Chapter 24

Chapter 24: Vernacular Music and the Classical Tradition in America

Composer Biographies

George Gershwin

Born: September 26, 1898, Brooklyn, New York

Died: July 11, 1937, Hollywood, California

American composer and pianist. One of the first composers to successfully integrate jazz and popular styles into the classical repertoire. With his brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin, he was one of the most successful composers of popular songs and stage works.

In the 1910s and 1920s, if you went into a music store to buy sheet music, you would likely find a song plugger—a pianist and singer who would perform songs for you in the same way we preview CDs in a record store today. If you had walked into Jerome H. Remick & Company (one of the famous Tin Pan Alley companies) in 1915, that song plugger might well have been the young George Gershwin. From this humble beginning, Gershwin went on to become both the best-known composer of popular music and the most popular composer of concert music in America.

Gershwin began studying the piano in 1910—on an instrument bought for his brother Ira. His teacher exposed him to the standard repertoire of the nineteenth century and saw in him real possibilities. But Gershwin dropped out of school at age fifteen to become a song plugger. Within a few years, he became a rehearsal pianist on Broadway. He also began composing songs, and by age twenty he had songs in three Broadway shows. His first full show, La Lucille, premiered before his twenty-first birthday. This was the beginning of a string of popular shows and songs, most written to lyrics by Ira. Many of the songs became "standards" in the repertoires of singers and musicians, and his most famous, I Got Rhythm, served as a musical template for hundreds of jazz tunes.

All the while, Gershwin had been studying composition, and in 1924, he burst onto the concert scene with his Rhapsody in Blue, a concerto for piano and jazz band. The work, written for Paul Whiteman's band, successfully combined the structure of a standard concert piece with many of the rhythmic and harmonic elements of popular music and jazz. For the next decade, Gershwin created an impressive body of concert works (such as the Concerto in F and An American in Paris) while at the same time creating such great shows as Girl Crazy and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Of Thee I Sing. His groundbreaking Porgy and Bess was perhaps the logical culmination of these two strands of musical composition—an opera that combined the best of his concert and stage work while exploring new social ground by using the world of African Americans in the South as the basis for the story. The work was finished in 1934, and, tragically, in 1937, Gershwin died of a brain tumor. But in his short life he helped to transform the music of the Broadway stage and at the same time create a uniquely American concert music.

Works

  • Orchestral works, including Rhapsody in Blue (1924, for piano and jazz orchestra); Concerto in F (1925); and a tone poem, An American in Paris (1928)
  • Piano music, including Three Preludes (1927)
  • More than 30 stage works, including Lady, Be Good! (1924), Strike Up the Band (1927), Girl Crazy (1930), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)
  • Songs for films, including Shall We Dance (1937) and A Damsel in Distress (1937)
  • Songs for shows by other composers and individually published songs

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Musical Examples

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Links

  • ClassicalNet's George Gershwin Page
  • The Official George and Ira Gershwin Web Site

Duke Ellington

Born: April 29, 1899, Washington, D.C.

Died: May 24, 1974, New York, New York

In his own words . . .

"The word 'improvisation' has great limitations, because when musicians are given solo responsibility they already have a suggestion of a melody written for them, and so before they begin they already know more or less what they are going to play. Anyone who plays anything worth hearing knows what he's going to play, no matter whether prepared a day ahead or a beat ahead. It has to be with intent."

African-American composer, pianist, and bandleader. Ellington was one of the leading figures in American jazz, and created a unique, recognizable style.

It is virtually impossible to separate Duke Ellington from the band that he led, for it was both the central vehicle for his career and, in many ways, an extension of himself. At the same time, Ellington was a strong individual force in the world of jazz—its most prolific creator (with more than 2000 pieces of various kinds to his name) and a source of inspiration for many generations.

Ellington began piano study at the age of seven and, in his twenties, had begun playing in clubs in New York with a group called the Washingtonians. From 1923 to 1927, the band enlarged, adding players—such as trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton, baritone saxophonist Harry Carney, and drummer Sonny Greer—who would become an integral part of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. From 1927 to 1931, the band played at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem and was joined by more key players—clarinetist Barney Bigard, saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and trumpeter Cootie Williams. Ellington wrote a great deal of music for the band, including one of his most famous pieces, Mood Indigo (1930).

In 1932, Ellington began touring the country with the band—now the Duke Ellington Orchestra—and over the years it became a mainstay of Big Band music. He continued to write for the band, and was joined in 1939 by Billy Strayhorn, with whom Ellington had a remarkable collaborative relationship. Ellington also began to go beyond the limits of the traditional jazz band in his compositions. From 1943 to 1952, he produced a series of annual concerts at Carnegie Hall, inaugurating it with his "tone parallel" Black, Brown, and Beige. This was one of many works that combined the larger structures of concert music with the materials of pure jazz. Ellington's music also reached beyond the traditional venues of club and concert hall. He wrote music for films (most notably Otto Preminger's 1959 Anatomy of a Murder), and in the last decade of his life, he wrote liturgical and concert music for the church, combining voice and dance with the music of his band.

Although Ellington was a fine (and often underrated) pianist, his real instrument was his orchestra. Unlike most writers, however, who write for the instruments, Ellington wrote for the players themselves. Each player had his own sound, from Harry Carney's vibrato-rich baritone saxophone to the stratospheric shouts of Cat Anderson's trumpet. And Ellington arranged his music with just these sounds in mind; so much so that a change in personnel often necessitated a change in the arrangement. Ellington stands out for his rich and adventurous approach to harmony and scoring and his experiments in larger forms. At the same time, he contributed some of the most memorable tunes of the jazz repertoire, with ballads such as Sophisticated Lady and Prelude to a Kiss and up-tempo songs such as I'm Beginning to See the Light and Satin Doll. His impact on the world of jazz and on American music was remarkable.

Musical Examples

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Links

  • Great Day in Harlem
    In 1958, photographer Art Kane arranged to take a group picture of 56 of the all-time great jazz musicians of the day. The picture is marvelous, but the story behind it (brought to life in a 1994 documentary by Jean Bach) is even better. This site features a virtual tour of the original picture. You can click on any spot to find out who is pictured and link to a biography of that musician, or you can search by name or instrument.
  • A Duke Ellington Home Page
    A good resource to start your exploration of Duke Ellington. Includes a biography, a list of selected songs and larger works, a picture gallery, and quotes by and about Ellington.

Silvestre Revueltas

Born: December 31, 1899. Santiago Papasquiaro (near Durango), Mexico

Died: October 5, 1940. Mexico City, Mexico

Mexican violinist, conductor, and composer. He helped to create an original Mexican music based on indigenous folk styles.

The first half of the twentieth century was a time of political and creative upheaval in Mexican society. The Mexican Revolution (1910–20), along with global events such as the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), helped to shape a generation of artists (painters and writers as well as musicians) who grounded their work in social issues and in the newly emerging Mexican nationalism. Perhaps the most famous of these artists is the muralist Diego Rivera. In music, this trend was seen in the music of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas.

Reveultas's work as a composer came relatively late in his life, beginning when he took on the duties of associate conductor of the Mexico Symphony Orchestra (1931–34). Before that, he played violin in a theater orchestra in San Antonio, Texas, and conducted an orchestra in Mobile, Alabama. He also studied in the United States (in Chicago and Austin), building on his early training in Durango and Mexico City. In the last years of his life, which ended early due to complications of alcoholism, he taught at the conservatory in Mexico City.

The music of Revueltas is striking in its use of distinctive tone colors and complex rhythmic structures, often showing the influence of European composers such as Igor Stravinsky. More importantly, however, Revueltas strove to create a music that reflected the indigenous Mexican culture. To do this, he often used elements of the folk songs and dances of the mestizo culture (a blend of European and native traditions that we recognize in styles such as mariachi music). Revueltas also took elements of the so-called Aztec Renaissance, which tried to evoke pre-Columbian musical and cultural practice. All of this created a musical style of great variety, one infused with Revueltas's distinctive wit.

Works

  • Chamber music, including 4 string quartets, works for violin and piano, Ocho por radio (8x Radio, 1933), and Homenaje a Federico García Lorca (1935)
  • Orchestral music, including Venetenas (1931), Janitzio (1933), and Sensemayá (1938)
  • 7 film scores, including Redes (1935) and La noche de los mayas (1939)
  • 2 ballets, including La Coronela (1940)
  • Songs, including 7 Canciones (on poems by García Lorca, 1938)

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Musical Examples

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Links

Aaron Copland

Born: November 14, 1900, Brooklyn, New York

Died: December 2, 1990, Tarrytown, New York

In his own words . . .

"To explain the creative musician's basic objective in elementary terms, I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. These thoughts and emotions are gradually formed by the contact of the composer's personality with the world in which he lives. He expresses these thoughts (musical ones . . .) in the musical language of his own time. The resultant work of art should speak to men and women of the artist's own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give."

American composer, conductor and author. Copland helped define a twentieth-century American sound. His influence on his contemporaries and students has been tremendous.

Aaron Copland seems at first to be an odd person to create a musical style that combined the myths of the American West and the styles of Latin American music into a populist music that spoke to a large segment of American society. Copland was the son of Russian Jewish immigrants, grew up in New York, and found his musical voice in the international, avant-garde atmosphere of Paris in the 1920s. In New York, he was part of a musical elite, championing the cause of modern music. At the same time, he had ties to the political and social left with its reformist agenda. Yet it could be argued that all of these elements were important ingredients, not just in the fabric of America in the 1920s and 1930s, but in the creation of a distinctly American aesthetic.

Copland began his study of music with piano lessons from his older sister. He soon turned to other teachers and began attending symphonic concerts, soaking up the music of the standard symphonic repertoire. While in high school, he studied harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration with Rubin Goldmark, who tried to steer his tastes down a conservative path. But at age twenty, Copland left New York to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who was to serve as a teacher and mentor to many of the leading composers of the century. In Paris, and in his travels through Europe, he was exposed to a wide variety of new styles. He returned to a New York that was in the midst of an artistic and social revival, and he immediately became a part of that renewal. From 1928 to 1931 he coordinated a series of concerts with the composer Roger Sessions that presented important new works to the American public. He lectured at the New School for Social Research (from which his book What to Listen for in Music took shape) and built his reputation as a composer.

His early music mixes very modern musical ideas with hints of jazz influence. Pieces such as his Piano Variations stand out for their harmonic and rhythmic experimentation, and jazz rhythms are an important part of his Music for the Theater. Copland's concern with modern techniques lessened during the Great Depression. Reacting to a changing social consciousness, he (along with a number of other composers) began to shape his style to speak to a larger segment of the population. This comes through most clearly in ballets such as Billy the Kid and Appalachian Spring and in his music for films. In these works, simpler (but no less sophisticated) harmonies, broad melodies, and hints of folk melodies created a sound that came to be associated with our pictures of the mythic American West. And works such as Fanfare for the Common Man and A Lincoln Portrait (in which the narrator recites various writings of Lincoln) added a populist and patriotic element. While Copland never abandoned the more adventurous style (including, later in his life, twelve-tone composition), he is best remembered, and justly so, for creating a truly American symphonic style. Over the course of his life, he not only served as a trendsetter, but also played an important role in the development of younger composers at places such as the Tanglewood Music Center. He was, in fact, the musical father to more than one generation of young composers.

Works

  • Orchestral music, including 3 symphonies, Piano Concerto (1926), Short Symphony (1933), Statements for Orchestra (1933–35), El sal—n México (1936), A Lincoln Portrait (1942), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), and Connotations for Orchestra (1962)
  • 3 ballets, Billy the Kid (1938), Rodeo (1942), and Appalachian Spring (1944)
  • Film scores, including The City (1939), Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), The Red Pony (1948), and The Heiress (1948)
  • Piano music, including Piano Variations (1930)
  • Chamber music, choral music, and songs

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Musical Examples

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Links

  • Life and Works
    A good biography of Copeland and a guide to recordings of his most popular works from ClassicalNet.
  • Copland, Music and Politics
    This site, from WNET's series Thomas Hampson: I Hear America Singing contains a biography of Copland. It nicely addresses Copland's involvement in progressive social movements, and his subsequent forced appearance before the McCarthy committee.
  • The Aaron Copland Collection
    Part of the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. An online exhibit of writings, letters, and photographs, along with special essays written for the exhibition.

William Grant Still

Born: May 11, 1895, Woodville, Mississippi

Died: December 3, 1978, Los Angeles, California

In his own words . . .

"What are the qualities which must be inherent in the person who aspires to write music? First, and most important, is the ability to induce the flow of inspiration, that indefinable element which transforms lifeless intervals into throbbing, vital, and heartwarming music."

African-American composer and arranger. His Afro-American Symphony was the first symphony by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra.

When Antonín Dvořák challenged American composers to create an American music, he suggested that they turn to spirituals and Native American music. Many composers took this track, creating a rich body of works. William Grant Still, however, rejected this approach, seeing the spirituals as having too strong of a European influence. Instead he turned to a more clearly African-American idiom—the blues.

Still's route to his greatest accomplishments—the performance of his Afro-American Symphony, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and having his opera Troubled Island performed by the New York City Opera—was less than direct. His studies at Wilberforce University (originally aimed at a medical career) were interrupted by marriage. His later studies in music at Oberlin were interrupted by service in the Navy during World War I. In the meantime, he also worked as an arranger for W.C. Handy, and after his college studies, his career centered in New York, where he worked as an arranger for performers such as Sophie Tucker and Paul Whiteman and for shows on Broadway. He also served as music director for Black Swan Records, the first record label owned and operated by African Americans, aimed solely at black audiences, and featuring the work of black artists.

While working in New York, he studied with George Chadwick and the modernist composer Edgard Varèse. It was during this time, especially the early 1930s, that he composed his larger symphonic works, including his Afro-American Symphony. In 1934, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation allowed him to move to Los Angeles, where he continued his compositional work while writing music for film and television (including for the original Superman and Gunsmoke television shows) and composing music for the 1939-40 World's Fair in New York. His most important work of this period was Trouble Island, in which he collaborated with the great African-American poet Langston Hughes.

While Still's popularity waned in the 1950s, his work gained more critical appreciation as the twentieth century came to an end. And in this century, as scholars begin to turn more serious attention to music and the media, his work as arranger and film and television composer is likely to claim more attention and respect.

Works

  • Orchestral music, 4 symphonies (No. 1, Afro-American, 1930; No. 2, Song for a New Race, 1937; No. 3, The Sunday Symphony, 1958), many orchestral suites (From the Land of Dreams, 1924), In Memoriam: The Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy (1943), Festive Overture (1944), and The Peaceful Land (1960)
  • Stage works, including 4 ballets (La Guiablesse, 1927; Sahdji, 1930; and Lenox Avenue, 1937) and 8 operas (Blue Steel, 1934 and Troubled Island, 1937–49)
  • Vocal music, including Songs of Separation (1949), From the Hearts of Women (texts by Verna Arvey, 1961), and spiritual arrangements
  • Choral music, including And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1940) and We Sang Our Songs: The Fisk Jubilee Singers (1971)
  • Chamber music, including Four Folk Suites (1962)
  • Piano music, including Three Visions (1936) and Seven Traceries (1939)
  • Film scores, including Pennies from Heaven (1936) and Lost Horizon (1937)
  • TV theme songs, including Gunsmoke and Perry Mason

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