The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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undermining the V-I progression, and that the third degree of the scale is commonly placed somewhere between the major and the minor third thus weakening if not destroying the distinction between major and minor scale so basic to the emotional expressiveness of tonal-harmonic music. The more sophisticated urban blues tends to use the piano, whose pitches are fixed on the tempered scale; the “neutral” third is simulated by playing major and minor third simultaneously (a feature that it shares with jazz) giving the characteristic sound to piano blues and its offshoots, barrelhouse and boogie-woogie, both of which use the blues harmonic framework. In any case, the tremendous proliferation of styles, of melodies and types of texture, which can be heard over that simple, conventional bass, shows that the interest of the music lies elsewhere than in harmony.
Many of the features are undoubtedly related to survivals of African music (the tenaciousness and persistence of African cultural elements in black people through generations of degradation and deliberate disruption is one of the cultural miracles of modern times) but that is not the present point; in the blues we see once again how the attitude to tonal harmony is a clear indicator of the ambiguity of its singers’ position within and their attitude towards white society.
Blues was, and remains, an essentially oral tradition, with strong and close links with the society from which it arose. The blues singer, like his society, was, with a very few exceptions, and those only recently, poor. He was often itinerant, travelling large distances throughout the South, not infrequently blind, led, Tiresias-like, by a boy, and, like Tiresias, often treated by his people as a seer who “saw” more than the sighted. As in many oral traditions, the material comes largely from a common stock, not only of musical phrases but also of verbal expressions and images such as “I woke up this mornin’ …,” or “Just a poor boy, long ways from home,” or “Laughin’ just to keep from cryin’.” This common stock of phrases, which was often shared by poor white, no less than black, musicians, is a universal characteristic of oral poetry (one thinks of Homer’s stock of phrases such as “the wine-dark sea” or “bright-eyed Athene”) and is a great aid to communality of expression. Everyone can play; the modestly talented singer can fall back on the common stock and by selection and permutation can make something that expresses how he feels, while the greatly gifted artist can take the common stock, building on it and creating something new and uniquely expressive, giving voice to feelings that all his hearers can recognize in themselves, thus remaining always in touch with the community as a whole and comprehensible to them.
These blues singers were—and still largely are—the seers and prophets of the black community. There is much cross-fertilization between blues and gospel music; Charles Keil points out that many black blues singers go on to become preachers in later life: “The word ‘ritual’ seems more appropriate than ‘performance’ when the audience is committed rather than appreciative. And from this it follows that perhaps blues singing is more a belief role than a creative role—more priestly than artistic … Bluesmen and preachers both provide models and orientations; both give public expression to privately held emotions; both promote catharsis; both increase feelings of solidarity, boost morale and strengthen the consensus.”12
Blues began, and has remained, very much a people’s art. It preserves in its techniques similarly ambiguous attitudes to the European tonal-harmonic tradition to those of the community that gave it birth towards white American society. Jazz, on the other hand, is in its origins and its history much closer to white music and to white society. As Gunther Schuller points out,13 the legend of the illiterate jazz musician in New Orleans in the early years of the century is not in general substantiated by the statements of musicians who were around at the time; many were highly trained in the western concert tradition with a wide knowledge of the various kinds of western concert music that New Orleans presented so richly. Many influences went into the shaping of jazz; Wilfrid Mellers, writing about Jelly Roll Morton’s Didn’t He Ramble sums them up thus:
The military march becomes a rag, the hymn becomes a blues and a Latin-American dance-song brings in hints of French or Italian opera and maybe a whiff of Europeanized plantation music in the manner of Stephen Foster also. This melting-pot of a piece gives us an idea of the variety of music that shook New Orleans in the first decades of this century. Parade bands in the streets were so numerous that they were apt to bump into one another. Party bands in the streets and squares might be playing Negro rags or Latin-American tangos or French quadrilles or German waltzes.14
Jazz shows in its techniques that it is closer to white music. In fact the first jazz musicians to gain popular attention, especially those we know from the record companies, were white (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and their black contemporaries were initially relegated to the “race records” category). From its earliest days until, in the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, it abandoned contact altogether with the idea of the fundamental bass, at about the same time as the post-Webernian revolution in European art music, it has maintained the harmonic progression to a greater or lesser degree as one of its expressive devices. Throughout its history it has maintained a flirtation with European art music (the word is apt; it is the sheer playfulness of jazz that is one of its most enduring features, giving it a personal quality and almost physical presence that the other lacks), and the closeness of its contact with white society at any time can be assessed from the importance of the harmonic element in the music. The swing era, for example, was characterized by complex harmony in elaborate arrangements played from written scores; it was at the time a largely white and perfectly “respectable” art in the eyes of the middle-American majority. The revolt against the over-smooth banalities of swing in the late forties, which became known as bebop, in its origins an entirely black movement, diminished the importance of harmony to a point where its role was associative rather than explicit (much of it was blues-derived), while rhythm regained the central position it had lost. Bop was also, quite explicitly, a music of black social revolt, so it is understandable not only that tonal harmony was the first casualty but also that at the time white people mainly detested it (today, of course, bop is history and thus safe to like).
It is a commonplace that much of the vitality of jazz comes from the tension between the African and the European elements that it incorporates. It is interesting, therefore, to see that the moment when it rejected tonality altogether in favor of a modal or even atonal heterophony in the music of Coleman, Coltrane, Ayler, and others was the point at which it stopped being a popular art and became virtually another branch of art music appealing to a public of cognoscenti rather than to a community. Blues, on the other hand, remains a communal art, and it was blues rather than jazz that became, along with country and western music, the main source of the other major non-harmonic (although still tonal) music of our time, rock’n’roll, and its successors in the sixties and seventies. These will be discussed more fully in the next chapter [Music, Society, Education].
I stated earlier that American culture is full of music, a line of thought that brings us directly to Charles Edward Ives, the one composer who brings together all the threads of specifically American music and links them with the European tradition. He had a wide knowledge of European music and a comfortable mastery of its techniques, yet his relationship to it was highly ambivalent and his commitment was first and foremost to America. I have already remarked on his experience of the outdoor camp meetings at which his father led the singing, and there is a memorable passage in his Memos telling how his father rebuked a smart young Boston musician for ridiculing the out-of-tune hymn singing of an old stonemason: “Watch him closely and reverently, look into his eyes and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”15
The view of Ives as a cranky amateur who stumbled almost unawares on some of the most revolutionary musical discoveries of the century is now, one hopes, well and truly dead. He was a sophisticated, cultured musician with a powerful mind and an incredibly alert ear, and was very clear about what it was he was doing, as can be seen from his Essays Before a Sonata,16 and the more recently published Memos. The reason why his music makes so little appeal to so many European academic composers and critics is that it celebrates, not some beautiful, orderly ideal world but the real world, contradictory, untidy, even