Part 11

Folks, I've just been down, down to Memphis town, Oh, that melody, sure appealed to me,

That's where the people smile, smile on you all the while Just like a mountain stream ripling on it seemed

Approaching them with the eager expectation that such praise naturally arouses, can we, as candid lovers of music, find anything but bitter disappointment in their trivial, poverty-stricken, threadbare conventionality? How many thousand times have we heard that speciously cajoling descent of the first three notes, that originally piquant but now indescribably boresome oscillation from the tonic chord in the third measure? These are the common snippets and tag-ends of harmony, kicked about the very gutters, ground out by every hurdy-gurdy, familiarity with which breeds not affection but contempt. Their very surface cleverness, as of meaningless ornament, is a part of their offense. Russian folk-song indeed! Compare them with the simple but noble tonic, dominant and sub-dominant, of the "Volga Boat Song" and their shoddiness stands self-revealed. And the melody? Bits and snippets again, quite without character if it were not for the rhythm, and acquiring no momentum save in the lines "I went out a-dancin'," etc., where they build up well, but to a complete anticlimax in the return of the obvious opening strain.

As for the rag rhythm itself, the sole distinctive feature of this music, it has undoubtedly something of real piquancy. The trick, it will be noted, is a syncopation of half-beats, arranged so as to pull bodily forward certain comparatively strong accents, those at the middle of the measures[61]--a scheme to which words as well as melody conform. The left hand meanwhile gives the regular metrical division of the measure, and a writer in the London Times, defining ragtime as "a strongly syncopated melody superimposed on a strictly regular accompaniment," points out that "it is the combination of these two rhythms that gives 'ragtime' its character."[62] This is perhaps not strictly true, since in some of the most effective bits of ragtime the metrical pulsation may give way momentarily to the syncopation, and everyone remembers those delightful times of complete silence in which the pulse is kept going mentally, to be finally confirmed by a crashing cadence. But it is usually the case that both time schemes, metrical and rhythmical, are maintained together. For this very reason we must question the contention of the champions of ragtime that its type of syncopation is capable of great variety, a contention in support of which some of them have even challenged comparison of it with the rhythmic vigors of Beethoven and Schumann.[63]

The subtlety of syncopation as an artistic device results from its simultaneous maintenance of two time-patterns, the rhythmic and the metrical, in such a relation that the second and subordinate one, though never lost sight of, is never obtruded. The quasi-mechanical pulse of the meter is the indispensable background against which only can the freer oscillations of the rhythm outline themselves. The moment the sense of it is lost, as it is sometimes lost in those over-bold passages of Schumann where a displacement is too emphatically made or too long continued, the charm disappears. In the following from his "Faschingsschwank," for instance, the interest of the rhythmic accent on beat "three" lasts only so long as we oppose to it mentally a regular metric accent on "one."

In the continuation of the passage, for which the reader is referred to the original, our minds are apt to "slip a stitch," so to speak, letting "three" and "one" coalesce. The moment this happens the passage becomes commonplace. But suppose, on the other hand, in the effort to maintain our sense of the meter, we strike the bass notes on each "one." Now equally, or indeed more than before, the charm is fled, and the passage rendered stale and unprofitable, through the actual presentation to the ear of so mechanical a reiteration. In short, the metrical scheme has to be mentally maintained, but actually, so far as possible, eliminated. Looking back, in the light of these considerations, at "The Memphis Blues," we shall realize that whatever the pleasing eccentricity of the rhythm, so relentless a meter as we here find thumped out by the left hand cannot but quickly grow tiresome, as indeed it will be felt to be after a few repetitions.

Reference to another well-known theme of Schumann will reveal a further weakness of ragtime. The second theme of the finale of his Concerto for piano runs as follows:

Here the indescribably delightful effect is evidently due not only to the purely rhythmic syncopation, but also to the fact that on the silent strong beat of every second measure harmony and melody as well as rhythm are so to speak "tied up," or suspended, in such a way that the syncopation is at the very heart of the whole musical conception, and cannot be omitted without annihilating the music. Beside such essential syncopation as this the mere pulling forward of certain notes, as in "The Memphis Blues," is seen to be superficial, an arbitrary dislocation which may disguise but cannot correct the triteness of the real melodic line. In fact, we seem here to have tracked ragtime to its lair and discovered what it really is. It is no creative process, like the syncopation of the masters, by which are struck forth new, vigorous, and self-sufficing forms. It is a rule of thumb for putting a "kink" into a tune that without such specious rehabilitation would be unbearable. It is not a new flavor, but a kind of curry or catsup strong enough to make the stale old dishes palatable to unfastidious appetites. Significant is it that, as the writer in the Times remarks, "In American slang to 'rag' a melody is to syncopate a normally regular time." The "rag" idiom can thus be put on and off like a mask; and in recent years we have seen thus grotesquely disguised, as the Mendelssohn Wedding March, for instance, in "No Wedding Bells for Me," many familiar melodies. To these it can give no new musical lineaments, but only distort the old ones as with St. Vitus' dance.

Thus the technical limitations of ragtime which we have tried to analyze are seen to be in the last analysis the results and indices of a more fundamental shortcoming--an emotional superficiality and triviality peculiar to it. Ragtime is the musical expression of an attitude toward life only too familiar to us all, an attitude shallow, restless, avid of excitement, incapable of sustained attention, skimming the surface of everything, finding nowhere satisfaction, realization, or repose. It is a meaningless stir-about, a commotion without purpose, an epilepsy simulating controlled muscular action. It is the musical counterpart of the sterile cleverness we find in so much of our contemporary conversation, as well as in our theater and our books. No candid observer could deny the prominence in our American life of this restlessness of which ragtime is one expression. It is undoubtedly what most strikes superficial observation. The question is whether it is really representative of the American temper as a whole, or is prominent only as the froth is prominent on a glass of beer. Mr. Moderwell thinks the former: "I like to think," he says, "that ragtime is the perfect expression of the American city, with its restless bustle and motion, its multitude of unrelated details, and its underlying rhythmic progress toward a vague somewhere." "As you walk up and down the streets of an American city you feel in its jerk and rattle a personality different from that of any European capital.... This is American. Ragtime, I believe, expresses it. It is to-day the one true American music."

To such an idolatry of precisely the most hideous, inhuman, and disheartening features in our national and musical life a lover of music and a lover of America can only reply that, first, it is possible that America lies less on the surface than we think, possible that it is no more adequately represented by Broadway than France is represented by the Parisian boulevards, or England by the London music halls; but that, second, if indeed the land of Lincoln and of Emerson has degenerated until nothing remains of it but "jerk and rattle," then we at least are free to repudiate the false patriotism of "My country, right or wrong," to insist that better than bad music is no music, and to let our beloved art subside finally under the clangor of subway gongs and automobile horns, dead but not dishonored.

III

That type of musical æsthetic which insists much on the importance of the racial and national differences dividing human kind into groups, and of the special features, technical and expressive, characterizing the music of these various groups, is constantly challenging our American music to disavow what it calls a featureless cosmopolitanism, and to achieve individuality by idealizing some primitive popular strain, whether of the Indians, of the negroes, of the British colonizers, or of our contemporary "ragtime." In so doing it usually accepts uncritically certain assumptions. It is apt to assume, for instance, that interpretative truth is assured by geographical propinquity. The chant of the Indian "expresses" the modern American because the habitat of both is west of the Atlantic Ocean. It often assumes that characteristic turns of idiom, such as certain modal intervals or rhythmic figures, are of intrinsic value as making music "distinctive." You can make a tune "American" by "ragging" its rhythm, as you make a story American by inserting "I guess" or "I reckon" at frequent intervals. It often mistakes the conception of the average for that of the ideal type, and supposes that the man in the street represents the best taste of America. Above all, it condemns any attempt at universalizing artistic utterance as "featureless cosmopolitanism" or "flabby eclecticism," and suggests that the musician who speaks, not a dialect but a language understood over the civilized world (as Tschaikowsky did, for example, to the disgust of the Russian nationalists), has "lost contact," as the phrase goes, "with the soil." In the interest of clear thinking all these assumptions stand in need of criticism.

It is hardly possible even to state the first without recognizing the large measure of absurdity it contains. That the crude war-dances and chants of the red aborigines of this continent should be in any way representative of so mixed a people, compounded of so many European strains, as we who have exterminated and displaced them, is a thought more worthy of savages who believe that the strength of their enemy passes into them when they eat him than of our vaunted intelligence, fortified by ethnological science. We should hardly entertain it if we were not misled by the interest that attaches to anything unusual or outlandish, and tempted by certain idiomatic peculiarities of these monotonous strains to exploit their "local color." This may very well be done now and then for an artistic holiday, as MacDowell has done it in his Indian Suite; but if a folk-music is to enter vitally into art it must bring with it something more than quaintness or distinctive idioms, it must be genuinely expressive of the temperament of the people using it; and of the complex American temper Indian music can never be thus representative.

Somewhat similar considerations apply to the British folk-songs which, introduced by our pioneering grandfathers, have in remote regions like the Kentucky mountains survived uncontaminated by modernisms, and have recently been rediscovered and widely acclaimed. Here again the piquancy of unfamiliar idiom and a simplicity that falls agreeably on over-stimulated ears has aroused an enthusiasm that overshoots its mark. By all means let us enjoy these fresh songs, and even embody them in our music if we find it an interesting experiment. But can we expect that they will have any far-reaching interpretative value for us, that they will express our national temper? That they are not even native to the soil is a minor objection to them, for we are importations ourselves. But that they are, with all their charm, British through and through, makes it unlikely that they can adequately reflect a nation which, though partly British, is also partly almost everything else.

The case of ragtime is rather more subtle. Here is a music, local and piquantly idiomatic, and undeniably representative of a certain aspect of American character--our restlessness, our insatiable nervous activity, our thoughtless superficial "optimism," our fondness for "hustling," our carelessness of whither, how, or why we are moving if only we can "keep on the move." If this were all of us, if the first impression which foreigners get of us, summed up for them oftentimes in our inimitably characteristic "Step lively, please," were also the last, and there was nothing more solid, sweet, or wise in America than this galvanic twitching, then indeed ragtime would be our perfect music. But every true American knows that, on the contrary, this is not our virtue but our vice, not our strength but our weakness, and that such a picture of us as it presents is not a portrait but a caricature. And similarly, as soon as we examine ragtime at all critically we discover its essential triviality. Its melodies are commonplace, its harmonies cheap, shoddy, and sentimental. Even its rhythm, as we have seen, is a clever formula rather than a creative form, a trick for giving ordinary movement a specious air of animation. It is, in fact, as the writer in the London Times points out, "a debased imitation of genuine negro song, just as the popular Gaiety favorites of the late eighties, 'Enniscorthy' and 'Ballyhooley,' were debased imitations of a certain class of Irish folk-song." A few lines later this same writer falls into the pitfall always yawning for the theorist about ragtime, asks if the American composer will arrive who can extract gold from this ore, states coolly that "Ragtime represents the American nation," and of course ends up with an edifying reference to an art "really vital because it has its roots in its own soil." Does he consider that "Ballyhooley" "represents the Irish nation"? Would he advise Sir Charles Stanford to write a symphony upon it? Only an American journalist could be more naïve, and here is one that is. "The important point," he says, "is that ragtime, whether it be adjudged good or bad, is original with Americans--it is their own creation."[64] This beggars comment.

IV

So far our results are mainly negative. We have discovered fallacies in several assumptions too commonly and easily made. We have set a lower estimate on purely geographical considerations than is often set. We have tried to distinguish between what in a popular strain is merely quaint or piquant because of peculiarities of idiom, and what is more profoundly true in expression to a national or racial temper; and while admitting the superficial charm of such idioms and of the "distinctiveness" to which they minister, we have insisted on the far deeper import of interpretative truth. We have glanced at the danger of confounding appeal to the majority with appeal to good taste, which is always outvoted, or of supposing that "originality" is of any importance in comparison with merit. From these criticisms certain positive principles thus tend to emerge. It becomes evident that there is a certain gradation of values in the qualities which a folk-music may possess. Distinctiveness of idiom is a merit, but a less vital one than interpretative power; higher than either is beauty, suitability to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world. Is there any body of folk-song available to Americans that possesses any or all of these merits in a higher degree than the types we have examined?

We seem to discover such a richer vein in the songs of the negroes--not the debased forms found in ragtime and the "coon-songs" of the minstrel shows, but the genuine old plantation tunes, the "spirituals" and "shouts" of the slaves. In idiomatic individuality, to begin with, both of harmonic interval and rhythmic figure, these songs will compare favorably with those of any European nation. With many of these they share, indeed, odd modal intervals of great antiquity, such as the lowered seventh scale-step in major and the raised sixth-step in minor. Like Scottish tunes they make frequent use of the incomplete or pentatonic scale, omitting the fourth and seventh steps. A peculiarity in which they are almost unique is a curious oscillation between a major key and its relative minor, especially at cadences, so that one gets a haunting sense of uncertainty that enhances tenfold their plaintiveness. In "The Angels Done Changed My Name" (Figure XXXIV), are exemplified the lowered seventh step--at "I went to pray"--and the pentatonic scale; in "You May Bury Me in the East" the raised sixth step--to the word "trumpet"--and the major-minor cadence. The last line begins unmistakably in E flat, and ends equally unmistakably in C minor, and gets from that veering in the wind, so to speak, a peculiar flavor which we should recognize anywhere as "Negro." It is noteworthy that both these songs have to be harmonized strongly and simply with the staple triads--it is impossible to harmonize them otherwise. In other words they are the product and expression of a primitive but pure and strong tonal sense, refreshingly free from the effeminate chromatic harmonies--the "barber-shop chords"--of ragtime. The one compares with the other as the fervent childish poetry of the lines here, "Thank God the angels done changed my name," or "I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning" compares with the slangy doggerel of the cabarets.[65]

I went to the hillside, I went to pray, I know the angels done changed my name, Done changed my name for the coming day, Thank God the angels done changed my name.

You may bury me in the East, You may bury me in the West, But I'll hear the trumpet sound in that morning. In that morning, my Lord How I long to go for, For to hear the trumpet sound, In that morning.

It is often stated that the chief rhythmic characteristic of the negro music is the so-called "Scotch jerk," the jump away from the normally accented note to another, thrice exemplified in the third line of "The Angels Done Changed My Name," and imitated in ragtime. A more typical instance of it is "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" (Figure XXXV), which also further illustrates major-minor idiom in its constant see-saw between G minor and B-flat major. It is pointed out that the slaves had a strong sense of time, that the overwhelming majority of their songs are in duple or march time, with very few in the more graceful but less vehement triple measure, and that in their "shouts" or religious dances they rocked themselves into paroxysms of rhythmic excitement, one group clapping the meter while the others sang and scuffled with a "jerking, twitching motion which agitated the entire shouter and soon brought out streams of perspiration."[66] No doubt the jerk evidences their love of strong accentuation; but it must be noted that accentuation is a purely local thing, affects the meter rather than the rhythm, and may be assumed and put off by a tune (as in the "ragging" of a standard melody) without changing its essential curve.

Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel D'liver Daniel, d'liver Daniel, Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel, And why not a ev'ry man?

Oh, yes, I'm going up, going up, going all the way, Lord, going up, going up, to see the heavenly land.

Far more significant, therefore, than their half-barbaric fondness for the jerk is the grasp shown by negroes over the larger and nobler reaches of rhythm, their feeling for the phrase as a whole and ability to impress upon it a firm and yet varied profile. The second half of "You May Bury Me in the East," with its bold festooning of outline, even more strikingly the tune "Going Up," with its piquant silences and its even-paced insistence on "going all the way, Lord," show a unity in their variety, a certain "all-of-a-piece-ness," compared with which even "Didn't My Lord Deliver Daniel" seems scrappy, and the ordinary ragtime effusion pitifully poverty-stricken. There is plenty of internal evidence, too, that these happy results are attributable to genuine musical imagination, and not to luck in the servile following of felicitous word-patterns. Indeed, the frequency with which unimportant words are accented and important ones slurred over shows that, as is so often the case with great melodists like Schubert, the words were regarded more or less as convenient pegs to hang the melodies on, and the specifically musical faculty did not easily brook interference. "The negroes keep exquisite time," writes one of the editors of "Slave Songs in the United States," the best of the collections, "and do not suffer themselves to be daunted by any obstacle in the words. The most obstinate hymns they will force to do duty with any tune they please, and will dash heroically through a trochaic tune at the head of a column of iambs with wonderful skill." The sense of independent tone-pattern, which when possessed by individual geniuses in supreme degree gives us the immortal melodies of a Beethoven or a Brahms, waxes and wanes in these childlike tunes, sometimes falling back into platitude, but sometimes advancing to a real distinction and beauty.

Whether this beauty is of the kind we have desiderated as the highest quality folk-song can have, rendering it "suitable to enter into music that may bear comparison with the best music of the world," is a further question, and one which brings us at length to the highly controversial matter of the kind of treatment that the composer should give folk-material in incorporating it into his more finished art. The variations of taste concerned here are so subtle that probably unanimity of judgement, even if it be desirable, will never be attained. Yet it is certain that treatment of some sort there must be. The mere collecting, collating, and setting forth of folk-songs, attractively arranged for instruments or even orchestrated, such as we have seen much of from all countries in recent years, is no more musical art than a pile of bricks is a building, or a series of anecdotes literature. So far as it tends to content the public with such potpourris, the fad for folk-song is positively injurious to taste, in something the same way that our modern floods of petty journalism are injurious to the capacity for sustained reading. Moreover, even on their own level such medleys are apt to be unsatisfactory; for the tunes themselves are so definite, brief, and complete, and the transitional passages between them are therefore so obtrusively transitional, that the net effect is that of the ill-baked bread pudding from which we eat nothing but the raisins. Mr. Coleridge-Taylor's "Twenty-Four Negro Melodies," despite incidental attractions, are on the whole an example of this bad model.