The Ellington Century (15 page)

We might term many of the rhythmic innovations of modernist concert music “jazz by other means,” (or “Euro-jazz”) though I'll call them cubist rhythms instead. Was this kind of rhythm as inimical to jazz as both Stravinsky and Gene Krupa, from opposite sides of the lines, would have us believe? There's no doubt that European composers were thinking about jazz and, perhaps, listening to it, though few followed the developments of jazz closely enough to distinguish its most important figures; discussions of jazz by Stravinsky and Copland never mention Louis Armstrong. Measured by the number of composers who suddenly added a saxophone to their orchestras (including Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern), the generic impact of jazz on European concert music and, of course, American as well was huge, but also, by the same measurement, short-lived. Modernist composers, moreover, were ambivalent about
jazz. For some it was an alien style that could only be assimilated in unmediated fashion through collage, as Satie did in
Parade
, or Ives did in
Central Park in the Dark
with its quotations from “Hello My Baby!” (a hit tune from 1899 by Joseph Howard and Ida Emerson); or it could serve as a convenient vehicle for anarchic “wrong-note” irony, as in the piano ragtimes of Ives, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, instances of rag rage that treat the new idiom with a violent, distorting irreverence. (By comparison, Stravinsky handled Pergolesi's music with kid gloves.) But while the outer trappings of jazz-age jazz soon faded, jazzlike rhythmic devices remained an essential part of the modernist idiom, even when they appeared in music labeled Bulgarian (Bartók's Fifth Quartet) or Mexican (Copland's
El Salón México
) or classically Greek (Stravinsky's
Apollo, Orpheus
, and
Agon
.)
⁴³

Before we examine some examples of cubist rhythm by Bartók and Stravinsky, we need a sidebar to deal with the issue—the red herring, actually—of notation. In jazz circles discussion about rhythm usually focuses on “feel,” the subtleties of performance; when modernist composers talk about rhythm they usually have a mental picture of some page from the score of
Le sacre
in which the meter changes every bar, even though some of the most rhythmically sophisticated movements in the modernist canon, the first movement of Bartók's Fourth Quartet (1928), the first movement of Webern's Symphony (1930), the first movement of Schoenberg's Fourth Quartet (1937), and the first movement of Stravinsky's Symphony in C (1939), are written in
throughout. (Bartók sketched first in changing meters, then renotated in
.) Two rhythmically vibrant parts of
Le sacre
, the “Augurs of Spring” and “Dancing Out of the Earth,” are similarly devoid of meter changes.

The opposition of feel and notation, however, replays the racist stereotypes of instinct versus culture. The rhythms of jazz and modernist music share more common ground than either Stravinsky or Krupa suspected. To locate that common ground let's look at two canonized and high-spirited modernist concert works both written around the swing era, neither explicitly related to jazz: Bartók's Fifth String Quartet (1934) and Stravinsky's Concerto in E
“Dumbarton Oaks” (1938)—with an inevitable detour through
Le sacre.

BARTÓK: STRING QUARTET NO.
5

The rhythms of Bartók and Stravinsky often approximate the woven, multilayered texture of jazz, but from Eastern European vantage points.
Their music, like Ellington's, illustrates the way rhythm functions as both sound and symbol. According to the dates in the score, Bartók composed his great String Quartet No. 5 in a month (August 6 to September 6, 1934), and few works of twentieth-century concert music can match its feeling of rhythmic spontaneity. And yet it applies the principles of rhythmic cubism (threes and twos combined horizontally and vertically) with a systematic logic. The thematic material of the first movement contrasts groupings of three and two and of five (3 + 2) and often builds up a rhythmic counterpoint either by superimposing two or three rhythmic patterns or through strettos, overlapping passages of imitation. Played idiomatically (as in the recordings by the Vegh Quartet), the ingeniously constructed music nevertheless has the improvisatory lilt of folk music.

Bartók, of course, knew a thing or two about folk music; he dedicated years of his life to recording, transcribing, and analyzing music from Hungary, the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa. His studies of folk music, and of natural phenomena as well, were not simply empirical. Many Bartók scholars find that he conceived his music in terms of a vast dialectical project symbolized by the numbers two and three. The goals of the project have been stated most broadly by Leon Botstein: “Bartók uniquely managed to reconcile the claims of formal musical aesthetics and the ideology of progressive musical modernism with the cultural politics of identity and subjective particularity;”
⁴⁴
—well, perhaps not so uniquely, since, if we include jazz within the realm of “progressive musical modernism,” the description fits Ellington as well.

Bartók's music set out to synthesize Beethoven's dynamic classicism and Debussy's static impressionism, Schoenbergian chromaticism and the modal diatonicism of Hungarian folk melodies, culture (with a capital “C”) and nature (with a capital “N”), and, reducing this project to its rhythmic essentials,
two
and
three.
Not since medieval music, when triple rhythms (
tempus perfectum
) signified the divine and duple rhythms (
tempus imperfectum
) the human, have the smallest building blocks of rhythm carried such philosophical weight.
⁴⁵

Bartók worked out the symbolic dialogue of twos and threes in many ways. It first appears as a large-scale structural symbolism, I think, in the Second Quartet, a three-movement work. The calmly meditative first movement begins in
time (3 × 3); the despairing third movement is in
(2 × 2). Between them, a scherzo inspired by the music Bartók heard in Biskra, Algeria, at times savage, at times grotesque, begins in two, but in its compressed recapitulation its themes are refashioned
in a whirling triple meter. In the Fourth Quartet Bartók used a five-movement arch structure, with the first and fifth movements in duple meters (
and
), the second and fourth in triple meters (
and
); the central movement, in the Bartókian genre of “night music,” sounds almost a-metric, outside of time.