This article appears in the July/August 2006 issue
of The American Spectator. To subscribe, click here.
A century ago composers and musicologists set out to collect and
preserve the folk music of Europe. Janacek wrote down the songs and
dances of Moravia and found in them inspiration for his own brand
of speech-melody; Cecil Sharp collected in pubs and fairs the tunes
that were to generate the modal harmonies and plangent melodies of
the Vaughan Williams symphonies, while beneath the fake dance
rhythms and creamy chords of “salon gypsy” music, Kodaly and Bartok
discerned polytonal and polyrhythmic structures that miraculously
coincided with their own stylistic innovations. All over Europe the
music of the people was being discovered by serious composers and
used to give a kind of democratic endorsement to their modernist
experiments. Stravinsky, Szymanowski, Canteloube, Albeniz, Respighi
— composers from every European country joined in the rush. It was
as though the past of European music was being discovered precisely
in order to break with it. For no sooner was our folk music
captured on the page, dusted off, and universally admired for its
melodic invention than it died. Those performers heard by Janacek,
Sharp, and Bartok were already old, and no young person could be
prevailed upon to sing with them.
The explanation is simple: Europe had been conquered by America.
The musical idiom that had poked its head through a window in
Dvorak’s New World Symphony had now stormed through the door. Not
jazz only, but the entire tradition, from the Negro spiritual, via
the blues and the minstrel shows, to the Music Hall and beyond.
Europeans had begun to be captivated by that “Great American
Songbook” which has recently been so expertly assembled by Terry
Teachout in his poignant articles in Commentary. There has
never been anything in the world like this — a tradition of song
which is open at every point to outside influence, which absorbs
every competing idiom into itself so that it is in effect without
competition, a great “yeah-saying” to the modern world and
everything in it, which is also a day-to-day reminder of the human
heart.
It is through music that America has had the farthest-reaching
influence on other cultures; it is through music that the country
came to self-knowledge and it is still part of the American
character to fill every silence with a song. Scholars like Gunther
Schuller have devoted many volumes to the mystery of jazz — how
this unprecedented idiom emerged from African drum music, from the
fusion of the pentatonic and diatonic scales, and from the
four-square harmonies of the Baptist hymnal. But the synthesis
didn’t stop with jazz. One after another the rival musics of the
world were absorbed: the Shaker hymns and Afro-American field
hollers, the marching bands of Central Europe, the fiddles and
spoons of the Celtic dances, the Spanish guitar, and the Anglican
organ. The classical orchestra too was conscripted, diverted by
Hollywood into the great river of popular sentiment and half-aware
kitsch. Korngold brought the harmonies of Richard Strauss and the
colors of Mahler; Gershwin added Stravinsky while Thelonius Monk
and Art Tatum provided touches of Debussy and Ravel.
The influence went rapidly in the opposite direction as well.
The Central European caf�s where Janacek and
Bartok had collected folk songs were soon filled with the sound of
jazz, and when the voice of the people is heard in the music of
Martinu it is not in the style of a Moravian folk song, but in the
idiom of New Orleans. The new music of America was democratic and
global, able to defeat any rival simply by its refusal to believe
in rivalry, happily appropriating every sound that could be
reissued as a song. From Ives, through Gershwin and Copland to
Bernstein, American music has shown how to mix the idiom of popular
music with the large-scale structures of the concert hall.
The great days of American popular music may now be past: rock
and roll changed the blues from a lyrical confession to a Dionysian
display, and the long-term effects are now being felt, not only in
America, but all across the world. Nevertheless, the visitor to
this country is still astonished by the number of spontaneous
musical episodes that he encounters: marching bands at football
matches; barber shop singing; church choirs and “praise dances”;
jazz combos in the clubs and bluegrass in the tavern. Our church in
rural Virginia uses the Baptist hymnal, with its wealth of
Victorian parlor songs and its smattering of solemn numbers from
the Geneva Psalter. Sometimes we have a visiting “witness,” who
will bring his backing on CD and croon out his love for Jesus in
the idiom of Nat King Cole or Mel Torme. The pastor often performs
solo hymns to his own guitar accompaniment; groups of gospel
singers from the black churches come and go; and at Easter our
little choir and their pianist performed a “Cantata for Holy Week”
by Joel Raney, in which all the devices of American popular song
are woven around the narrative of the crucifixion, in a kind of
artless homage to J.S. Bach. This unpretentious weaving of music
into the ordinary life of a religious community typifies the
American manner, which prefers song to silence and loud praise to
quiet prayer.
LIKE EVERYTHING TYPICAL of America, this musical culture issues
from the spontaneous interchanges of ordinary people. The American
song exists because people have enjoyed it and asked for more. It
is the musical expression of consumer sovereignty. And like
everything typical of America it gets up the intellectual nose.
Coming to America as a refugee from Nazism, the philosopher and
critic Theodor Adorno took it upon himself to pour scorn on the
music of Hollywood. For Adorno this disgusting sound, riddled with
cliche and kitsch, was not art but ideology — the sweet pill of
false consciousness which numbs the senses of the working class.
The American song, Adorno argued, be it by Gershwin or Berlin, by
Jerome Kern or Cole Porter, is an instrument of capitalist
exploitation. It is not the consumer or the producer that is
sovereign in this debased musical culture, but the “owners of the
means of communication,” namely the capitalist class. Under
socialism, Adorno implied, all this fetishism would be blown away
and the emancipated proletariat would be whistling the
ideology-free music of Webern and Schoenberg in the streets.
It is no doubt because American liberals are congenitally
disposed to endorse all expressions of anti-American sentiment that
Adorno’s ludicrous writings remain canonical in American academic
musicology, with only Richard Taruskin prepared to administer to
this censorious charlatan the well-deserved kick in the butt. Far
more human among the Marxist refugees was Kurt Weill who, unlike
Adorno (whose compositions are as constipated as his prose), gave
to the world an abundance of lyrical masterpieces. Weill
immediately understood that, if there is an idiom that conveys the
meaning of modern life as it is lived by ordinary people, it is
that of the American popular song. The works that resulted from
Weill’s conversion culminate in The Seven Deadly Sins — a
set of tableaux to words by Brecht, in which the deeply nostalgic,
all-American music wars with the anti-American sentiment of
Brecht’s malicious verse.
The case of Weill versus Adorno is of enduring significance.
There is an undeniable streak of toe-curling kitsch in American
popular music. For it is music that has escaped from the paddock of
good taste into the open plains of common sentiment. This does not
mean that it is morally corrupt, as Adorno thought, or that it is
bent to the task of falsifying social realities. It means the
opposite. This is music that incorporates the pains and joys of
modern life. If it sounds so different from all the music that has
gone before then, this is because modern life — the life made in
America — is also different from the life that has gone
before.
Where a traditional folksong like “Waley Waley” tells us of the
inconsolable wretchedness of a woman betrayed, the American
songbook provides us with the gentle remedies of modern life, as
when Judy Garland sings of “The Man That Got Away.” Such a song
says goodbye to one man, by way of preparing the heart for the
next, using the Big Band chorus in order to cheer the victim on.
The small devices whereby ordinary people cope with ordinary
disappointments are honored in this music, which seldom if ever
adopts a tragic tone of voice. Its attitude to rupture is typified
by Hoagy Carmichael’s nostalgic “I Get Along Without You Very
Well”; it uses homely images to normalize the excitement of falling
in love — “If I Were a Bell” as sung by Blossom Dearie, or Irving
Berlin’s “I’m Putting All My Eggs in One Basket.” It refuses to
take a tragic attitude to unrequited desire (Rodgers and Hart’s
“Glad to Be Unhappy”), and it cuts down all experiences, whether of
joy or sorrow, of embarrassment or humor, to a manageable size,
making it clear that either they are within reach of us all or
within reach of no one.
IF THIS MUSIC INVOKES the higher forms of passion, therefore, it
also projects them into the background. The insinuating softness
with which Peggy Lee sings of “the days of wine and roses” and “the
door marked nevermore” is like the candlelit supper and the folded
napkins — a way of invoking the unobtainable, and imbuing it with
a fairy-tale glow. This is not for you, the music says; but only
because it is not for anyone. Meanwhile, let’s pretend. From Frank
Sinatra to Barbra Streisand, America has produced a continuous
stream of singers who know exactly how to represent in their tone
of voice the ordinary American heart in its ordinary heartbeat,
while adding just enough exaltation to make the heart miss a beat
or two. Looked at in this way, the American song has prepared
mankind for the modern world of transitory attachments and
temporary griefs far more effectively than has any other cultural
innovation.
But while American popular music normalizes those sentiments it
also moralizes them. While exploring the heartbreaks of infidelity
and the excitements of seduction, it points gently in the direction
of marriage, family, and the future. Unlike the tragic ballads of
old Europe it aims for the “happy ending,” as boy and girl become
man and wife. You may have fallen by the wayside, it says, but you
can get back on the happiness train. The musicals of Rodgers and
Hammerstein projected this American idea of available happiness
across the world, and it is to the American tradition of popular
song that people all over the world still turn when they wish to
recapture their ordinary hopes.
Ponder this fact and you too will hope. A world that turns
naturally to the American songbook whenever it wishes to remind
itself of its joys is a world that is friendly to America. In the
contest between Weill and Adorno, the world is on the side of
Weill.
