All posts tagged Irving Berlin

Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward (1941)

‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Mrs Condomine.’
(Madame Arcati the medium, humorously quoting Hamlet in Blithe Spirit, Act 2, scene 2)

Blithe Spirit, first staged in 1941, has turned out to be one of Noel Coward’s most popular and regularly revived plays. From my reading of half a dozen of the others I’d hazard a guess that this is because it’s actually about something. ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Easy Virtue’, ‘Private Lives’, ‘Design for Living’, ‘Present Laughter’ – if they’re about anything, it’s farcical arguments and misunderstandings based around people’s fractious love lives; whereas Blithe Spirit has an interesting and genuinely comic premise.

This is that a medium, one Madame Arcati, who a group of cynical upper middle-class types have invited round to hold a séance amid much joking and banter, turns out to everyone’s amazement to be real. There is an afterlife, the spirits of the dead do live on there, and people called mediums can get in touch with them.

But the comic premise goes further than that. The lead male character – witty, cynical Charles Condomine who hosts the séance – lost his first wife, Elvira, seven years ago (to be clear: she died: in a comic detail we are told she laughed so hard at a BBC radio programme that she dropped dead of a heart attack).

He has subsequently married the fragrant and sensible Ruth. But when the medium, Madame Arcati, succeeds in getting in touch with the ‘other world’, guess who’s waiting there to transmit a message to the living? His first wife, Elvira!

His first hint of it is when the medium’s ‘contact’, a girl called Daphne, insists on picking out the record of an Irving Berlin song, ‘Always’, to put on the gramophone to help set the mood. Charles starts a bit, because that was one of Elvira’s favourite songs. But then, once the lights are turned low and Madame Arcati has gone into a trance, Charles insists that he can hear Elvira talking to him, even though no-one else can.

This freaks him out so much that he leaps up and turns the lights on, to reveal Madame Arcati unconscious and flat on her back. To backtrack a bit and explain the plot more fully:

Brief synopsis

Act 1

Scene 1. Setup and arrival of the guests

Charles Condomine is a successful novelist. While dressing for dinner, he and his second wife, Ruth, discuss his first wife, Elvira, who died young, seven years earlier. They also fuss about the new maid, Edith, who is gauche and over-keen, always racing hither and thither and constantly having to be told to calm down and walk.

Charles has invited round for dinner a local couple, Dr and Mrs Bradman. When the guests assemble they make jokes about the third guest who hasn’t yet arrived, for Charles has invited a local eccentric, Madame Arcati, who claims to be a medium. He explains that he’s invited her in order to get background information and colour for a novel he’s planning to write about a fake medium. Madame Arcati arrives, all clattering ‘barbaric’ jewellery.

(As Philip Hoare points out in his excellent biography of Coward, the playwright’s lesbians are often dressed ‘barbarically’ i.e. in modernist necklaces, bangles, patterns and designs. In addition it is made to appear outlandishly eccentric that Madame A likes cycling everywhere. In addition she is given to schoolgirl pep talks: ‘mustn’t give up hope–chin up–never day die’. Coward is quoted in the Hoare biography as saying that as her part grew and grew as he thought up funnier and funnier aspects of her character.)

So now the guests are all assembled they settle down to dinner and the scene closes.

Scene 2. The séance

After dinner the characters prepare to hold the seance. The character of Madame Arcati and her preposterous profession are rich in comic details: such as how the best ‘contacts’ in the other world are children, although Indians are also good. Unless they get over-excited, in which case they go off ‘into their own tribal language’ and are unintelligible.

Madame Arcati’s contact is called Daphne and is ‘rising seven’ years old. Contacts respond well to music and Daphne has a fondness for the songs of Irving Berlin (Madame A drolly remarks that ‘She likes a tune she can hum’). Rifling through Charles’s collection, Madame comes across ‘Always’ by Berlin.

After a lot more palaver, as described above, Madame A raises the ghost of Elvira whose voice only Charles can hear. When he leaps to his feet and turns the lights on Madame A is unconscious on her back. The doctor helps bring her round and after further chat, she leaves. As she does so Elvira appears to us, onstage, dressed in grey with grey make-up on face and flesh, although not seen by anyone else. After some more sceptical chat, Dr and Mrs Bradman also leave.

So now there’s just Charles, Ruth and ghost Elvira onstage. What quickly emerges is that only Charles can see or hear Elvira. Elvira is exactly as selfish and imperious as she was in life and soon she and Charles are bickering like characters in all Coward’s other plays. The cleverness or conceit of this play is that Ruth can only hear Charles’s part of the dialogue. So when he says something rude and sharp to Elvira, Ruth thinks he’s talking to her and gets understandably upset and then cross.

So although the premise is novel enough, the actual meat of the play is like all Coward’s other plays in that the only way the characters can relate to each other is through arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up.

CHARLES: Shut up.
CHARLES: Be quiet, Elvira.
RUTH: Stop talking like that, Charles.
CHARLES: Be quiet, she’s doing her best.
RUTH: Be quiet, you’ll ruin everything.
CHARLES: Do shut up darling, you’ll make everything worse.
CHARLES: Don’t be childish, Elvira.
ELVIRA: Don’t call me your child.
CHARLES: For heaven’s sake don’t snivel.
CHARLES: I’m sick of these insults, please go away.

ELVIRA: Oh Charles.
CHARLES: Shut up!

And Coward’s favourite word, idiotic.

RUTH: Charles, how can you be so idiotic?
RUTH: Sit down for God’s sake and don’t be idiotic.
CHARLES: How can I control myself in the face of your idiotic damned stubbornness?
CHARLES: Don’t be idiotic.
RUTH: And now, owing to your idiotic inefficiency, we find ourselves in the most mortifying position.

Coward is so aware of the issue that even he himself uses the word ‘bickering’ to describe everyone’s behaviour.

CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.

ELVIRA: When I think what might have happened if I’d succeeded in getting you to the other world after all – it makes me shudder, it does honestly… It would be nothing but bickering and squabbling for ever and ever and ever.

And all this bickering, as in all Coward’s other plays, tends towards what I’ve called the futility point, the moment when one or both participants in the argument just give up even trying to communicate to the other.

RUTH: It’s no use arguing any more.
CHARLES: It doesn’t matter, Ruth… We’ll say no more about it.
CHARLES: There is nothing to be gained by continuing this discussion.

So in this early phase of Elvira’s haunting the comedy, if it works as comedy, comes from Ruth’s bewilderment at Charles’s unexplained remarks, while there is equal comedy in Charles’s frustration at his inability to make Ruth understand or believe that his first wife has returned from the dead to haunt him.

RUTH: I am not going to stay here arguing any longer.
ELVIRA: Hooray!
CHARLES: Shut up!
RUTH [incensed]: How dare you speak to me like that!
CHARLES: Listen, Ruth, please listen.
RUTH: I will not listen tom any more of this nonsense. I am going up to bed now, I’ll leave you to turn out the lights. I shan’t be asleep – I’m too upset. So you can come in and say goodnight to me if you feel like it.
ELVIRA: That’s big of her, I must say.
CHARLES: Be quiet!

From this little excerpt you can see how what I’ve described as bickering isn’t an incidental feature of the dialogue, it is absolutely central to Coward’s method, the core of his idea of drama, and, if acted correctly, the source of most of the alleged comedy.

There is another thread of comedy which is that Elvira is comically banal and under-excited about being dead or the afterlife. We get no confirmation of whether there’s a heaven or hell, or the Big Question – whether there’s a God, and his Son is Jesus etc. None of that kind of detail. This is a comedy after all. Instead she talks like a blasé Mayfair cocktail party character, can’t really remember any of the details but has gossip about various characters in the afterlife. Thus we learn that Joan of Arc is really ‘a lot of fun’ while Merlin bores everyone with the same old party tricks. So the afterlife sounds exactly like a Noel Coward 1920s cocktail party.

Elvira has only the vaguest sense of where she was and thinks she’s appeared to haunt Charles because she was ‘summoned’ though he swears to her and Ruth that he never summoned anyone. This is an important plot point which we’ll return to.

Meanwhile, Ruth refuses to believe Elvira is there, is instead convinced that Charles is drunk and storms off to bed leaving Charles to recriminate with Elvira.

Act 2

Scene 1

The next morning at breakfast Ruth tells Charles he behave abominably to her the night before and was disgustingly drunk. As you might expect, this quickly degenerates into another Coward slanging match, with both spouses dragging up stories about flings or affairs they had with other people. Charles is given speeches declaring his exasperation with women and claims Ruth is always trying to boss him around (‘You boss and bully and order me about’). This is an important theme, maybe the central theme of the play, which has given rise to predictable accusations of misogyny (see below).

They carry on the argument through and after breakfast and are sitting in armchairs when Elvira walks in through the French windows. Charles is again shocked and starts arguing with Elvira, which Ruth misinterprets as more abuse of her until… Charles persuades Elvira to prove to Ruth that she exists. She does this by moving a bowl of flowers around the room to prove her existence. Ruth thinks it must be a trick, then becomes hysterical, fearing that she’s going mad, while Elvira picks up a chair and waltzes with it. When Ruth tries to escape through the French windows Elvira slams them in her face. When Elvira smashes a vase, Ruth goes into hysterics. End of scene 1.

Scene 2

Later the same day, Ruth has invited Madame Arcati to tea. She has accepted Elvira’s existence, to the extent of casually mentioning that her husband is off driving the ghost for an outing to Folkestone.

In the midst of a lot of banter it emerges that Ruth has invited Madame Arcati round with the simple wish of wanting her to get rid of Elvira, to send her back to ‘dematerialise’ her. But when Ruth admits that Charles didn’t believe she was a real medium and only invited her round to take notes on ‘the tricks of the trade’, offended Madame Arcati leaves in a huff.

Enter Charles and ghost Elvira. Ruth accepts and understands the distinction between when Charles is talking to her (Ruth) and when he’s talking to Elvira. In fact she asks questions of Elvira directly and asks Charles to report back her answers, which he does tactfully since many of Elvira’s replies are barbed and aggressive. When Ruth reports that Madame Arcati doesn’t think she can dematerialise Elvira, the latter crows in triumph: she will spend the rest of her life with her beloved Charles!

But the conversation degenerates and Ruth says next day she’s going up to London to the Psychical Research Society to see if they can help, and if they can’t she’ll go to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, and she slams out of the room (again).

Charles and Elvira have a relatively civilised conversation and he says he’s going off to dress for dinner and exits. The scene ends with some comic business when Elvira puts the record of ‘Always’ on the gramophone and is dancing round to it when Edith the gawky maid comes in, turns the gramophone off and files the record away, at which Elvira takes it out and puts it back on the gramophone – with the result that Edith runs out the room screaming.

Worth mentioning that this is a tried and tested Coward strategy, of having one song be repeatedly played and mentioned throughout a play, so that at the end of the evening the audience would come out humming it. In this play it’s Berlin’s song ‘Always’, compare Coward’s use of his own song, ‘Someday I’ll Find You’, in Private Lives.

Scene 3

A few days later, in the same drawing room, Ruth is talking to Mrs Bradman because the doctor has popped round to have a look at Charles’s arm, which he appears to have sprained. The doctor says he’s a bit worried about Charles because during his inspection, he kept letting fly irrelevant remarks. Of course Ruth and the audience know these were aimed at Elvira, of whose existence Dr B knows nothing. Also, Edith seems to have had an accident and fallen, on the same day.

At this point Charles enters with his arm in a sling. He’s insisting he drive into Folkestone but the doctor advises against it. Ruth knows the Folkestone trip is because Elvira wants to go to the cinema. Charles sees the doctor out while Elvira teases Ruth by throwing rose stems at her from a vase.

When Charles returns Ruth tells him she’s convinced Elvira is trying to kill him. This explains the recent accidents: Edith fell down the stairs and banged her head because the whole of the top stair was covered in axle grease, while Charles had the accident on the ladder which hurt his arm because the ladder had been sawed nearly in two. Why? So Charles will pass over into the spirit world and be Elvira’s forever.

Ruth convinces Charles she’s right and they are discussing what to do, whether Madame Arcati can do anything, when Elvira sweeps in again. Charles alerts Ruth to the fact, and they change the subject. Although she still can’t see or hear Elvira, Ruth tells her off for making her husband drive her to Folkestone that evening, and storms out (again).

Charles and Elvira engage in some more banter and bickering about how poor Ruth’s taste in household furnishing is etc. This is padding to cover time because when Elvira asks Charles can’t they go into Folkestone now, he casually says no, because Ruth’s taken the car to go and see the vicar.

At this news Elvira leaps out of her chair and becomes extremely agitated, repeating ‘Oh God oh God’. Charles begins to suspect something about the car, then suddenly realises that Elvira has sabotaged it. He is just accusing her of it when the phone rings. He picks it up and we only hear his side of the conversation but it’s something about an accident down by the bridge.

And at this moment the door swings open and Elvira steps back in horror, then shields her head from blows and cries out, ‘Ruth, stop it’.

Clearly 1) Elvira did sabotage the car 2) Ruth crashed it and was killed 3) she has ‘passed over’ and now exists on the same spectral plane as Elvira where 4) she is attacking her. And on this bombshell the scene ends.

It is an important plot point that the audience, and Charles, at this point cannot see Ruth. But there’s no doubt that she’s died and come back from the dead.

Act 3

Scene 1

It is a few days later. Presumably there’s been a funeral for Ruth etc. Charles is waiting by the fire and Madame Arcati is shown in. She offers her condolences but is spookily aware that Elvira had something to do with Ruth’s death. Elvira appears – note that even Madame Arcati can’t see her and has to have Charles point out to her where she is and what she’s saying.

Part of the comedy is that Madame Arcati is as gleeful as a child that Elvira has returned. She asks for proof and Elvira blows on her ear which makes Madame A cackle with pleasure.

Elvira, for her part, is fed up, she hates Ruth being on her plane because she’s endlessly taunting her. She now wants to be exorcised or dematerialised. Charles asks Madame A to step into the dining room for a moment because he wants to talk to Elvira. This, of course, turns into an argument, with them both taunting each other with the affairs they had during their marriage, she with Guy Henderson and Captain Bracegirdle, he with Cynthia Cheviot.

As this bickering makes them both really miserable Elvira begs Charles to call Madame Arcati back into the room., She comes and there’s a lot of palaver and stage business with salt and pepper and herbs as she lays everything out for her dematerialisation. She claims to be following a formula from Edmondson’s Witchcraft and its Byways.

She puts music on the gramophone, turns off the lights and asks her contact on the other side to tap the table for messages, but the tapping gets stronger and stronger until Madame Arcati falls over, pulling the table on top of her.

When Charles switches the lights on and pulls the table off her and revives Madame Arcati, he points out that Elvira is still here, nothing happened to her, but Madame Arcati insists that something happened, and at that moment the figure of Ruth, herself as grey as Elvira, sweeps in through the French windows. I think that up till this moment she had been an unearthly presence. So I think what’s happened is that Madame Arcati’s spell has backfired and fully invoked or materialised her to the same level as Elvira.

Now Charles has two angry ex-wives to cope with. End of scene.

Scene 2

It’s a few hours later and the room is in disarray with various objects (crystal ball, Ouija board) arranged to give the impression that a variety of further spells and incantations (‘the most humiliating hocus-pocus’) have been tried and all failed. Madame Arcati is fast asleep on the sofa.

The two women ghosts are exhausted and humiliated. They complain that they’ve had to sit through no fewer than five séances and innumerable spells and have completely failed to dematerialise.

What begins to develop or become clear is the division between Charles and the two women. Elvira and Ruth have buried the hatchet and are now in league against him, joining common cause in finding him boorish and unhelpful. And he finds himself outnumbered and exasperated with him. It’s now that he delivers what in one sense is the play’s defining line (and the defining line of so many Coward plays):

CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.

So the ghosts goad Charles into waking Madam Arcati up for one last try. It is that this point that a key fact is discovered: All the women (Elvira, Ruth and Madame A) have been insisting it was Charles who called them into being: the two ghost women recall answering an overwhelming call for them to appear in the Condomine house. Suddenly Madame A has a brainwave. She grabs her crystal ball and sees something white, like a bandage. She scampers round, waves a bunch of garlic, makes cabbalistic signs and chants a spell.

And into the room comes Edith, the scatty servant. Wearing a white bandage round her head. She asks Charles why he called her but of course he didn’t – Madame Arcati did! At first she pretends she can’t see the two ghosts but soon makes a slip and they realise that she can. It was her. She has the gift. She is a Natural.

Madame Arcati swiftly hypnotises Edith and tells her she knows what she has to do i.e. reverse her call to Ruth and Elvira. So Madame A gets Edith to softly sing ‘Always’ (remember what I said about Coward cannily threading a theme song throughout many of his plays?) Sensing they are about to disappear, both Ruth and Elvira hurry to get in some last messages to Charles but their voices fade and then disappear.

Hooray! Madame A wakes Edith from her trance and Charles gives her a pound for her troubles. For a split second there is a moment of naughtiness, because Edith can’t remember how she got there or what’s just happened, and for a moment she misinterprets the pound to mean that she’s been taken advantage off and she runs out the room squealing.

Charles, rather like the confirmed misogynist Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, doesn’t understand, though the audience – or some of the audience – does.

Charles is hugely relieved and is effusively thanking Madame A when she utters words of caution. She tells him to pack his bags and leave. Why on earth? And Madame A explains that… they may still be here! Even though he can’t see or hear them… the house may still be haunted. She gives him a parting warning to pack his bags and go far away (while she herself is packing up all her paraphernalia) and then she takes her leave.

Charles is alone onstage, pondering. Tempting fate, he starts to talk to Elvira and Ruth, teasing them, telling them how happy he is to be free of them, and of women generally in his life. At which the vase on the mantelpiece falls to the floor. Of course! They are still here!

So: he takes the opportunity to let rip: first he tells Elvira that he knew about her affairs all along, what she didn’t know about was him and Paula Westlake! Then he turns to Ruth and says he was faithful to her but was being alienated by her increasingly domineering behaviour and it was only a matter of time… at which the clock strikes sixteen!

He bids them both goodbye as a sofa cushion is thrown at him, ducks it and tells them they’re welcome to smash up the house as much as they like – as the curtains are pulled up and down, the gramophone lid opens and shuts, the overmantel shakes. He eggs them on, telling Ruth to give Elvira a hand, as a statuette on the bookshelf falls down, and as he makes his amused exit all hell breaks loose, with vases falling, the curtains falling, the gramophone playing ‘Always’ speeded up, the overmantel collapsing, the curtain rod crashing down and anything else the director can think of.

THE END

Misogyny

In his biography Hoare quotes a woman director as saying the play is very funny but the ending reeks of misogyny. Certainly the last couple of pages where he delights in getting rid of the two ghosts, and then taunts them, have a certain fierceness. A series of remarks about being free of women climaxes with this little peroration.

CHARLES: You said in one of your more acid moments, Ruth, that I had been hag-ridden all my life! How right you were – but now I’m free Ruth dear, not only of Mother and Elvira and Mrs Winthrop Llewellyn, but free of you too and I should like to take this farewell opportunity of saying I’m enjoying it immensely!

Not Andrew Tate, is it, but it is the conclusion of a distinct trend in the play. Why does this play and not most of his others display this tone? Maybe it comes from something in Coward’s attitude. But maybe it’s simpler, maybe it’s simply the logical conclusion of the tendency of the of the characters, implicit in the initial setup, maybe Coward followed the logic of the basic scenario and Charles’s gratitude to be rid of the two haunters is comic vehemence.

Movie version

‘Blithe Spirit’ was promptly made into a movie, released in 1945, directed by David Lean who Coward had collaborated with on another adaptation of a recent play, ‘This Happy Breed’. The film starred two of the main actors from the original stage production, namely Kay Hammond as Elvira and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati. Constance Cummings played Ruth and Rex Harrison stepped into Coward’s shoes to play Charles.

Out of the country during the filming, Coward was less happy with the result than with Lean’s version of ‘This Happy Breed’, thinking it too static and stagey. Watching it, you can’t help agreeing, despite the film version’s attempts to get out of the living room at every opportunity, with several scenes driving along in a car or at Madame Arcati’s house.

The general clunkiness is driven home by the film’s drastic departure from the play’s ending. The play ends with Charles swanning off abroad, leaving the women smashing up his house in frustration. The film ends with Charles merrily driving down towards the bridge where Ruth crashed, while the ghosts watch smiling, because they’ve sabotaged the car, again. The car crashes and seconds later Charles plonks down on the bridge beside his two ex-wives. In the play, man triumphs, two women left fuming. In the film, the two women win. No doubt this sounded like a funny idea in the script conferences, but the clumsy clunkiness with which it’s shot, the lack of any punchline and the film’s abrupt ending, all leave you with an impression of clumsiness.

Coward’s negative opinion was reflected in the film’s lack of box office success – but it has subsequently come to be valued for its Technicolor photography and Oscar-winning visual effects.

Related reviews

Noel Coward reviews

The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross (2007) – the American chapters

Alex Ross’s the Rest is Noise is by far the most comprehensive and accessible introduction to the classical music of the long difficult twentieth century that I know of.

Born in 1968, Alex Ross studied classical composition, but was also a rock DJ at Harvard. He was just 28 when he was appointed classical music critic for New Yorker magazine, combining formidable technical and historical knowledge with a wonderfully clear and expressive prose style. He has a modern, unstuffy, relaxed approach to music of all sorts and sounds.

Having recently visited an exhibition of art from 1930s America and read the book of the exhibition, I decided to reread the relevant chapters of Ross’s masterwork to shed light on the musical highlights of the period. In the event this also requires reading one of the earlier chapters in the book, the one which describes the beginnings of 20th century American music.

Chapter 4 – Invisible men: American composers from Ives to Ellington

African American music

Slavery. Blacks. African Americans. The chapter opens by describing the way prescient critics and composers grasped that the one truly new and different element in American music was the black African element. It’s amazing to learn that when the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák went to New York in 1892 to teach at the new National Conservatory, he met a black composer, Harry T. Burleigh, who introduced him to African American spirituals, prompting the European master to write an article on ‘the Real Value of Negro Melodies’ in 1893 and predict that:

the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies.

The early part of the chapter lists black composers who struggled to reconcile the European tradition with their background, and coming up against prejudice, racism, the difficulty of getting a full classical training and, if they did, of writing in a foreign idiom and getting performed. Ragtime classic Scott Joplin wrote an opera which was never performed. Harry Lawrence freeman founded the Negro Grand Opera Company and wrote two tetralogies of operas in the Wagner tradition, but which were never performed. Maurice Arnold Strohotte who Dvořák thought the most gifted of his pupils had a piece titled American Plantation Dances performed at the National Conservatory in 1894, but then couldn’t get any subsequent works performed and languished in obscurity. Will Marion Cook managed to get into one of the few colleges which accepted blacks and became a world class violinist, moving to Germany where – surprisingly – he was respected and taken seriously. Back in America he found his career blocked, began work on a classical adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but never completed it, and found himself driven to orchestrating and directing blackface musical revues, and then a bandleader founding the New York Syncopated Review, and hiring the young genius clarinettist Sidney Bechet as star soloist.

Cook’s career shows how the exclusion of black ‘serious’ composers from the mainstream pushed them again and again towards music halls, revues, popular music – and indirectly fuelled the creation of jazz. Once this had crystallised as a form, a completely new style of music, towards the end of the Great War, there was an explosion of long-suppressed talent. The Russian pianist, composer and conductor Anton Rubinstein had predicted, back in 1893, that within 25 years Negro musicians would form ‘a new musical school’.

Neither he nor Dvořák nor many of the wannabe black classical composers could have anticipated just how revolutionary the advent of jazz would be. As Ross puts it, with characteristic eloquence:

The characteristic devices of African-American musicking – the bending and breaking of diatonic scales, the distortion of instrumental timbre, the layering of rhythms, the blurring of the distinction between verbal and nonverbal sound – opened new dimensions in musical space, a realm beyond the written notes. (p.122)

Just reeling off the names of some of the masters of jazz is dizzying – Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Sidney Bechet, Fletcher Henderson, Bix Beiderbecke, Paul Whiteman. As is the list of Broadway masters who came to fame in the 1920s – Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin. They invented rhythms, styles, timings, structures, tones and timbres, and wrote thousands of compositions which changed the nature of music all round the world.

Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Histories of modern American classical music generally begin with Ives. The son of a traditional marching bandmaster in New England, he grew up surrounded by the music of brass bands and church music but, after a successful university education, decided to work for an insurance company, composing in the evenings and weekends completely revolutionary works which experimented with novel musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory elements and quarter tones. An immediate flavour is given when you learn that Three Places in New England requires the orchestra to play orchestrated versions of two popular Victorian songs at the same time. That said, compared with most of what follows, a lot of Ives still sounds reassuringly familiar.

Edgar Varèse (1883 – 1965)

Whereas Ives was American through and through and incorporated snatches of hymn tunes, popular songs and classical references in works still titled Violin concerto and so on, Varèse was French and determinedly avant-garde. He travelled to New York during the Great War and pioneering a highly experimental sound, latterly involving tape recordings, which earned him the sobriquet ‘the father of electronic music’.

Coming from the world of Dada and cubism, Varèse was keen to incorporate non-musical sounds in a futurist attempt to capture ‘the sound of the city’ – look out for the fire siren in Amériques. His key works are Amériques (1918–1921), Offrandes (1921), Hyperprism (1922–1923), Octandre (1923), Intégrales (1924–1925), Arcana (1925–1927), Ionisation (1929–1931), Ecuatorial (1932–1934), Density 21.5 (1936), Dance for Burgess (1949), Déserts (1950–1954) Poème électronique (1957–1958).

Varèse broke down language and form into a stream of sensations, but he offered few compensating spells of lyricism. His jagged thematic gestures, battering pulses, and brightly screaming chords have no emotional cords tied to them, no history, no future. (p.137)

I like the YouTube poster who describes Amériques as like The Rite of Spring on crack.

George Antheil (1900 – 1959)

Antheil was born American, to German immigrant parents, who went to Paris determined to be the most avant of the garde, wowed modernist writers with his Dadaist/Futurist ideas, caused a riot at one of his premiers in the approved avant-garde style and brought back to New York his notorious Ballet Mécanique. This was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy with cinematography by Man Ray and which you can see on YouTube. To the kind of fire siren sounds Varèse pioneered Antheil added the use of several airplane propellers onstage. Sadly these tended to blow the audience’s programmes around and wreck ladies’ hairdos. The critics were underwhelmed at his ‘bad boy’ antics, and his reputation went into decline. After a spell in decadent Berlin writing for the stage, by the 1930s he was back in the States, writing film scores in Hollywood. Although it’s loud with four pianos and plenty of percussion, it’s striking how prominent the three xylophones manage to be. Xylophones suddenly appear in modernist music and have never gone away.

The Wikipedia article has a musical analysis of Ballet Mécanique.

Carl Ruggles (1876 – 1971)

A difficult, obstreperous, loudly racist and self-taught composer, Ruggles devised his own form of atonal counterpoint, on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number such as eight pitch classes intervened. He wrote painstakingly slowly so his output is relatively small. His longest and best-known work is Sun-Treader (1926–31) for large orchestra, a weighty 16 minutes long. As Ross sums him up:

If Varèse is like early Stravinsky with the folk motifs removed, Ruggles is like Ives without the tunes. (p.138)

Henry Cowell (1897 – 1965)

Cowell was another highly experimental; American composer. He was the centre of a circle which included Ruggles, Dane Rudhyar, Leo Ornstein, John Becker, Colin McPhee, Varèse and Ruth Crawford. In the 1920s he founded new music magazines and organisations, published much new music, and reached out to incorporate South American composers such as Villa-Lobos. Among his many students were George Gershwin, Lou Harrison and John Cage.

George Gershwin (1898 – 1937)

The most glaring thing about Gershwin is how tragically young he died, aged 38 of a brain tumour. How much he had accomplished by then! A host of timeless songs, a pack of shows and revues, and then some immortal concert hall – Rhapsody in Blue (1924) and An American in Paris (1928) as well as the opera Porgy and Bess (1935). He grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family on the lower East Side of Manhattan, was intrigued by the music-making of some relatives, wangled piano lessons, got a job very young in Tin Pan Alley while the Great War was still on, churning out popular tunes and songs incorporating the latest sounds i.e. the arrival of jazz from the great mash-up of syncopated sounds which were in the air. His biggest money-spinner was the early song Swanee which Al Jolson heard him perform at a party and decided to make part of his black-face act.

As success followed success Gershwin took to the party high life of New York like an elegant swan. And beneath the stylish surface there was an enquiring mind, always questing to improve his musical knowledge. He continued to take musical lessons throughout his life and made several trips to Europe where he sought out the masters. He was particularly impressed by the serialist composer Alban Berg in Vienna. In Paris he studied with Maurice Ravel, who ended their lessons, supposedly by telling him, ‘Why be a second rate Ravel when you can be a first-rate Gershwin?’

Many commentators then and now have noticed how many of the popular ‘composers’ of 20s and 30s America were Jews – Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, George Gershwin – and how thoroughly they co-opted and expressed the African American idiom. This allowed a field day to anti-Semites like some of the Regionalists and ruralists. Scholars have pointed to the similiarities, both were ‘outsider’ groups liable to harsh discrimination. In our own censorious judgmental times, how would they have avoided the block accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’?

Ross is more relaxed and points to the notion of the Melting Pot – New York in particular was a massive mash-up of hundreds of influences, everyone – writers, poets, painters, composers, singers, comedians – was stealing from, remixing and contributing to a mass explosion of creativity. Also, as I read in a history of jazz decades ago, it is commonplace to say that jazz – and the vast ocean of sounds which come out of it, rock’n’roll, pop and the rest of it – is entirely due to African rhythms, syncopations and the blurring of voices and timbres Ross describes. But this history pointed out another truth so obvious nobody sees it – there isn’t a single African instrument anywhere in a jazz band. All of the instruments were invented by white Europeans as was the system of music notation used by all the big bands. Seen from this point of view, African American music ‘appropriated’ 500 years of European tradition – and gave it a good shake from which it’s never recovered.

Duke Ellington (1899-1974)

One of the prime shakers was Duke Ellington, the jazz big band leader who broadened its style and appeal into a large band capable of projecting a well-organised, full sound while still giving space to many of the greatest soloists of the day. With Ellington jazz moved out of low dives and bars and into the swellest of must-see nightclubs. His impeccable personal taste and style, his good manners and slyly intelligent way with reporters and interviewers made him a star, as did a steady stream of jazz standards. From the 1930s to the 1970s his band undertook wide-ranging tours of Europe and Latin America, helping to make him a household name around the world.

Chapter 8 – Music for All: Music in FDR’s America

A host of things led to decisive changes as the 1920s turned into the 1930s.

1. The Depression wrecked the country, destroying middle class savings and crushing the rural population. Somehow, eerily, there continued to be a market, in fact the market grew, for shiny escapist Hollywood fantasies of the high life, starring a new generation of movie stars Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Jean Harlow. As the country got poorer the Hollywood fantasies got shinier, the stars more glamorous.

2. Talkies And now they were in talking pictures. Sound completely transformed movies, in the obvious respect that you could hear the movie idols speak, but also because they could now carry extended soundtracks. Music. Short songs, extended show pieces or just background music. This music had to be accessible and comprehensible immediately. No place here for modernist experimentation – Varese, Ives, Ruggles, Virgil Thompson – no thank you. Opportunities opened for thousands of hack composers to mash up all the sounds they heard around them, jazz, swing, along with any useful bits of classical music, with a few geniuses standing above the crowd, most famously Erich Korngold (1897-1957), a child prodigy who produced the scores for many of Errol Flynn’s swashbucklers in the 30s, and Bernard Hermann (1911-65) who kicked off his career spectacularly scoring Citizen Kane (1941) before going on to score a host of famous movies, including a clutch of Hitchcocks, most famously the shower scene of Psycho (1960). Both the children of Jewish immigrants.

3. Politics Stalin’s Communist International issued the call for a Popular Front to be formed against the fascist powers at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 but the whole of the 30s are sometimes seen as the Popular Front decade, when working men and women, some politicians, as well as the intelligentsia all became politicised, all asked themselves how such poverty and misery could come to the greatest country on earth and, not irrationally, concluded there was something very wrong with the system. More than one composer decided to reject the intellectual allure of modernism – indelibly associated with ‘abroad’, with the big city specially New York – and realised it was their ‘duty’ to write about their own country, about its sufferings, in music which would be understandable to all.

4. The Exodus Also Europe came to America. The advent to power of Hitler in 1933 drove a wave of European emigrants – Jews or socialists and communists, or just people the Nazis described as ‘degenerates’ – to flee to the Land of the Free. And so half the great composers of the day landed up in America – Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Rachmaninov, Weill, Milhaud, Hindemith, Krenek, Eisler and many others. As Ross puts it, entire communities from Paris or Berlin settled en masse in New York or the Hollywood Hills (p.260). they were all welcomed into the bosom of Roosevelt’s New Deal America although, arguably, in pampered America none of them produced work of the intensity which brought them to fame in troubled Europe. But it had another impact: in the 1920s artists and composers went on pilgrimage to Europe to sit at the feet of the masters and bring their discoveries back to breathless audiences. But now the masters were here, living among us and regularly putting on concerts. The special role of the artist as privileged messenger from the other world evaporated. They had to find another role.

5. The Federal Music Project was set up as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935. It created employment for a small army musicians, conductors and composers and led to the thousands of concerts, music classes, the establishment of a Composers Forum Laboratory, as well as scores of music festivals and the creation of 34 new orchestras! An estimated 95 million Americans attended presentations by one or other FMP body. A huge new audience was created for a type of accessible culture which increasingly came to be defined as ‘middle-brow’ (p.278).

6. Radio and records These new regional orchestras were able to reach beyond concert halls into the homes of many more people as radio stations were set up across America and mass production made radios available to even the poorest families (like television a generation later). Music (as well as news, drama, features and so on) now reached far beyond the big cities. Radio made stars of some of the big name conductors, namely Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, whose regular radio broadcasts brought Beethoven and Brahms to huge numbers of new listeners. Simultaneously the plastic discs, 78 rpm records and then long players, were a whole new medium which could bring recordings of all sorts of music into people’s homes to be played again and again. A massive revolutionary switch from live to recorded music began to sweep the country in this decade.

How as the American composer, struggling to find a voice and a role, to respond to the clamour and confusion of this new world?

Aaron Copland (1900 – 1990)

Copland was another New York Jew who went to Europe to study music and composition for three years, returned and got only small audiences for his advanced pieces until, swayed by the changing social scene around him, and participating in communist meetings and agitation, he realised he needed to devote his talents to the common man, making his music as accessible, as uplifting, as optimistic as possible. His breakthrough came after a visit to Mexico (which often helps American writers, poets, composers, painters see their own country in a new light) and the syncopations of the Spanish tradition helped him escape from both the prison house of modernism but also the sounds of jazz and Broadway which dominated his native New York.

The result was the complex syncopations of El Salón México (1936) and there quickly followed the tide of his most popular works, which used big bold motifs, lots of brass and grandiose percussion, clear harmonies and slow-moving, stately themes which somehow convey the sense of space and openness – Billy the Kid (1938), Quiet City (1940), Our Town (1940), Fanfare for the Common Man (1942), Lincoln Portrait (1942), Rodeo (1942), Appalachian Spring (1944).

(Although he’s associated with soft American landscapes, if you look closely you’ll see that his most programmatic music is actually about the desert and the prairie, a distinctly non-European landscape. For me this echoes the way that Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings inspired by the deserts of New Mexico – for me – emerged as the most distinctive works in the recent exhibition of 1930s art, America after the Fall.)

Copland created a way of sounding big and brash and bold and confident, often poignant and moving, which somehow didn’t seem to owe anything to the stilted European tradition. To this day his sound lives on in the movie music of, for example, John Williams, the most successful Hollywood composer of our day. Copland is always mentioned in the company of other populist composers like:

Samuel Barber (1910-81) remembered for his haunting Adagio for strings (1936)

Roy Harris (1898 – 1979) From Wikipedia: “Johana and Roy Harris were a tour de force in American music. Their collaboration has been compared to that of Robert and Clara Schumann. The Harrises organized concerts, adjudicated at festivals, and in 1959 founded the International String Congress. They promoted American folksong by including folksongs in their concerts and broadcasts.” Harris wrote 18 symphonies in an accessible style and on grand patriotic subjects – Gettysburg Address, West Point, Abraham Lincoln. This passage from Ross gives a good sense of his easy confident often amused style:

The work that won Harris nationwide attention was his Third Symphony of 1938 – an all-American hymn and dance for orchestra in which strings declaim orations in broad, open-ended lines, brass chant and whoop like cowboys in the galleries, and timpani stamp out strong beats in the middle of the bar. Such a big-shouldered sound met everyone’s expectations of what a true-blue American symphony should be. (p.280).

Swing

To most of us the period was dominated by the form of jazz known as swing and the big band jazz of Duke Ellington (formed his band 1923) and Count Basie (formed his big band in 1935) alongside white bandleaders like Ted Lewis (1919), Paul Whiteman (1920) the rather tamer offerings of white band-leaders like Tommy Dorsey (1935), Benny Goodman and latterly Glenn Miller. It was an August 1935 concert at the Palomar Ballroom by Benny Goodman which is sometimes hailed as the start of ‘the Swing Era’ and the band’s ‘s confident smooth big band sound earned Goodman the moniker ‘the King of Swing’, a status when his band went on to play the prestigious Carnegie Hall in new York, previously the domain of the most high-toned classical concerts, and took it by storm. After twenty years of hard work by black and white musicians across the country, it felt like their music was finally accepted.

The highbrows weren’t immune. Stravinsky, the great liberator of rhythm in classical music, had incorporated sort-of jazz syncopations right from the start and now, in exile in California, wrote a Scherzo a la Russe for Paul Whiteman’s band (1944) and an Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman’s, Woody later commenting that the Maestro hadn’t made any concessions at all to the idiom of the big band – it was Stravinsky through and through.

But Stravinsky’s adventures in America belong to the next decade, the 1940s (he came from Paris to do a U.S. concert tour in 1940 and then the Germans invaded France, so he was stuck).

Imagine you were a student in 1938, what would you listen to? Copland’s serious but consciously patriotic and possibly left-leaning orchestra panoramas of the Big Country? Would you subscribe to Henry Cowell’s New Music and followed the ongoing experiments of Varese, Ruggles and Ives? Would you dismiss all that as European rubbish and tune into Toscanini’s Saturday night broadcasts of the old classics, dominated by Beethoven and Brahms? Would you know about the efforts of the Seegers and others like them to track down and record the folk songs of rural folk before they died out? Or would save your dollars to take your best girl to go see each swing band which came through your mid-Western city, and have an impressive collection of discs by the Duke, the Count, Benny, Tommy and Woody?

Another world, other tastes, other choices.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Irving Berlin

Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward (1941)

Brief synopsis