different course from Gershwin or Copland or William Grant Still. From “Reminiscing in Tempo” onward his extended forms, both secular and sacred, were sui generis. Perhaps ironically, Ellington's quirkiness made him a kind of modernist; like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Bartók, he believed that form was inextricable from content. European forms, however, were simply irrelevant, even inimical, to the experiences he strove to represent musically. The scope of ideas, images, and emotions of his music was panoramic, from political protest (“Jump for Joy”) to religious faith (“Heaven”), from the African past (“Ko-Ko”) to the American present (“The Air-Conditioned Jungle”), from Rio to Tokyo. We'll consider his project, and its relation to other twentieth-century music, under three rubrics: love, history, and God.