All posts tagged twentieth century

Cavalcade by Noel Coward (1930)

New Year’s Eve: our London family, sheltered through two generations of Victorian prosperity, awaits the headlong cavalcade of the Twentieth Century…’
(First caption of the 1933 movie version)

Introduction

Copied from the Wikipedia article (why reinvent the wheel?) with my own adaptations:

‘Cavalcade’ is a play by Noël Coward with songs by Coward and others. It covers three decades in the life of the Marryots, an upper-middle-class British family, and their servants, beginning in 1900 and ending in 1930, a year before the premiere.

Its 22 scenes each focus on a major historical event of the period, including the Relief of Mafeking (17 May 17 1900), the death of Queen Victoria (22 January 1901), the sinking of the RMS Titanic (12 April 1912), scenes from World War I and so on. Popular songs from each period are woven into the score.

The play was premiered in 1931 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, directed by Coward himself. It took advantage of the large stage of Drury Lane with its hydraulics and moving components to stage a spectacular pageant.

Presented by the impresario Charles B. Cochran, the spectacular production involved a huge cast and massive sets. The first night was met with a standing ovation and it proved a hugely popular play, running for almost a year.

Background and production

During the run of his successful comedy ‘Private Lives’ in London in 1930, Coward discussed with the impresario C. B. Cochran the idea of a big spectacular production to follow the intimate small scale of ‘Private Lives’.

Coward considered the idea of an epic set during the French Revolution, but when he saw a photograph of a troopship leaving for the Boer War in an old copy of the Illustrated London News the germ of the new play came to him.

He outlined his scenario to Cochran and asked him to secure the Coliseum, London’s largest theatre. Cochran was unable to do so but was able to book the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which was not much smaller, provided Coward could guarantee an approximate opening date.

Coward and his designer Gladys Calthrop inspected Drury Lane and found it adequate in terms of the size of its stage and its technical facilities, although two extra hydraulic lifts had to be installed for quick changes of scenery, and unlike the Coliseum it lacked the revolving stage Coward wanted. While Calthrop began designing hundreds of costumes and twenty-two sets, Coward worked on the script, which he completed in August 1931.

‘Cavalcade’ premiered on 13 October 1931, starring Mary Clare and Edward Sinclair as the Marryot parents and featuring John Mills, Binnie Barnes, Una O’Connor, Moya Nugent, Arthur Macrae, Irene Browne and Maidie Andrews in supporting roles. The performance was a big success and the play went on to become one of the year’s biggest West End hits, running for 405 performances. It closed in September 1932.

Photos

The printed text of the play contains 22 photos from the production. In the online version I read these are all of shockingly poor quality so I wasn’t tempted to include any here.

The working classes

The play is immediately different in feel from anything else by Coward I’ve read because it features working class characters, in fact it opens with working class people, instantly differentiating it from the posh people dressing for dinner ambience of all the other plays.

Somewhere I’ve read a quote from Coward saying he was born into the middle class and so felt close to, or detached from, all the others. How working class characters here strike me as every bit as stereotypical as his upper middle class characters.

Synopsis

Part 1

Scene 1: Sunday 31 December 1899. The drawing-room of a London House

It is nearly midnight on New Year’s Eve 1899. The whole vast production opens in the kitchen of the posh Marryot family where we find the married parlourmaid Ellen and the butler, Bridges, fretting about preparing supper for their lords and masters, but also about the fact that Bridges has been called up to go and fight in the Boer War.

Cut to ‘above stairs’ where the master class, Robert (35) and Jane (31) Marryot, are seeing in the New Year quietly together. Jane’s brother is besieged in Mafeking, and Robert himself will shortly be going off to serve.

Robert and Jane invite their Bridges and Ellen toast the new year. Bells, shouting, and sirens outside usher in the New Year, and Robert proposes a toast to 1900.

Hearing her two boys stirring upstairs, Jane runs up to see after them, and her husband calls to her to bring them down to join the adults. He has some droll lines:

ROBERT: How very impolite of the twentieth century to waken the children.

Scene 2: Saturday 27 January 1900. A dockside

A month later, a contingent of volunteers are leaving for the war. On the dockside Jane and Ellen have parallel parting scenes with their men, Robert and Bridges. the basic dichotomy between the master class and the rude mechanicals reminds me of Shakespeare, goes back at least 300 years…

As the men go aboard Jane comforts Ellen, who is crying and a band strikes up ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. The volunteers wave their farewells to the cheering crowd.

Scene 3: Friday 8 March 1900. The drawing-room of the Marryots’ house

The Marryot boys – Edward (aged 12) and Joe (8) – are playing soldiers with a young friend, Edith Harris. She objects to being made to play the Boers, and they begin to quarrel. The noise brings in their mothers. Joe throws a toy at Edith, and is sharply slapped by Jane, whose nerves are on edge with anxiety about her brother and her husband.

Her state of mind is not helped by a barrel-organ outside, playing ‘Soldiers of the Queen’ under the window. Ellen the maid brings tea and the women commiserate about their menfolk in danger. Margaret, friend of Jane’s and mother of young Edith, sends the organ-grinder away then suggests taking Jane out tonight, to dinner at the Cafe Royal then on to the theatre to take her mind off her worry.

But left alone, Jane is tormented by the sound of the wretched barrel organ and collapses into hysterical tears.

Scene 4: Friday 8 May 1900. A theatre

Jane and Margaret are in a stage-box watching chorus girls performing ‘The Girls of the C.I.V’. The performance of the then popular musical comedy ‘Mirabelle’ continues but the performance is interrupted when the theatre manager comes onstage to announce that Mafeking has been relieved, triggering joyous uproar breaks out, the audience clapping, cheering and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Scene 5: Monday 21 January 1901. The kitchen of the Marryots’ house

The cook, Annie the parlour maid, and Ellen’s mother Mrs Snapper are preparing a special tea to greet Bridges on his return from the war. He comes in with Ellen, looking well, and kisses his little baby, Fanny. He tells them that he has bought a public house off a chap he met in Africa and is staying out there. So he and Ellen can work for themselves in future.

The celebratory mood is dampened when Annie brings in a newspaper reporting that Queen Victoria is ‘sinking’.

Scene 6: Sunday 27 January 1901. Kensington Gardens

This scene is all in mime. Robert and Jane are walking in Kensington Gardens with their children when they meet Margaret and Edith Harris. Everyone is in black, solemn and silent, following the Queen’s death.

Made me think of the death of our Queen Elizabeth II, who had reigned as long as anyone could remember, and the deep sense of loss many many people felt.

Scene 7: Saturday 2 February 1901. The Marryots’ drawing-room

On the balcony, Jane, Margaret, their children and the servants are watching Queen Victoria’s funeral procession. Robert, who was awarded the Victoria Cross is walking in the procession. Jane tells her children to stand respectfully as the coffin passes, especially after one of the boys drops a piece of cake onto the hat of a woman in the crowd. As the lights fade, Joe comments, ‘She must have been a very little lady’.

Scene 8: Thursday 14 May 1903. The grand staircase of a London house

Jane and Robert are attending a grand ball given by the Duchess of Churt. The Major-domo announces, ‘Sir Robert and Lady Marryot’.

Part II

Scene I: Saturday 16 June 1906. The bar parlour of a London public house

Jane has brought her eldest son Edward, now 18, to see Ellen and her mother, Mrs Snapper, in the flat above the public house. They are just having tea, together with Flo who is over-dressed and embarrassingly pretentious and George, who is a greengrocer. Alf and Ellen’s daughter Fanny is now seven-years-old and has been dancing to entertain them.

Ellen and her mother make excuses for Alf’s absence, lying that he is upstairs in bed after hurting his leg in a bicycling accident.

Alf Bridges enters, clearly drunk. Jane, dismayed, makes a tactful departure. Bridges starts to bully Fanny. He sees that Fanny has a nice new doll, just given her by Jane. Furious, he snatches it from the child and throws it into the fire, shouting that he can buy his own child a doll if he wants, he doesn’t need no bloomin’ charity. Ellen goes for Alf who punches her and is grabbed and thrown out the room by George.

Scene 2: Saturday 16 June 1906. A London street (exterior of the public house)

Alf emerges from the pub into a wonderful street scene with scores of Cockneys dancing and drinking and partying to the sound of a penny-in-the-slot piano, with much singing and laughter, costermongers hawking their wares, and a Salvation Army band performing. Fanny is happily dancing with some adults. Alf sees her and makes a grab at her but the men push him away, over offstage. Moments later there’s a screaming. Flo and Ellen had emerged from the pub to look for Fanny and, hearing the shouting, Flo runs offstage to see the scene, the re-enters to tell Ellen her husband has been run over and killed.

Scene 3: Wednesday 10 March 1909. The private room of a London restaurant

The Marryots’ eldest son, Edward Marryot, is holding his twenty-first birthday party, with many smart young guests. Rose, an actress from the old Mirabelle production, proposes his health and sings the big waltz number from the show.

Scene 4: Monday 25 July 1910. The beach of a popular seaside resort

On the beach crowds of holidaymakers are listening to Uncle George’s Concert Party performing from a bandstand. Ellen and her family are there and Fanny wins a prize for a song and dance competition.

Promenading are the posh people – Jane and Margaret, and their children, Edward, Joe and Edith. Edward and Edith are now young adults and sweet for each other. They unexpectedly bump into the roles – Ellen, little Fanny, George the greengrocer and Flo.

Ellen tells them that she has kept on the pub since her husband’s death and that Fanny is now at a dancing-school and determined to go on the stage.

A couple of unknown women walk by talking about the Crippen murder and how he was spotted and caught trying to escape on a liner, July 1910.

There’s a roll of thunder and it starts to rain. The beach becomes a sea of umbrellas (must have been impressive to see) and everyone walks or runs offstage leaving ‘One fat old woman is left asleep in a deck chair.’

A tremendous roll of thunder wakes her abruptly and she struggles to get up, and falls back into the chair, which collapses.

We are in the era of the Keystone cops.

Scene 5: Sunday 14 April 1912. The deck of an Atlantic liner

Edward has married Edith Harris, and they are on their honeymoon. They speculate blithely how long the initial bliss of marriage will last.

EDWARD: How long do you give us?
EDITH: I don’t know—and Edward—(she turns to him) I don’t care. This is our moment—complete and heavenly. I’m not afraid of anything. This is our own, for ever.

As they walk off, she lifts her cloak from where it has been draped over the ship’s rail, revealing the name Titanic on a lifebelt. The lights fade into complete darkness and the orchestra plays ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ very quietly.

Scene 6: Tuesday 4 August 1914. The Marryots’ drawing-room

Joe asks his father if he will fight (probably) and then is frightfully keen to sign up himself. Father urges caution. A newspaper seller in the street outside shouts that war has been declared, and Robert, Joe and Margaret join a toast to victory, but Jane – who I’ve realised is the ‘moral core’ of the text – delivers an impassioned diatribe against the stupidity of war before running out.

JANE: Drink to die war, then, if you want to. I’m not going to. I can’d Rule Britannia! Send us victorious, happy and glorious! Drink, Joey, you’re only a baby, still, but you’re old enough for war. Drink like the Germans are drinking, to Victory and Defeat, and stupid, tragic sorrow. But leave me out of it, please!

Scene 7: 1914–1915–1916–1917–1918. Marching

Above the proscenium 1914 glows in lights. It changes to 1915-1916, 1917 and 1918. Meanwhile, soldiers march uphill endlessly. Out of darkness into darkness. Sometimes they sing gay songs, sometimes they whistle, sometimes they march silently, but the sound of their tramping feet is unceasing. Below, the vision of them brightly-dressed, energetic women appear in pools of light, singing stirring recruiting songs.

Scene 8: Tuesday 22 October 1918. A restaurant

Joe and Fanny – now a rising young singer and dancer – are dining in a West End restaurant. Jane is now nineteen and extremely attractive. Joe is in army officer’s uniform. He is on leave but is about to return to the Front. They discuss marriage but she imagines his family would object. She gives him a locket with her picture in.

Scene 9: Tuesday 22 October 1918. A railway station

Jane sees Joe off at the railway station. Like many of the women on the platform she is distressed. This is conveyed by a simple but effective piece of stage business: as stretchers bearing wounded men are carried past her, she lights a match to light her cigarette but is so distracted by the sight of the wounded that she lets the match burn out.

Scene 10: Monday 11 November 1918. The Marryots’ drawing-room

Ellen, now very swankily dressed, comes to visit Jane. She announces that Joe is emotionally involved with her daughter. The two mothers fall out: Ellen thinks Jane regards Fanny as beneath Joe socially.

As Ellen says a pointed goodbye they hear the guns going off outside to signal the Armistice. At that exact moment the maid brings in a telegram. Jane opens it and tells Ellen, ‘You needn’t worry about Fanny and Joe any more, Ellen. He won’t be able to come back at all, because he’s dead.’ And she faints.

Scene 11: Monday 11 November 1918. Trafalgar Square

Surrounded by the frantic revelry of Armistice Night, Jane is walking, dazed, through Trafalgar Square. With tears streaming down her face, she cheers wildly and waves a rattle, while the band plays ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

Part III

Scene 1: Tuesday 31 December 1929. The Marryot’s drawing room

Margaret and Jane, both now elderly, are sitting by the fire. Margaret leaves, after wishing a happy New Year to Jane and Robert, who has come in to drink a New Year toast with his wife. Jane drinks first to him and then to England: ‘The hope that one day this country of ours, which we love so much, will find dignity and greatness, and peace again’.

Scene 2: Evening, 1930. A night club

Robert, Jane, Margaret, Ellen and the full company are in a night club. At the piano, Fanny sings Coward’s song ‘Twentieth Century Blues’.

Scene 3: Chaos

When the song is finished, people rise from table and dance without apparently any particular enjoyment; it is the dull dancing of habit. The lights fade away from everything but the dancers, who appear to be rising in the air. They disappear and down stage left six ‘incurables’ in blue hospital uniform are sitting making baskets. They disappear and Fanny is seen singing her song for a moment, then far away up stage a band is seen playing wildly. Then down stage Jane and Robert standing with glasses of champagne held aloft, then Ellen sitting in front of a Radio loud speaker; then Margaret dancing with a young man. The visions are repealed quicker and quicker, while across the darkness runs a Riley light sign spelling out news. Noise grows louder and louder. Steam rivets, loud speakers, jazz bands, aeroplane propellers etc until the general effect is complete chaos.

Then it all fades into darkness and silence and away at the back a Union Jack glows through the blackness. The lights come up on the massed company singing ‘God Save the King’.

Music

In addition to compositions by Coward, more than fifty popular songs, national anthems, hymns, ballads, and topical tunes relevant to the years portrayed were used in the film. Wikipedia lists just some of them. There have been numerous recordings, of all the songs, or just Coward’s songs, and a Cavalcade Suite developed from them. Here’s a record made of music from the show, with a spoken introduction by Coward himself.

The fantastical

The absurdist surreal fantasies, the mad spur-of-the-moment imaginings of Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’ has alerted me to the vein of fantasy, or flights of fancy, which pop up at unexpected moments in Coward’s plays.

Thus Edward and Edith’s moment on the Titanic is intensified by Edith’s strange flight of fantasy:

EDITH: Wouldn’t it be awful if a magician came to us and said: ‘Unless you count accurately every single fish in the Atlantic you die to-night?’

How strange but how strangely effective it is in accentuating that short scene, in giving it an extra dimension of tragedy: the idea that not just people were drowned but that the priceless gift of fantasy and imagination was drowned with them.

A few scenes later the family arrive back in the house which has been locked up for a while and has no food in. Jane asks where her husband is, and her son Joe says:

JOE: Groping about in the wine cellar like an angry old beetle. He says strong drink is essential in a crisis.
JANE: We must have something to eat, too. I wonder if there is anything.
JOE: There’s a strong bit of cold tongue in the larder. I just put my head in and it sang the Marseillaise.

!

Different histories

History in an absolute sense is the record of everything that’s ever happened i.e. is an incomprehensibly vast amount of material which is being continually added to.

History is also an academic subject with its own sub-divisions and specialities, all subject to the changes in academic and social fashion. When I was a student Marxist history was still a going concern with notables such as Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson at their peak in the post-1960s radical ’70s and ’80s. But even at the time friends who actually studied history told me they were old hat and the new fashion was for social history from the bottom up, along with a new interest in regional history. I saw all this for myself in the eclipse of Christopher Hill’s Marxist accounts of the English Revolution by the regionalist approach of John Morell and the constitutional analysis of Conrad Russell.

Since then the study of British history has been shaken by at least three newer schools of thought or interpretation. The most obvious one is feminist history, which simply wants to redress centuries of dominance by men and reclaim the history of women, showing that women had more agency and influence than previously admitted, plus simply telling the stories of women from the well-known queens to the humblest working girls.

Alongside this has gone an equal surge in interest in Black history. In a sense the core of this is a proliferation of histories of the slave trade accompanied by the contentious claim that most of Britain’s eminence and the origin of the industrial revolution ultimately stemmed from the profits from the slave trade (see Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day by Eric Hobsbawm for a classic statement). But around this central core are new works emphasising the role of Black people from across the Empire, from Africa and the Caribbean, in fighting in the two world wars, and providing manpower in less well-known places such as in the merchant navy.

Thirdly there is the rise and rise of postcolonial studies, an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry which includes history, literature, film etc to examines the cultural, political and economic effects of colonialism and imperialism with a special emphasis on the colonised, on the victims of imperialism.

Fourthly, over the same timescale, the rise and rise of Queer studies: an interdisciplinary academic field that examines gender and sexuality, challenging traditional notions and exploring the social construction of these identities.

By now you can see where I’m going with this. It is to state the obvious fact that the political, social and cultural world in which Coward wrote this work, and the historical narrative of unquestioned, unified, white, imperial British supremacy which it unashamedly promotes, has been smashed to pieces over the last 50 years or so. That the play, the script and the movie made from it are not just a little dated, but come from a different world, far closer to the values of Queen Victoria than to us (it was only 30 years  from Victoria’s reign but is 90 years distant from us).

I feel like I just about have a vestigial contact with that world and its values, through the books and TV and films I consumed as a boy just 40 years after the play was premiered. But to my kids, the entire thing comes from another planet.

The Woolf connection

I learn from Philip Hoare’s wonderful 1995 biography of Coward that in 1928 he met and became friends with Virginia Woolf who, for a period, was awed and impressed by him, while he did everything he could to butter up to this scion of England’s intellectual set, extravagantly praising her most recent production, Orlando.

The idea of following an upper-middle-class family across several generations and dotted with key historic incidents from the period is also the plot of Virginia Wool’s 1937 novel, The Years. I wonder what she made of Coward producing something so similar in subject matter and scale while she was struggling so hard to create her book.

Upstairs, Downstairs

Interesting to learn that the 1970s television series, ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’, was to some extent based on ‘Cavalcade’.

As Karl Marx famously remarked, history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as ITV costume drama.

The 1933 movie

‘Cavalcade’ was quickly snapped up by Hollywood which released a movie version in 1933. Directed by Frank Lloyd, the film version is an epic two hours long and won three Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Coward was still only 34. The scale of his success is breathtaking.

Philip Hoare

‘Cavalcade unashamedly reaffirms stereotypes: the characters seem almost Dickensian as Coward mixes comedy and tragedy… The overwhelming impression of the production was of nostalgic national introspection and sentimentality, somewhat redeemed by Coward’s handling of his material, technical skill and sense of spectacle. The result was a triumph of style over content.’ (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Haore, page 234)

Related reviews

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by Simon on May 30, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Film, History, Play, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on May 30, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/30/cavalcade-noel-coward/

Bert Hardy: Photojournalism in War and Peace @ the Photographers’ Gallery

‘Everywhere I look, and most of the time I look, I see photographs.’
(Bert Hardy)

This is a lovely overview of the entire career of acclaimed English photographer Bert Hardy (1913 to 1995), responsible for some of the most iconic shots of British life in the mid-twentieth century.

The Gorbals Boys 1948. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The exhibition includes:

  • 87 black-and-white prints
  • two photos enlarged and pasted on the walls
  • two display cases showing Hardy memorabilia such as front covers of Picture Post, letters and negatives, press passes and diaries, even his passport (!)
  • and, off to one side, a darkened room showing a slideshow of his colour photos

There’s even a case displaying one of his cameras. All this stuff is loaned from the Bert Hardy archive, now held by Cardiff University, making what is probably as major a retrospective as we can expect for some time.

Blackpool Railings, 1951. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

All the photos are brilliant. Hardy was a photographer of genius. Born into a working-class family in the shabby area around Elephant and Castle, Hardy was self-taught and, once he’d gotten his big break during the war – getting a gig to photograph conditions in London’s bomb shelters – he went on to have a very varied career indeed.

He was lucky enough to break into the profession as it was experiencing the peak of photojournalism. During the 1930s there’d been a revolution in photojournalism and press reporting. This was precipitated by the advent of new, high quality lightweight cameras such as the 35mm Leica, but also the popularity of new, often left-wing editorial perspectives, themselves driven by wide cultural awareness of the miserable poverty caused by the Great Depression at the start of the 30s. Thus the late 30s saw the heyday of ground-breaking photo-journals such as Life in the USA (founded 1936) and Picture Post in Britain (founded 1938).

Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Magazines like this pioneered the use of photography-led journalism, extended pictorial essays about society during the politically fraught and feverish 30s. Lead editor at Picture Post was Tom Hopkinson and it was Tom who gave Bert his big break.

Bert had left school at 14 (1927) and got a job as a lab assistant at the Central Photo Service where he slowly familiarised himself with all the technical aspects of the trade. He practiced by taking photos of friends and his extended family (he was the eldest of seven sibling). His first commercial work was when he took a photo of the ancient King George V riding in an open top carriage along Blackfriars Road in 1935, turned it into a postcard and sold 200 copies around his neighbourhood.

In 1936 he was given a job as photographer at the General Photographic Agency and began to get work published in the Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch and the photo magazine, Weekly Illustrated. In 1941 he applied for a job with the Picture Post and the editor, Tom Hopkinson, set him a challenge – to take photos of Londoners in the air raid shelters where, notoriously, no lights were allowed, obviously creating difficult conditions for someone using a 1930s camera.

In the event, Hardy’s photos were vivid, well-composed and atmospheric and Hopkinson gave him a staff job on Picture Post where he was to remain for the next sixteen years (until the magazine closed in 1957). So this story explains why one of the first sections of the exhibition is devoted to images from the war.

Life of an East End Parson, 1940. Photo by Bert Hardy//Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In 1942 he was recruited into the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) with the rank of sergeant. Three days after D-Day he joined the troops in Normandy and went on to document the Liberation of Paris (August 1944), the invasion of Germany (November 1944), the crossing of the Rhine (March 1945) and arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a few days after it was liberated by British troops (April 1945). (I wonder if he met the SAS soldiers who were the first to discover Belsen, as detailed in Ben Macintyre’s book ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’). He was then sent with the AFPU to Singapore in the Far East, where he became Lord Mountbatten’s personal photographer – there are some striking photos of the devilishly handsome Earl – and where he remained until September 1946.

He went on to cover Cold War conflicts in Greece and Korea (where his shots of the amphibious landings at Inchon in 1950 won awards) and then post-colonial conflicts in Malaya, Kenya, Yemen and Cyprus. The Inchon photos on display here are thrilling, conveying a real sense of the danger and contingency.

Assault Craft, 1950. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

As to the other conflicts, I was particularly struck by images of supposed Mau Mau rebels cooped up behind barbed wire, and a particularly poignant photo of a British soldier searching a tubby, scruffy old peasant leading a donkey in Cyprus. So stupid, wars; complete failures of intelligence, failures to negotiate sensible rational solutions to human quarrels. (For the Mau Mau rebellion from the African point of view, see my reviews of the novels of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.)

But it wasn’t all war: Bert went on photo assignments to an impressive roster of countries, photographing ordinary life in Thailand, Bali, Burma, and across Europe to Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia. He also went to Botswana, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Nyasaland, Rhodesia, Sudan and Tibet. Wow. What a life for a poor boy from the Elephant and Castle.

Farmer in the Douro Valley, Portugal (September 1951) Photo by Bert Hardy

Between these foreign forays he travelled widely in the UK, recording the grim living conditions of working class people in London, Glasgow, Belfast, Tyneside and Liverpool and, along the way, documenting social and cultural changes after the war. By the early 1950s his work had become so well known and acclaimed that he was offered a job on the bigger, richer Life magazine (which he turned down).

Display case showing front covers of photojournalism stories by Hardy along with other memorabilia. Photo by the author

In the 1950s Bert branched out to cover the glamour and glitz of London’s theatre land and visits by Hollywood stars. Just before Picture Post closed, Hardy took 15 photos of the Queen’s entrance into the Paris Opera on 8 April 1957, which were assembled into a photo-montage – there’s a case devoted to this elaborate magazine spread.

In parallel to the war, travel and glamour work, he also covered sporting events – the exhibition features shots of cycling (early on he had freelanced for Cycling magazine), wrestling and boxing stars.

Robinson And Fans, 1951. Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Videos

Exhibition overview:

Interview with the curators:

Thoughts

Life just seemed so much more interesting and varied in those days. Britain’s cities look mired in crushing poverty, hardly anyone had a television (plenty didn’t have an inside toilet or hot water), but one aspect of this was a much greater diversity of people and dress and accent. Nowadays everyone dresses (more or less) the same and sounds the same and carries the same phones, and the shopping malls of London, Liverpool, Belfast or Glasgow all look depressingly the same with the same chain stores selling the same products. The world had much more genuine diversity and character back then.

But above and beyond learning a lot of detail about Bert Hardy’s career and individual commissions, the simple thought this exhibition prompts is that his photos need almost no explanation. They come from an era when photography and photojournalism was intended to be immediately comprehensible to a wide and popular audience, and by God, they are – incredibly direct and impactful.

The contrast with our own image-cluttered and intellectually verbose age is emphasised when you walk up a floor at the Photographers’ Gallery to see the four finalists for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2024. Each one of these requires a lengthy wall caption to introduce them and their aims and project plans and so on; and then each photograph requires a lot of explanation, some of them covering an entire A4 page.

Obviously all the Hardy shots do have wall labels giving their title and one in every three or four also has a caption giving a bit more detail and context – but none of them really need it. The whole point is that the images speak for themselves in a way that, interestingly, a lot of modern photography just doesn’t. Which means they are wonderfully democratic and accessible and inclusive, in a way that so much modern art and photography simply isn’t.

Cockney Life in the Elephant and Castle: ‘My goodness, my Guinness’ (1949) Photo by Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Related link

Photographers’ Gallery reviews

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by Simon on March 20, 2024  •  Permalink
Posted in Exhibition, Photography, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on March 20, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/03/20/bert-hardy-photojournalism-in-war-and-peace-the-photographers-gallery/

Being Human: An exhibition of modern sculpture @ Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

‘Can sculpture capture what it is to be human?’ That is the question posed at the beginning of this small but varied and high-quality exhibition at the Bristol Art Gallery.

Spread over two floors, Being Human shows a selection of very different twentieth century sculptors (and a brace of film-makers) have conceived, worked, shaped and reproduced the human body.

At the traditional end of the spectrum, there are female nudes such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Small female torso (1910). Wearing its Greek origins on its (armless) sleeves, the hair braided like a statue of Aphrodite, looking demurely down, her diaphragm and belly button nicely defined, the nipples oddly burnished as if generations of gallery goers have touched them for good luck or other purposes.

La Jeunesse by Robert Wlerick (1935)

Whereas only a few yards away, and well on the way to the abstract end of the spectrum, is Ken Armitage’s Moon Figure of 1948. This was my favourite piece in the second room, although a moment’s reflection suggests it is less a bold leap forward into modernity than an appropriation of Cycladic art from around 3,000 BC – even down to the crossed arms, which feature in so many really ancient Greek statues.

Moon Figure by Kenneth Armitage (1948)

More thoroughly abstract were Yee Soo Kyung’s Translated vases number 8 of 2012. Yee has smashed up ceramics into fragments which she then reassembles using the traditional art of kintsugi, visible repairs in gold, to create something which is only vestigially ‘human’ at all in form.

In the first room is maybe the best, or my favourite piece, from the exhibition, Help by Bernard Meadows. It’s from as long ago as 1966, and is one of a series Meadows began to make in the mid-60s expressing ‘human fear and anxiety’. The idea is that crushed sphere is crying for help, and that the piece pays tribute to the harrowing existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Does it, though? If you hadn’t read all that, might you not mistake it for a bit of sculptural fun by a jokey modern artist like Anish Kapoor?

Help by Bernard Meadows (1966) Tate

The wall labels tell us that at the core of the exhibition is a set of works associated with the so-called ‘Geometry of Fear’ school of British sculptors. According to the Tate website:

Geometry of Fear was a term coined by the critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors characterised by tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures. 

Read used the phrase in a review of the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale of that year. The British contribution was an exhibition of the work of the group of young sculptors that had emerged immediately after the Second World War in the wake of the older Henry Moore. Their work, and that of Moore at that time, was characterised by spiky, alien-looking twisted and tortured figures.

They were executed in pitted bronze or welded metal and vividly expressed a range of states of mind and emotions related to the anxieties and fears of the post-war period. The artists were:

  • Robert Adams
  • Kenneth Armitage
  • Reg Butler
  • Lynn Chadwick
  • Geoffrey Clarke
  • Bernard Meadows
  • Eduardo Paolozzi
  • William Turnbull

Of their work Read wrote:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

Possibly the most ominous figure here is one of Elizabeth Frink’s many space-age, sculpted heads, brooding and minatory.

Prisoner by Elisabeth Frink (1988)

To quote the wall label:

As a child in the Second World War, Elisabeth Frink witnessed falling planes and burning soldiers in the airfield near where she lived. On a holiday in Devon she had hidden in the bushes to avoid getting caught in the crossfire of a battle. These visions haunted her sculpture which examines the human capacity for cruelty. She was taught by Bernard Meadows, one of the postwar ‘Geometry of Fear’ artists. Frink added pity to their earlier generation’s images of alienation. Prisoner has a hypnotic vulnerability.

Maybe all this angst is true of half a dozen of the works on show here, but there are plenty of other utterly angst-free enjoyments of the physical heft and thews of the human body conceived as a big solid object in space.

Thus there is nothing particularly fearful about Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s bust of Horace Brodzky. Brodzky was an artist and critic, and Gaudier-Brzeska made the work as he was falling under the influence of – or influencing – the pre-war London movement known as Vorticism, which was much fascinated by planes and lines and angular shapes, cubes and squares.

Horace Brodzky by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913, cast 1956)

And what could be more prosaic than a sculpture of a woman bending over to dry her feet, which combines a posture from degas with the clunky clayiness of Rodin’s sticky fingers.

Woman Drying her Feet by Hubert Dalwood (1955)

And the curators astonished me by singling out as one of the most sexy or erotic statues, this exercise in elongation by Reg Butler, one of the geometry of fear sculptors who didn’t let his existentialist alienation stop him from producing numerous sculptures of naked or nearly naked girls.

Girl by Reg Butler (1953 to 1954)

An example of post-war deformation, influenced by Alberto Giacometti’s walking stick people, her head worryingly disappearing into a blunt dollop, her bulemic pre-pubescent body scrawny with malnutrition… but sexy? Not to my mind.

Featured sculptures

Drawings

Films

Two films are included. What have they got to do with sculpture? Nothing whatsoever, that I can make out. A film is a film is a film, although they are both about ‘the body’.

Conclusion

Curators have to come up with themes and ideas for exhibitions, and ‘twentieth century sculptures of the human body’ is a reasonable enough theme – although it is odd to include a couple of very average drawings, and some completely off-the-wall videos into the mix.

But then its quirkiness is, maybe, the appeal of this small-ish exhibition. Coherence is over-rated. The very fact that the pieces are so disconnected and random creates more space for the visitor to wander around them and relate to each one individually, trying to figure out which ones you like, and why.

And, incidentally, hints at the extraordinary explosion in ways of seeing and conceiving and making art which occurred in the twentieth century and which this tiny but intriguing selection represents.

Related links

Other Bristol reviews

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by Simon on November 26, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Exhibition, Sculpture
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Posted by Simon on November 26, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/26/being-human-modern-sculpture-bristol-art-gallery/

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.

Related links

Reviews of books about America

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by Simon on May 16, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Books, Classical music, Contemporary classical music, History
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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/the-rest-is-noise-by-alex-ross-2007-the-american-chapters/