|
American Music Review Formerly the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter H. Wiley Hitchcock for Studies in American Music |
|
|
|
|
|
Inside
This Issue: Inside This Issue Pianos, Ivory, and Empire by Sean Murray Searching for Brooklyn’s Jazz History by Jeffrey Taylor Celebrating Carter, review by Ève Poudrier Robert Ashley’s Operas, review by David Grubbs |
Reenvisioning
a Critical Chapter in American Music by Musicologists have been trying to define the parameters of American music since Anton Dvořák arrived on our shores more than a century ago. And in today’s increasingly pluralistic, transnational, and digitally-driven world the task has become only more daunting. Charles Hiroshi Garrett’s collection of essays, boasting the provocative title Struggling to Define a Nation: American Music and the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2008), does not provide definitive boundaries, but it certainly maps out fresh directions for exploring the terrain. Rather than dividing and analyzing American music along traditional lines of genre, geographic region, high/low class hierarchy, or race and ethnicity, Garrett proposes a broader model that views musical practice through the lens of cultural production and power relations. Borrowing from such critical theorists as Theodore Adorno, Stuart Hall, and Makhail Bakhtin, he envisions a messy collision of sundry music cultures that collectively negate any national consensus. American music, Garrett tells us, “can be understood best as a series of conflicts or clashes between diverse and often opposing musical identities” (216). Such a perspective, he hopes, will help us move beyond the overly-reductive Anglo-Afro paradigm that has dominated our thinking over the past half century to focus on the more complex, trans-cultural nature of American music-making. The book’s subtitle is a bit misleading, as its scope is limited primarily to the early decades of the twentieth century. But this was a wise choice, as the years between 1900 and 1930 were marked by turbulent waves of urbanization, immigration, and migration that reconfigured the American landscape in ways that would reverberate throughout the century and into the new millennium. Equally important for producers and consumers of music was the advent of mass media and the modern entertainment industry. During this period Americans experienced the golden years of Tin Pan Alley, the birth of Broadway musical theater, the popularizing of ragtime, vaudeville blues, and jazz, and stepped-up efforts to infuse American concert music with indigenous vernacular sounds. From this rich milieu Garrett has chosen a sampling of musical practices that, for him, personify the contested nature of American life and music. The initial chapter is centered on Four Ragtime Dances, Charles Ives’s turn-of-the-century work for theater orchestra that melded syncopated ragtime phrasing with melodic motifs drawn from Protestant gospel hymns. Reviewing Ives’s ambivalent writings on black American vernacular music and analyzing his ragtime dance score (as reconstructed by James Sinclair), Garrett concludes the composer gave more precedent to the white hymn than the black ragtime material. Yet his very decision to experiment with what was at the time a very new form of black popular music, Garrett contends, reflected Ives’s willingness to grapple with difficult issues of race and cultural hierarchy that were just beginning to appear on the radar of American composers and critics. Ives’s dabbling with ragtime may have been fraught with contradiction, but it was a harbinger of a broader national dialogue that would soon unfold around the progressive urge toward bi-racial understanding and the regressive perpetuation of old cultural inequities. The second and third chapters explore two towering figures, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, from the perspective of jazz’s multicultural origins and inherent class tensions. Garrett turns to Morton’s “Spanish-tinged” compositions to demonstrate the deep influence of Latin tresillo and habanera rhythms and occasional melodic motifs on a number of the pianist’s best-known compositions. By intermingling Afro-Caribbean rhythms and African-American blues forms in pieces like “New Orleans Blues,” Morton celebrates his own French/Spanish/African ancestry and the Creole culture of his native city. But Garrett’s music analysis leads him to conclude that Latin and blues elements do not always act in concert, and such songs can be read as “sonic metaphor(s) for difference and conflict” (62). This is not a cultural or aesthetic liability, for Garrett argues it is exactly this dialectic tension between Latin and blues sensibilities that creates such compelling music. With Louis Armstrong’s 1927 recording of
“Gully Low Blues” Garrett explores the relationship of music,
region, and class in the context of the first great migration of southern
African Americans following WWI. The piece descends from a grand, theatrical
trumpet fanfare and urbane opening chorus to a low-down southern blues where
Armstrong’s gritty vocal promises his high-brow lady he
“won’t be Gully no mo’” if she will just take him
back. Armstrong’s final triumphant solo, Garrett suggests, signals his
musical and social deliverance from the gully blues. This and other Hot Five
recordings provided sonic sites where musical gestures of the modern urban
north and the traditional rural south could meet and mingle, creating
exciting new forms that helped ease the transition of southern migrants in
cities like The final two chapters broaden the query by addressing the dialogue between Asian-American culture and American popular music. This is ground that few musicologists have trod and certainly represents the book’s most original contribution. First Garrett examines the production of Tin Pan Alley songs like Jean Schwartz and William Jerome’s 1910 “Chinatown, My Chinatown” as pop culture responses to the proliferation of Asian immigration. More than innocent novelty songs, these works consistently portrayed Chinese Americans as racialized exotics who spent most of their time smoking opium and strumming shamisens (Asian lutes). Here Garrett’s analysis seems more dependent on lyrics, iconography, and yellow-face theatrical productions than vocal or instrumental style, as Tin Pan Alley songwriters stuck to their conventional musical vocabulary and only on occasion employed stereotypical oriental forms like pentatonic scales and repeated parallel fourths. Garrett closes with a
fascinating look at the Hawaiian-themed music that swept mainland The strength of Struggling to Define a Nation lies in Garrett’s close reading of exemplary musical texts. Too often cultural studies scholars spin wild speculations couched in impenetrable jargon that leave readers wondering what happened to the original subject(s) of investigation. Garrett avoids this trap, weaving together convincing music and lyric analysis with deep historical contextualization all conveyed through lucid and engaging prose. That said, his focus on musical collisions and cultural struggles inevitably leads to interpretations that are a bit fuzzy around the edges: Ives was at once fascinated and ambivalent about ragtime; Morton’s Spanish tinge was multifaceted and not easily reducible to a simple set of characteristics; Armstrong could lampoon and celebrate his southern roots in a single performance; Chinese Americans musical gestures and imagery were regularly reconfigured, thereby offering new sets of meaning to new audiences; the Hawaiian music craze introduced mainland Americans to both damaging stereotypes and authentic sounds of island culture, and so forth. Those seeking a neat model based on definitive textual readings will undoubtedly be disappointed, but Garrett rightly understands that cultural miscegenation is messy, hegemony is slippery, and the struggle for human agency is rarely complete. While Garrett does move us beyond a simple black/white dyad with his Latin and Asian examples, his push toward greater inclusion might be extended to additional ethnic musics that occasionally spilled into the national spotlight during the early twentieth century. Working from a cultural insider’s perspective (a position Garrett only assumes in passing as part of his discussion of the Hawaiian music craze), one might investigate how Jewish, Irish, Puerto Rican, and/or West Indian-American immigrants (to name but a few) developed their own vibrant, community-based music scenes that made significant contributions to popular vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. This sort of approach would encourage the integration of the fields of traditional musicology, ethnomusicology, and popular music studies. Can Garrett’s vision of American music as a series of clashes between diverse, creolized musical forms be more widely applied to other historical periods and genres not covered in his present work? It seems plausible, and he certainly will be afforded ample opportunity to do so in his current position as Editor-in-Chief of the forthcoming second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of American Music. For the moment, Struggling to Define a Nation points the way for reenvisioning at least one critical chapter in American music making. — ISAM home Who we
are Contact us
ISAM Conferences and Lectures Copyright © 2005 Institute for Studies in
American Music, Conservatory of Music, |
