The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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bass, which sung together with the upper parts, is most majestic, and so exceeding grand as to cause the floor to tremble, as I myself have often experienced … Much caution should also be used in singing a solo (sic); in my opinion 2 or 3 at most are enough to sing it well. It should be sung soft as an echo, in order to keep the hearers in agreeable suspense till all the parts join together in a full chorus, as sweet and strong as possible.10
It was also apparently not unusual for these composers to place the various parts at some distance from one another, making use of the spatial separation between them—attesting further to a concern for the individual part, which was virtually unknown in the European music of the time.
Here, then, was the stuff of a new, democratic tradition in music, strong, confident, firmly rooted in the life of the people, and accessible to them, which could match the aspirations of Jeffersonian democracy. Yet it vanished without trace for almost two hundred years, swamped by the movement towards gentility and European-style “correctness” which took place under the leadership of musicians such as Lowell Mason in the early years of the nineteenth century. To Mason, who, appropriately enough, was also the first to bring to music the methods of that typically American institution, Big Business (which was just getting under way in the early nineteenth century), music was principally a commodity. He published an enormous quantity of music, hymns, church music generally, children’s instructional manuals and songbooks, secular songs, some of them his own compositions (From Greenland’s Icy Mountain is his) but mostly taken from the work of lesser European composers and the lesser works of greater, often rearranged to take out their most striking features, leaving a bland and bloodless mixture, not unlike the products of present-day American television, and for much the same reasons. Mason grasped the fact that if music was to be treated as a commodity then clearly it had to appeal to the widest number of people and antagonize the fewest. Good quality, yes—but not so original as to disturb or frighten off a potential customer. (This blandness is still to be found today in many American collections of music for high school orchestras, bands and the like.) In any case the raw but richly alive works of the New England tunesmiths clearly would not do.
It is not too fanciful to see in this betrayal of the ideals of the early composers a parallel of the betrayal of the idea of the rights of man that began to take place in the early nineteenth century as industrialism got under way. America in the nineteenth century produced writers of real greatness who preserved an aggressive stance of independence—Melville, Twain, Whitman, Emerson, for example, and above all Thoreau, while American art music produced only Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Stephen Collins Foster, both interesting figures but scarcely of comparable stature. Could not this be because music, for the very reason that it is less precise in its outward meanings, less conscious of exactly what it is saying, gives even deeper expression than literature to the subconscious motivations of a culture? In any case, the history of nineteenth-century American art music is a dismal affair; one after another, young composers crossed the Atlantic, to Dresden, to Leipzig, Vienna or Weimar, rarely to Paris, coming back with music that was no more than a pale imitation of German romanticism. As David Wooldridge in his recent biography of Charles Ives remarks, the vision of the New England tunesmiths “went forfeit to the competent … Only music malingered dismally, generation over generation of American composers making the pilgrimage to Europe like dowagers to a spa, to fetch back the continuing seed of a foreign culture for the continuing delight of old ladies.”11
It was not, however, the Europeanized American composers who dominated the art-music scene; indeed, they were hard put to it to get a hearing at all. It was European, and especially German, music, its apparatus and standard repertoire—a state of affairs that largely continues even today with the large and socially accepted concert organizations. And precisely because this music had, and has, no organic relationship with indigenous American culture it proved sterile, without roots; it is perhaps for this reason that, while in Europe those who find in themselves no point of contact with classical music (in the popular sense of the word) are content to ignore it and go their own way, in America it seems to arouse positive hostility. A standard plot for the Hollywood musicals of my youth concerned the confrontation between “longhair” musicians and the “regular kids,” as portrayed by the young Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Bonita Granville and Jane Withers, who wanted to “Hey kids, let’s put on a show!” There is malice, too, in the Marx Brothers’ hilarious destruction of a performance of Il Trovatore in A Night at the Opera, and in the cutting loose of the floating platform in At the Circus allowing the symphony orchestra under the baton of the outrageously caricatured Italian conductor to float out to sea still energetically playing Wagner—an architypal image if ever there was one. But we must be clear; it was not music that the average American disliked, then as now. His culture was full of it, from minstrel shows to southern hymnody, jazz, cowboy songs, vaudeville, “burleycue” and military marches—all vigorous growths, all indigenously and characteristically American and all popular in the widest sense. It was specifically European art music that was and is rejected by the vast majority.
The triumph of the European tonal-harmonic tradition in the nineteenth century among Americans who considered themselves to be cultured went parallel to that of the post-Renaissance scientific world view, and its cognates the Protestant ethic, capitalism and industrialism. Only for those who lived outside the mainstream of American life did the older traditions survive. We have seen how the tradition of communal hymn singing in the old style persisted in rural areas into the late years of the nineteenth century; even today in the backwoods areas of Kentucky and the Carolinas one comes across thriving groups who sing the old hymns in the old way, using shape-note notation and “fasola” syllables which date back to the days of the eighteenth-century song schools. The survival of modal Anglo-Celtic folksong among the remote rural populations of the Appalachian mountain region is well known; indeed, British folk-song collectors such as Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles found in the nineteen-twenties that these areas were an altogether richer source of British folk song than anywhere in England.
By far the largest group, which until recently has been excluded from the mainstream of American economic, political, and cultural life, is the Negro population. We have already observed that the collision between the African and the European, notably Anglo-Celtic, traditions, has proved one of the most fruitful in the entire history of music, and although this is not the place for an examination of that collision and its fruits, we may perhaps make some observations on the music and its relation to Negro society.
First, the blues. In its classic form this consists, verbally, of stanzas of two lines of rhyming verse, with the first line repeated, so that the second when it comes forms a kind of punchline. The words are characterized by an unsentimental melancholy tinged with an ironic humor, frequently connected with deprivation of love, such as:
I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep
(I said) I’m gonna buy me a bulldog, watch you while I sleep,
Just to keep those men from making their early mornin’ creep’
Often the imagery is explicitly sexual:
My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,
(I say) My baby got a little engine, call it my Ford machine,
If your generator ain’t bad, baby, you must be buying bad gasoline.
and is surprisingly little concerned with topics concerning racial discrimination or economic deprivation.
Musically the classic blues consists of twelve bars of music on a very simple and conventional sequence of I-IV-I-V-(IV)-I chords, alternating two sung bars with two bars of instrumental improvisation. Although it would thus seem to be based firmly on European harmonic progressions, the music preserves, as do black singers towards white American society, a very ambiguous relationship towards tonal harmony. Leaving aside the fact that the progression is an unvarying one which can therefore play no part in the actual expressive means, since what is expected, harmonically speaking, always arrives, we find that the favored accompanying instrument, at least in country blues, is the guitar, an instrument that lends itself, especially when played with a sawn-off bottleneck, to bold pitch distortions, and is commonly used