Listen to This (32 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
“Here I’m feeding off all this energy around me, this rebellious energy, and I’m playing for people who usually don’t know this music at all. We’re out here making it up as we go along, because we’re not teachers in the conventional sense and not performers in the conventional sense. Hopefully, we’re not just scattering experiences here and there, hopefully we’re creating continuity from one to the other. But I really don’t know what effect we’re having. Certainly, we’re happy. It’s as if we’d never left college. We’re posting signs, organizing things at the last minute, putting on performances in any space available.
“But what does it do? I don’t know if it changes anything right in a single moment in anyone’s life. But it might change how someone thinks. Maxine Greene talks about the arts creating openings, this mysterious clearing in people’s lives, so they walk out of the forest and can breathe. Maybe, at that moment, music becomes a huge part of their lives. Or maybe they use the clearing to see themselves in a new light, and go on to do something different. It could be any kind of music, could be any other art form.”
Ruth looked out at Westminster Street, which was empty of people.
“Of course, it’s all full of contradictions,” he went on. “Let me tell you a story about Vanessa Centeno, who’s been with us for many years. Her
mom works various jobs, day and night. She doesn’t want her daughter to have the same existence. There was an article about us in the paper, in which she was quoted as saying that she loves our program because classical music is ‘for people who have class.’ It was funny that she said that, when my whole thing has been about trying to undo these stereotypes, deconstruct the idea that this music has ‘class,’ and make the point that music can be made anywhere by anyone at any time.
mom works various jobs, day and night. She doesn’t want her daughter to have the same existence. There was an article about us in the paper, in which she was quoted as saying that she loves our program because classical music is ‘for people who have class.’ It was funny that she said that, when my whole thing has been about trying to undo these stereotypes, deconstruct the idea that this music has ‘class,’ and make the point that music can be made anywhere by anyone at any time.
“Vanessa’s mom and I had such different ideas in mind. I was trying to get out of the world that she was trying to get into. But, in the end, we’re going in the same direction.” He stretched out his arm toward the door and the street. “We are both moving toward Violin.”
VOICE OF THE CENTURY
MARIAN ANDERSON
On Easter Sunday 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt, the First Lady, resigned from the DAR, and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Mall. Seventy-five thousand people gathered to watch Anderson perform. Harold Ickes, the secretary of the interior, introduced her with the words “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”
The impact was immediate and immense; one newsreel carried the legend “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.” But Anderson herself made no obvious statement. She presented, as she had done countless times before, a mixture of classical selections—“O mio Fernando,” from Donizetti’s
La favorita,
and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”—and African-American spirituals. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”; perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently awesome instrument, vast in range and warm in tone. In her early years, Anderson was known as “the colored contralto,” but, by the late thirties, she was
the
contralto, the preeminent representative of her voice type. Toscanini said that she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years; Sibelius welcomed her to his home, saying, “My roof is too low for you.” There was no rational reason for a serious concert venue to refuse entry to such a phenomenon. No clearer demonstration of prejudice could be found.
La favorita,
and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”—and African-American spirituals. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”; perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently awesome instrument, vast in range and warm in tone. In her early years, Anderson was known as “the colored contralto,” but, by the late thirties, she was
the
contralto, the preeminent representative of her voice type. Toscanini said that she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years; Sibelius welcomed her to his home, saying, “My roof is too low for you.” There was no rational reason for a serious concert venue to refuse entry to such a phenomenon. No clearer demonstration of prejudice could be found.
One person who appreciated the significance of the occasion was the ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. Five years later, King entered a speaking contest on the topic “The Negro and the Constitution,” and he mentioned Anderson’s performance in his oration: “She sang as never before, with tears in her eyes. When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows de Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality, and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.” When, two decades later, King stood on the Lincoln Memorial steps to deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech, he surely had Anderson in mind. In his improvised peroration, he recited the first verse of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” then imagined freedom ringing from every mountainside in the land.
Ickes, in 1939, bestowed on Anderson a word that put her in the company of Bach and Beethoven: “Genius, like justice, is blind … Genius draws no color line.” With the massive stone image of Lincoln gazing out over her, with a host of distinguished white men seated at her feet—senators, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices—and with a bank of microphones arrayed in front of her, Anderson attained something greater than fame: for an instant, she became a figure of quasi-political power. In Richard Powers’s novel
The Time of Our Singing,
a magisterial fantasia on race and music, the concert becomes nothing less than the evocation of a new America—“a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be.” Fittingly, when Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the United States, in January 2009, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” floated out over the Mall once more, from the mouth of Aretha Franklin to a crowd of two million.
The Time of Our Singing,
a magisterial fantasia on race and music, the concert becomes nothing less than the evocation of a new America—“a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be.” Fittingly, when Barack Obama became the first African-American president of the United States, in January 2009, “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” floated out over the Mall once more, from the mouth of Aretha Franklin to a crowd of two million.
Anderson was born in 1897, in a poor section of Philadelphia. Her father died when she was young; her mother worked in a tobacco factory, did laundry, and, for some years, scrubbed floors at Wanamaker’s department store. Her musical gifts were evident early, but she had an arduously difficult time finding voice teachers who were willing to take on someone of her race and economic background. A core of self-confidence, rarely visible behind her reserved facade, allowed her to endure a series of potentially crushing disappointments. The sharpest setback is described in her
autobiography,
My Lord, What a Morning:
when she applied to a Philadelphia music school, in 1914, a young woman at the reception desk made her wait while everyone behind her in line was served. Finally, the woman said, “We don’t take colored.”
autobiography,
My Lord, What a Morning:
when she applied to a Philadelphia music school, in 1914, a young woman at the reception desk made her wait while everyone behind her in line was served. Finally, the woman said, “We don’t take colored.”
Anderson received positive notices throughout the 1920s—her first
New York Times
review, in 1925, registered “a voice of unusual compass, color, and dramatic capacity”—but she needed time to master the finer points of style and diction in foreign-language songs. A notable aspect of her story—related in Allan Keiler’s biography,
Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey
—is that she found real recognition only when she began an extended European residency, in 1930, giving numerous recitals with piano accompaniment. German critics received her respectfully, and with little condescension. In Finland and the Soviet Union, there were near-riots of enthusiasm. In 1935, she sang in Salzburg, eliciting from Toscanini his voice-of-the-century plaudit, which the impresario Sol Hurok promptly spread through the press. During a series of American tours in the late thirties, she performed in sold-out halls night after night and found herself one of the better-paid entertainers of her time. (In 1938, she earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to $3.7 million.) The American critics capitulated. Howard Taubman, of the
Times,
who later ghostwrote her memoir, called her the “mistress of all she surveyed.”
New York Times
review, in 1925, registered “a voice of unusual compass, color, and dramatic capacity”—but she needed time to master the finer points of style and diction in foreign-language songs. A notable aspect of her story—related in Allan Keiler’s biography,
Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey
—is that she found real recognition only when she began an extended European residency, in 1930, giving numerous recitals with piano accompaniment. German critics received her respectfully, and with little condescension. In Finland and the Soviet Union, there were near-riots of enthusiasm. In 1935, she sang in Salzburg, eliciting from Toscanini his voice-of-the-century plaudit, which the impresario Sol Hurok promptly spread through the press. During a series of American tours in the late thirties, she performed in sold-out halls night after night and found herself one of the better-paid entertainers of her time. (In 1938, she earned nearly a quarter of a million dollars, which, adjusted for inflation, comes to $3.7 million.) The American critics capitulated. Howard Taubman, of the
Times,
who later ghostwrote her memoir, called her the “mistress of all she surveyed.”
What did she sound like in her prime? A slew of recordings made between 1936 and 1939 give an indication, although her voice plainly possessed the kind of incandescence that no machine can capture fully. The discs certainly demonstrate her ability to produce a deep-hued timbre in all parts of her range, from the lowest tones of the female voice well up into the soprano zone. When she sings Schubert’s “Erikönig”—in which a child, his father, and the headless horseman speak in turn—you seem to be hearing three singers, yet there are no obvious vocal breaks between them. She is fastidious but seldom stiff, with caressing little slides from note to note and a delicately trembling tone adding human warmth. Perhaps Anderson’s most famous performance was of Brahms’s
Alto Rhapsody,
which she first recorded in 1939, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (It can be heard on a Pearl CD that collects some of her finest early recordings.) In the Goethe poem on which Brahms’s work is based, an embittered soul wanders the desert, eliciting a
prayer for his redemption: “If there is on your psaltery, O father of Love, one sound acceptable to his ear, refresh his heart with it.” Anderson effortlessly issues the healing tone, but, before that, she mobilizes the lowest register of her voice to evoke the dark night of the soul.
Alto Rhapsody,
which she first recorded in 1939, with Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra. (It can be heard on a Pearl CD that collects some of her finest early recordings.) In the Goethe poem on which Brahms’s work is based, an embittered soul wanders the desert, eliciting a
prayer for his redemption: “If there is on your psaltery, O father of Love, one sound acceptable to his ear, refresh his heart with it.” Anderson effortlessly issues the healing tone, but, before that, she mobilizes the lowest register of her voice to evoke the dark night of the soul.
Anderson was a musician of a pure, inward kind, to whom grand gestures did not come naturally. The historic drama at the Lincoln Memorial was not something she sought, and, in fact, she contemplated canceling the concert at the last minute. Throughout her life, she preferred not to make a scene. As Raymond Arsenault writes, in
The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America,
her negotiation of Jim Crow America displayed a “spirit of pragmatism” that could be interpreted as “quiescence.” Although she refused to sing in halls that employed “horizontal segregation”—that is, with whites in the orchestra seats and blacks in the galleries—for many years she did accept vertical segregation, with whites on one side of the aisle and blacks on the other. She usually took her meals in her hotel room, in order not to cause complications in restaurants. “I always bear in mind that my mission is to leave behind me the kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow,” she explained in her memoir.
The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America,
her negotiation of Jim Crow America displayed a “spirit of pragmatism” that could be interpreted as “quiescence.” Although she refused to sing in halls that employed “horizontal segregation”—that is, with whites in the orchestra seats and blacks in the galleries—for many years she did accept vertical segregation, with whites on one side of the aisle and blacks on the other. She usually took her meals in her hotel room, in order not to cause complications in restaurants. “I always bear in mind that my mission is to leave behind me the kind of impression that will make it easier for those who follow,” she explained in her memoir.
On occasion, she extracted a certain dignity from the ugliness of segregation: when the Nassau Inn, in Princeton, New Jersey, refused to give her a room, she spent the night at the home of Albert Einstein. Usually, though, the humiliation was intense. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the Second World War, she had to stand outside a train-station waiting room while her accompanist, the German pianist Franz Rupp, went to fetch a sandwich for her. Sitting inside was a group of German prisoners of war.
By the time Anderson’s career entered its final phase, in the fifties and sixties, such obstacles had begun to disappear. Segregated halls were no longer on her schedule. She broke a momentous barrier in 1955, when she became the first black soloist to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, as Ulrica, in
Un ballo in maschera.
By then, her voice was past its prime, the pitch unstable and the vibrato distracting. She went on singing for ten more years, less because she couldn’t leave the spotlight than because audiences wouldn’t let her go. They cherished not only what she was but also what she had been. And she might have achieved even more if the world of opera had been open to her earlier. To hear her assume soprano arias such as “Casta diva” or “Pace, pace, mio Dio” (transposed down a step) is to realize
that she was capable of singing almost anything. If, as Toscanini said, such a voice arrives once a century, no successor is in sight.
Un ballo in maschera.
By then, her voice was past its prime, the pitch unstable and the vibrato distracting. She went on singing for ten more years, less because she couldn’t leave the spotlight than because audiences wouldn’t let her go. They cherished not only what she was but also what she had been. And she might have achieved even more if the world of opera had been open to her earlier. To hear her assume soprano arias such as “Casta diva” or “Pace, pace, mio Dio” (transposed down a step) is to realize
that she was capable of singing almost anything. If, as Toscanini said, such a voice arrives once a century, no successor is in sight.
What has changed since Anderson made her lonely ascent, basking in ecstatic applause and then eating alone in second-class hotels? Certainly, she made it easier for the black singers who came after her, especially the women. Leontyne Price enjoyed the operatic triumphs that were denied to Anderson, and after Price came such female stars as Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle—although the flameout of Battle’s career might indicate the difficulties that await a black diva who doesn’t go out of her way to avoid making a scene. Opportunities for black males have been markedly more limited, despite the pioneering work of Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Todd Duncan, and George Shirley, among others. African-American conductors are hard to find; the most prominent is James DePreist, who happens to be Marian Anderson’s nephew. According to statistics compiled by the League of American Orchestras, only 2 percent of orchestral players are black. African-American composers are scattered across college faculties, but they seldom receive high-profile premieres. The black contingent of the classical audience is, in most places, minuscule.
To a great extent, this racial divide stemmed directly from prejudice. Racism hardly disappeared from classical institutions after Anderson reached the apex of her fame. Consider the twisting career of the singer-songwriter Nina Simone, who originally aspired to become a concert pianist. Anderson was a hero to Simone and her family; one of her uncles knew the singer well. But when she failed to win a place at the Curtis Institute of Music, for what she surmised were racial reasons, she turned instead to playing and singing in clubs. In her autobiography,
I Put a Spell on You
, Simone wrote, “My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people.” Miles Davis used harsher language when he explained why he gave up studying trumpet at Juilliard: “No white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me.” He went on to mock a teacher who stated that “the reason black people played the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton.” Davis, the son of a successful dentist, lost confidence in the school soon afterward.
I Put a Spell on You
, Simone wrote, “My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people.” Miles Davis used harsher language when he explained why he gave up studying trumpet at Juilliard: “No white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me.” He went on to mock a teacher who stated that “the reason black people played the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton.” Davis, the son of a successful dentist, lost confidence in the school soon afterward.
There is another, less baleful explanation for the absence of African-Americans from classical music: beginning with jazz, black musicians invented their own forms of high art, and the talent that might have dominated instrumental music and contemporary composition migrated elsewhere. Perhaps Simone would have made a fine concert pianist, and Davis surely would have been a sensational first trumpeter in a major orchestra, but it’s difficult to imagine that they would have found as much creative fulfillment along those paths. Instead, they used their classical training to add new dimensions to jazz and pop. Davis, an admirer of Stockhausen, made a point of criticizing the “ghetto mentality” that prevented some black musicians from investigating classical music. Simone, for her part, never forgot the music of her youth. “Bach made me dedicate my life to music,” she wrote in her memoir.
In May 1965, in the tense months that fell between the killing of Malcolm X and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Simone made a recording of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching ballad immortalized by Billie Holiday in 1939. (As it happens, Holiday’s original recording was set down eleven days after Anderson’s Easter Sunday concert on the Mall.) The ghosts of classical tradition hang over Simone’s radically reworked version: the piano accompaniment becomes a spare lament in the Baroque manner, and there is a strong reminiscence of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger”—a song that Anderson sang in memorably ashen style. At the climax—“For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop”—Simone let her immaculately true-toned voice deliquesce into an agonizing slow glissando, traversing the lamenting interval of the fourth. Schubert’s song is about recurring nightmares, identical tragedies being acted out from life to life; Simone, in a gorgeous fury, tells much the same story.
Sadly, African-American classical musicians today seem almost as lonely as ever. They are accustomed to being viewed as walking paradoxes. William Eddins, the music director of the Edmonton Symphony, has addressed the situation on his blog, Sticks and Drones. In the black community, Eddins writes, classical music is “looked on with intense suspicion,” as “one of the last true bastions of segregation in America.” Eddins sees it differently: “If you sat me down and asked me to describe one truly racist incident that has happened to me in this business, I’d most
likely stare at you blankly. I can’t think of a one.” The problem is one of perception; African-Americans think that classical music is for other people, he says, and the almost total absence of music education in public schools prevents a different story from being told. “People tend to support and listen to the music that they hear from a young age,” Eddins writes.
likely stare at you blankly. I can’t think of a one.” The problem is one of perception; African-Americans think that classical music is for other people, he says, and the almost total absence of music education in public schools prevents a different story from being told. “People tend to support and listen to the music that they hear from a young age,” Eddins writes.
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