Jonathon Anderson

6/11/2014

“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise”: Conjuring the Sound of a Nation of Immigrants

An old question, part 1

In Carlos Marquina’s Research Post from 2012, “Here we are…now what do we eat?”, he asks an interesting question—“What is American food?” He explores both the confusion and the boon of a nation of immigrants who all bring unique culinary traditions to the table. Implicit in this line of inquiry is the characteristically American problem of making one out of many, which is a problem that has bugged me about art music for nearly twenty years now. If America is essentially made up of immigrants and individualists, how can a piece of music like George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue sound “typically American,” as King Carol II of Bohemia commended it after hearing a 1931 performance? (Pollack 307). Nor is the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire alone in his assessment: since its premiere in 1924, the Rhapsody has grown in reputation from what one commentator called “the nearest thing in classical music to a smash hit” to what Anne Goldman writes of, assessing Gershwin’s “musical imprint on the collective American imagination,” as being “as permanent as Yosemite’s Half Dome in an Ansel Adams photograph, as strongly etched as the face of Lincoln on the penny, as iconic as the outstretched arm of the Statue of Liberty herself” (Goldman 363). Considering the American experience from the perspective of its “otherness” gave me the opportunity to ask again, “What makes American music sound American?”

An old question, part 2

            It turns out the question really is old, reaching back to the earliest days of the United States when William Billings “declared his independence from the normal rules of counterpoint [exemplified by European composers like Bach and Handel], claiming that he had devised a set of rules better suited to his aims and method” (Grout and Palisca, 761). In the introduction to The Continental Harmony, a collection of psalm and hymn settings, anthems and canons for congregational use published in 1794, Billings defended his idea of “musical warfare,” whereby each part “striv[es] for mastery, and sweetly contend[s] for victory” so that “the minds [of the audience] are surprisingly agitated, sometimes declaring in favor of one part, and sometimes another” (762).

            That rugged sense of independence seems to have proven infectious to further waves of immigrants like Anthony Philip Heinrich, a German-Bohemian who led the first known American performance of a Beethoven symphony in 1817 before turning his back on established (European) musical tradition to experiment among other things with incorporating Native American themes into his works (763). Heinrich was part of an influx of Germanic immigrants that would eventually “dominate…the teaching of composition and music theory in [American] conservatories and universities.” Along with other “diverse immigrant groups [who] brought with them or later imported elements of their religious and secular music,” the growing community of American musicians began to “search for an independent, native voice” to counteract the more than one thousand years of European musical tradition that was felt as a “threat to home-grown musical creativity” (763, 666).

            Coinciding with this growing interest in cultural identity around 1900 was the development in popular music of new, hybrid styles combining the cultural heritage of African-Americans and the musical materials inherited from the Old World (Europe), forming the genres of ragtime and blues (767). Eventually the practice of improvising variations on blues melodies and experimenting with (and embellishing) ragtime rhythms evolved into the earliest jazz, which is defined largely by its emphasis on improvisation and individuality within the context of a group. In addition to traditional blues, jazz bands found themselves skyrocketing in popularity with the inclusion in their growing repertoire of Tin Pan Alley hits by composers like Irving Berlin and brotherly team of George and Ira Gershwin.

Gershwin

            Like many second and third generation immigrants, George Gershwin was not born with the name by which he was known. He was born Yakov Gershovitz, which was quickly anglicized somewhat to Jacob Gershvin, and Howard Pollack reports in his 2006 tome George Gershwin – His Life and Work that as early as his second birthday he was known as George (Pollack 4, Course Obj. 2d). Though he would later single out Anton Rubinstein’s Melody in F as one of the pieces that seduced him from street hooligan to musician, he told Theatre Magazine in 1927 (in “‘Whitmanesque’ fashion,” says Pollack) that his childhood was filled with the sounds of “old music and new music, forgotten melodies and the craze of the moment, bits of opera, Russian folk songs, Spanish ballads, chansons, ragtime ditties, combined in a mighty chorus in my ear. And through and over it all I heard, faint at first, loud at last, the soul of this great America of ours” (42). This was no mere platitude; Gershwin’s style was both beloved by the concertgoing public (a poll comparing lifetime earnings of famous composers, adjusted for inflation, estimates Gershwin as the richest composer of all time) and criticized by the musical establishment for its inclusion of jazz and other popular music styles alongside the techniques of the European tradition.

            On a few occasions, Gershwin also had the opportunity to discuss the influence of his Jewish heritage on his music. The Gershwins were not especially observant of traditional practices, assimilating fairly quickly to the dominant culture surrounding them, but there is actually quite a lot of documentation to show that George was exposed to no small amount of Yiddish theatre. Not only did he run errands for several members of the Lower East Side Theatre as a teenager, appearing in a show as an extra, but he also continued attending Yiddish theatrical performances throughout his life at least until 1928 as recorded by Ira Gershwin (43, 45). The Gershwins were also friendly with prominent Jewish artists in New York (including conductor Michael Tilson Thomas’s grandfather Boris Thomashevsky), and George frequently performed popular songs from Yiddish theatre shows on the piano during social gatherings (44). In 1916 George even recorded a piano-roll medley of popular Yiddish songs.

            If he tended not to emphasize his Jewish heritage when it came to his music, it was more because he embraced the democratic ideal of America than any awkwardness of bi-culturalism. He never denied the possibility that his music might have some elusive or psychologically Jewish qualities. To one interviewer he explained, “I think many of my themes are Jewish in feeling although they are purely American in style” (43).

The New American

            Describing his intention with the Rhapsody, Gershwin said “I hear it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America—of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness” (Cowen). Anne Goldman describes the famous beginning in more binary terms: “The clarinet’s chromatic rush up the scale is as American as a slide into home plate and as Jewish as a village wedding dance…the melancholy brightness of klezmer stretched around the swagger of jazz” (Goldman 360). Michael Tilson Thomas may get to the root of Gershwin’s true greatness when he says, “he took the Jewish tradition, the African-American tradition, and the symphonic tradition, and he made a language out of that which was accessible and understandable to all kinds of people” (Cowen).

            Interestingly, Ira Gershwin “thought the lack of ‘Hebraic influence’ a point of distinction with his brother’s music” (Pollack 46). Maybe “‘the New American’ who bears no marks of ethnic or tribal identification” is ultimately someone who, like George, absorbs and assimilates the influences around him (or her) in a way that accentuates the best America has to offer while also minimizing the worst.

Works Cited

Cowen, Ron. “George Gershwin: He Got Rhythm.” www.washingtonpost.com. Washington Post, 1998. Web. 9 Jun 2014.

Goldman, Anne. “Listening to Gershwin.” The Georgia Review. 62.2 (2008): 353-372. Print.

Grout, Donald and Claude Palisca. A History of Western Music. New York: Norton, 1996. Print.

Pollack, Howard. George Gershwin—His Life and Work. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Print.