The Ellington Century (18 page)

In distancing himself from jazz, Stravinsky may have been protesting too much. Ragtime arrived in Paris a decade before Stravinsky; he did not have to wait until 1918 to compose a piece with that title, but he did have to find himself removed, as he was by a war and a revolution, from Russia and its traditions. Stravinsky throughout his life was a compositional magpie seizing on whatever musical objects he “loved.” From
Histoire du soldat
onward, jazz was part of his
matières sonores;
he would even give the sound of Shorty Rogers's flügelhorn a prominent role in the austere, sacred, and serial setting of
Threni.

Richard Taruskin quashed the idea that Stravinsky was influenced by jazz with the perceptive statement, “What makes Stravinsky's rhythm fascinating and delightful…is its metrical ambiguity—that is, the doubts the composer continually and deliberately sows…precisely about what jazz takes for granted.”
⁵²
Let's test Taruskin's statement by looking at a bit of prime swing-era Stravinsky, the Concerto in E
“Dumbarton Oaks,” composed in 1938.

The concerto is syncretistic in style and rhythmic devices. The first movement pits Bach against ragtime (in the violins at rehearsal number 2). The second movement replaces the back-to-baroque style with a teasing little tune from Verdi's
Falstaff
and a Rossinian flute solo. The third movement begins like a brisk march, slows down for some “Arabian” music à la Tchaikovsky, and ends like a speeding locomotive. Its opening displays the rhythmic ambiguity Taruskin describes—but more so. There are three simultaneous rhythmic patterns: a six-note theme in the horn, played twice with slightly different rhythmic values; a pulse rhythm ostinato in the bass in groups of three or four quarter notes; and an unheard conducted rhythm of changing meters that coincides with neither of the heard patterns, but which places the two
statements of the melody in contrasting relations to the bar lines (an example of
augenmusik
). The first note of the tune begins on the second beat of a
bar as an upbeat but returns as the downbeat of
. If we don't watch the score or the conductor it will sound the other way around because we would assume (listening to the bass) that the first note was the downbeat of a
bar, but because the theme is eleven beats long, the second statement would sound off the beat. While this diabolically manufactured rhythmic shift would not happen in jazz, its layered structure (tune, pulse, and feel) is a cognate of jazz. The asymmetry of the phrase, one half coinciding with the strong beat, the other bouncing off it, could be thought of as an extended hemiola (
against
), similar to the 5 + 7 division of the West African handbell pattern.

Stravinsky asserted himself as time shaper by cropping the lengths of phrases in either odd or even numbers of beats, the odd beats serving as syncopating irritants and the even patterns as a resolution, though this resolution may be more apparent to the ear than the eye. At the end of the movement Stravinsky built his little tune almost to an anthem, superimposing it on a chugging
moto perpetuo
figure of four eighth notes in the strings. In the final phrase, a repeated unit forty-six beats long, Stravinsky superimposed three rhythmic ideas: in the winds, the upper strings, and the lower strings, in changing meters that correspond mainly to accents in the wind melody. If instead of following the bar lines you let the steady four eighth-note figure in the violins organize the rhythm (say, by tapping your foot on the first note and snapping a finger on the third), you will notice that the music suddenly takes wing, its irregular chop turned into an infectious bounce. Once you hear the music this way, you will also discover that Stravinsky's notation of the last five notes (ta-ta-ta-ta-TA) misrepresents the joyful groove so apparent to the fingers and toes but hidden from the eye. Keep on snapping and the last five notes become ta-ta-TA-ta-ta, with the last note no longer a plodding downbeat but a ricocheting bounce.

European music, torn loose from its older harmonic moorings, needed to acquire something of the rhythmic backbone of jazz; African American music, evolving from an array of regional folk styles toward a sophisticated form of artistic expression, at times looked to European modernism for inspiration. The cultural exchange is best understood as a trade between equals, not between sophisticates and primitives. We might say that the achievements of European musical modernism challenged jazz musicians in general, and Duke Ellington in particular, to take the modernity of their own music more seriously, to plumb
its expressive and representational resources more fully as a cultural and political instrument. Yet, given the many ways in which European music and jazz interacted, any notion of European precedence seems questionable, and even an appearance of influence may be deceptive or at least redundant. Ellington's 1937 “Diminuendo in Blue” and “Crescendo in Blue” sport half-classical titles that accurately mirror their structural designs and that ask us to listen to them formalistically as “modern music”; at the same time these paired pieces exemplify both the blues and swing.
⁵³
These paired works, testing the boundaries, are classics of both jazz and modern music. As is “Cotton Tail.”

OUTRO: EXPERIMENTAL RHYTHM

The large literature on American experimental music usually credits rhythmic progress to the vanguard (white) composers whom Virgil Thomson called the “rhythmic research fellows”:
⁵⁴
Henry Cowell, Edgard Varèse, and, by extension, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Conlon Nancarrow. This alliance, formed in the 1920s, called themselves “ultra-modernists.” Thomson, with slightly more accuracy than he brought to the phenomenon of swing, characterized them by their “arithmetical structures, which are about the only structures available to non-tonal music.”
⁵⁵
Henry Cowell, without reference to any existing style of music, proposed rhythms derived from the fractional structure (
etc.) of the overtone series in his
New Musical Resources
, published in 1930 as an ultra-modernist bible.
⁵⁶

One of the finest applications of Cowell's rhythmic ideas appeared in the last movement of Ruth Crawford Seeger's 1931 String Quartet, whose structure is a rhythmic numbers game. The first violin plays one note, the remaining trio plays twenty notes, then the first violin plays two notes, the trio, nineteen, and so on, and then they reverse course.
⁵⁷
We might call it a rhythmic diminuendo and crescendo, but the formalistic exercise also sounds like a wicked mad-scientist parody of obsessive compulsion—an experiment that worked.

Beyond the “ultras” Cowell's ear-stretching rhythmic proposals had little influence until the 1940s when composers in Europe and America began to reconsider their rhythmic practice especially under the influence of serialism. Emerging composers like Boulez were dismayed by the apparent discrepancy between Schoenberg's radical method of organizing pitches and his traditional-sounding rhythmic idiom. Applying
simple durational algorithms to a pitch series, Messiaen and Boulez “serialized rhythm” in “Modes de valeurs et d'intensité” and
Structures I
, respectively; Milton Babbitt made a similar move in his
Composition for Four Instruments.
For about twenty years Cowell-like “arithmetic structures,” often devoid of any feeling of pulse or meter, dominated advanced concert music.