Musical Topics in Hale Smith’s Evocation

by Horace J. Maxile, Jr.

During a seminar I took years ago on the Beethoven string quartets, a realization rocked the foundation upon which my musical knowledge stood. I was a Ph.D. candidate in Music Theory at Louisiana State University who happened to be African American. Although I was advised to not think about my research agenda until after my comprehensive examination, I occasionally thought about future projects. Within my growing appreciation and analytical grasp of the Western musical canon sprouted complex issues of reception, self, and identity. I found that I was most intrigued by concert music written by African American composers and by jazz. I wondered if I pursued this line of research whether I would appear to be trying to validate the works of African American composers—whose works need no validation—by putting their works under the scrutiny of rigorous, objective analysis. Would I have to “prove” myself to my colleagues that I was fit for the field by denying my true interests and focusing my research on the European masters? Would my work on African American pieces be received in scholarly venues wherein the canon reigns?

The seminar that sparked these concerns involved an analysis of a Beethoven string quartet. While the class discussion migrated toward issues of harmony, voice-leading, and form, I focused on the idea of composers conveying expression through musical topics and of an analysis addressing issues of musical expression. While I enjoyed exploring traditional analytical concerns such as harmony and motive, my cultural experiences consistently begged questions about expressivity and musical meaning, or signification, beyond the printed page—after all, I never sang or played “Amazing Grace” just as it appeared in the hymnal. The seminar led me to ponder the possibility of expanding or modifying the scope of topical analysis to music of diverse cultures, particularly the culture of African Americans, and thus I began a search for African American cultural topics that would allow me to “speak” analytically to musical emblems that “spoke” to me.

Expressivity lies at the heart of the African American musical experience. The cultural history of African Americans is reflected in oral and written musical traditions. Social, religious, and other aspects of the culture are readily recognized in expressive devices unique to African American music. As Samuel Floyd contends, “a compelling cultural musical continuity exists between all musical genres of the African American musical experience.”¹ Therefore, using an analytical method designed to address musical expression to me seems essential.

Musical semiotics appears to offer promising results toward such an endeavor. In Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style, Leonard Ratner addresses the issue of musical expression by proposing a theory of topics. Invoking precepts from eighteenth-century theorists, Ratner explores musical meaning and expression in terms of topics, or musical signs, which he defines as the “subjects of musical discourse.”² V. Kofi Agawu expands the theories of Ratner in Playing With Signs.³ Agawu is concerned with how and why topics surface and how they convey musical expression, and insists on a theory that celebrates “the interaction of topical and structural signs.”⁴ My search for African American topics does not only identify the attributes that define African American musical culture, but examines how those attributes, or signs, interact with each other and with the structural elements in a given piece.

The topics I propose hardly represent the entire spectrum of expression in African American music, but rather provide a platform from which this type of inquiry can begin. They are: (1) call-and-response, (2) signifyin(g), (3) spiritual/supernatural, (4) blues, and (5) jazz.⁵ A thorough account of these topics requires a much larger scope than is possible in this essay, but each possesses distinguishing attributes. These topics have broad connotations and overlapping interpretations may occur. For example, an instrumental passage that recalls the vocal nuance of the spiritual may use jazz harmony; call-and-response techniques often occur in blues performance practice. However, it is precisely the interaction of related emblems that create the most powerfully expressive utterances in African American music. The following analysis will utilize some of the aforementioned topics in an interpretation of a passage from Evocation, a 1966 piano piece, by Hale Smith (b. 1925).⁶

Smith’s compositional aesthetic is shaped by a number of contemporary influences such as modernism and expressionism. Dense chromaticism and serial techniques are among his favored devices and his works make extensive use of motives and linear constructs. Coupled with European and modernist influences is Smith’s long-standing affinity for jazz. Since Smith’s early introduction to Duke Ellington, jazz has saturated his musical life.⁷ Therefore, one might expect jazz influences—conscious or unconscious—to surface in his compositions. And indeed, harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic characteristics associated with the jazz genre faintly emanate from within Smith’s chromatic contexts, particularly in this solo piano piece. He is somewhat reluctant to assign a measure of cultural allegiance to his music and is not celebrated for deliberate black associations in his works. In fact, he asserts that the fact that he is African American will be quite obvious when he stands to take his bow, after his compositions have made their own impact.⁸ Yet the expressive emanations from Evocation demonstrate a consummate technique and a subtle sensitivity to African American vernacular traditions.

Smith’s Evocation, a short twelve-tone piece for piano, reflects a sensitive interaction between the worlds of African American vernacular and European Classical traditions. I will focus my discussion on pre-compositional issues, such as the twelve-tone row, and on a selected motive that reflects the interaction of the referential and structural domains. Among the African American topics I identify in Evocation are jazz, call-and-response, blues, and the spiritual/supernatural. This analysis will highlight the jazz, call-and-response, and blues topics.

Smith uses only the illustrated prime form and three other forms of the row in the entire piece. These four row forms all feature successions of perfect fourths as are bracketed in the twelve-tone row example. Smith often presents these perfect fourth successions in jazzy melodic and chordal constructs. He frequently employs these highlighted pitches as successions of descending perfect fourths in gestures that summon the quartal harmonic and improvisational practices of bop and post-bop schools. One is inclined to refer to the quartal and modal excursions of McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, or Chick Corea for the detection of the jazz topic even within the pre-compositional process of row construction. The jazz topic also surfaces in the actual composition as it assists motive identification and interpretation.

The motive illustrated in the second example is the most clear and convincing African American symbol in the piece. Because of its flavor and function, I refer to it as the “blue tag”—blues flavor, tag function. This motive undergoes a number of transformations in the piece, but my focus will be on this particular realization. The motive is cadential in function as its realizations punctuate each section of the piece’s ternary design, but its expressivity is most pronounced in its blue flavor. The alias refers to a blues symbol as the melodic triplet figure suggests a stock blues lick in F, involving the inflected seventh scale degree (E^b). Pitch inflection, a common vernacular performance practice of African Americans, has been documented in the works of a number of scholars, and are often referred to as “blue notes.” These inflections are so frequent and salient that a scale has been ascribed to them, the blues scale. The perception of the expressive practice of pitch inflection should not be confined to a few altered notes of a Western diatonic model. The five-line staff is our convention, or perhaps our crutch, for notating these cultural emblems, and encounters with lower inflected scale degrees are often regarded as blue. Thus, the “blue tag” features the blues topic. The motive’s syncopated, triplet rhythm also adds to the vernacular flavor.

The call-and-response topic is suggested in the later segment of the gesture as the last two pitches, E^b and F, are repeated at a softer dynamic level. The varying levels of loudness between the two brief gestures evoke a conversational dynamic: an exchange between a call and a response. The interactive character of the call-and-response topic within this gesture and others within the piece lead toward an interpretation of something or someone being evoked through an expressive summoning. Each realization of the “tag” in the piece features a modified treatment of the call-and-response topic. The jazz topic is observed again in the open voiced sonority that accompanies the “blue tag.” Performance practices of bop and post-bop piano are recalled again as open fifth and fourth chord voicings abound.

Hence, African American cultural topics are pronounced even within the single motive isolated for this essay. The power of Smith’s compositional expression rests within its subtlety. African American signification is deeply embedded in the chromatic context. However, the invocative vernacular gesture of the “blue tag” suggests more referential content than one might expect in a twelve-tone setting. Topical considerations complement the conventions of structural and motivic analysis and pose a potential challenge to the music scholar: to investigate interactions between the referential and the structural en route to thorough interpretation.

The implications for an expansion of topics theory provide fertile ground for music scholarship. In the case of Smith’s piece, topical analysis affords fruitful insights into pre-compositional processes and prompts intriguing vernacular references to motivic characters. While this essay focuses on African American composers and culture-specific emblems, topical analyses may be broadened to apply to musical manifestations of other cultures. Through this mode of inquiry, our analytical and pedagogical canon may well expand to include African American composers and other composers outside the Western tradition. In turn, the academy is rewarded by way of challenges to and extensions of conventional inquiry.

—University of North Carolina at Asheville

Notes

Click on note number to return to its place in the text.

¹ Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (Oxford University Press, 1995), 10.

² Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (Schirmer, 1980).

³ V. Kofi Agawu, Playing With Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton University Press, 1991).

⁴ Agawu, 23. Structural signs for Agawu involve components of form, contrapuntal relationships, and other structural bases for classic music.

⁵ Floyd defines musical signifyin(g) as “troping: the transformation of preexisting musical material by trifling with it, teasing it, or censuring it” (8). This concept is directly linked to Henry Louis Gates’s theory of African American literary criticism. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Oxford University Press, 1988).

⁶ Hale Smith is one of the African American composers discussed in my dissertation entitled “Say What?: Topics, Signs, and Signification in African American Music,” (Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 2001). Other composers examined in the dissertation include William Grant Still, David Baker, and Charles Mingus.

⁷ At the age of sixteen, Smith met Duke Ellington. Ellington critiqued one of Smith’s scores and offered some advice. A number of biographical accounts list Duke Ellington among Smith’s major influences. See Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. “Hale Smith,” International Dictionary of Black Composers (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1999) and Malcolm Breda, “Hale Smith: A Biographical Study of the Man and his Music” (Ph.D. diss., University of Southern Mississippi, 1975).

⁸ Hale Smith, “Here I Stand,” in Readings in Black American Music, 2nd Edition, ed. Eileen Southern (W. W. Norton, 1983), 323-26.

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