MUSICAL COURIER
6
May 11, 1922
oboes or similar reed instruments. Also the drums of our American Indians. It is significant that our American negroes never have showed any tendency to use drums. They took to the banjo and to “bones,” but the African drum never seems to have interested them. “Jazz” is made up of a number of borrowed idioms, all consciously borrowed because they obviously appealed to the American taste. Even the idiom of the melody has occasionally been borrowed, but, for the most part, it is pure invention and pure American.
Also it is to be noted that “jazz” in America is by no means confined to music and dancing. Our magazines, movie shows, melodramas, comics in the newspapers, much of our fiction, our business, our politics and our social life is as rowdy, as noisy, as full of punch, as little restrained by tradition, as vigorous and as strongly rhythmic, as any “jazz.” Just set a group of average Americans down in staid old Europe and see how they stand out with their energy, their quick decision and vigorous determination, their noise, their boisterous good humor. They are as different from the European as the child is from the man. The East blames this sort of thing on the “wild” Westerners—but the fact is that we are all alike, and the whole world is copying us. Nothing is doing more to break down the trammels of tradition in Europe than the irresistible American combination of boisterous good nature with honesty, consideration, kindliness and idealism. Europe used to laugh at us as savages. Now Europe is saying to itself that America has the right dope. And, between ourselves, “the right dope” is “jazz.” It expresses our American nature-^and as long as our nature is expressed by anything so simple and straightforward we will have no cause for worry. When our nature becomes so complex that we need the high art of Europe, or something similar, to express it, it will then be time to realize that we are getting old and effete.
A word remains to be said about the saxophone. In the article above quoted Mr. Barroll gives a list of a few of the characterizations found in books and magazines expressive of the general impression gained of this instrument: “the seductive saxophone,” “the ribald saxophone,” “the wailing voice of the wicked saxophone,” “the madness of passion inspired by the saxophone,” “the gyrations of the maniac manipulator of a lewd saxophone.” That, of course, is not to be taken too seriously. It is largely, no doubt, the art of the picturesque fiction writer that invents such phrases, and the context must be known to get their true meaning. Such phrases often refer, and are intended to refer, to the ribaldry, the lewdness and the passion of the characters in the story. It is not an intended criticism of the saxophone, but of the place in which it is found, and the people with whom it is indirectly associated. The writer recalls having seen exactly similar expressions in French fiction referring to the dances of the Apaches in the low dives of Montmartre and to the music, which happened to be not a saxophone but a piano and violin. In one case such expressions were used in a story with Spanish setting and referring to a guitar and castanets.
That the saxophone is any of the things here named is absurd. It is absurd even when subjected to the objectionable practices of some “jazz” players. And yet, as a musical instrument, it can never take a very high standing until its tone is greatly improved. As already pointed out, its penetrating tone renders it useful for inner counterpoints, and its color is good in combination with other instruments and also in chords, especially on low tones. It is a poor solo instrument, and when a player attempts to sentimentalize it by using a tremolo it becomes particularly awful. Arrangers are realizing this and are putting it in its proper place. It is to be hoped that they will also realize how bad the banjo is and do away with it altogether.
They may be depended upon to do that. They are, these arrangers, animated by a sincere ambition to create a real art. They would like to go the orchestration of the Viennese operetta one better, and they have actually already created something which, though perhaps not so refined, is more expressive and more colorful, and possessed of a contrapuntal richness that none of the European popular composers ever thought of. They are out to kill “jazz,” in the sense of “ad libbing,” not because it is any of the evil things the reformers would have it, but because it offends their art sense—and they will do it.
And when “jazz” is dead and gone, will then families that are going to destruction, like the people in “The National Anthem,” reform and follow the “straight and narrow?” They will not. “Jazz” does not bring about their downfall, and the absence of “jazz” will not bring about their uplift. The abolition of an abolition might.—But this is not a political newspaper.
“JAZZ”—THE NATIONAL ANTHEM(?)
By Frank Patterson
(Continued from last week’s issue)
chorus,” in which the melody and harmony are written staccato and the pauses filled in with contrapuntal passages.
The arrangements are for ordinary orchestra with the addition of saxophones and, sometimes, banjo. They are very ornate, full of strange harmonies, borrowed to some extent from the moderns, and, as Mr. Lang expressed it, of a nature that could only be invented by a person ignorant of the rules of music. These queer harmonies, mostly used in the “blues,” are either invented by the composer or imitated from the accidental inventions of “ad lib.” players of “jazz.” They are often refined by the arrangers, but not entirely abandoned because of their characteristic nature. These “blues” came direct from the negro field hand, and were originally long-drawn wails, not, however, expressive of grief or discouragement, but, generally, of uplift and joy—often religious. But to the white borrowers of the idiom they seemed blue, hence the name. Hence also, in imitation of the strange slurring and gliding of the negro singer at work (when he is unconscious of any listening ears), the so-called “blue note” in the arrangements (a diminished interval or minor note not belonging to the key) and the sliding harmonies with their frequent consecutive fifths, etc.
Thus is American music made: The negro borrows from the whites, puts his own interpretations on things, and then the whites borrow it back again and adapt it to their own uses. And while it is true that the rhythm of American popular music may, partly, be attributed to the negroes, it is also true that the tunes now being used have hardly any of the negro character. The syncopation is largely in the arrangement. It is also true that a good deal of the character of some of the music used for dancing—and it is almost all used for dancing—comes from the Tango, the Maxixe and Honolulu melodies, not to speak of the melodies of the American Indian and imitations of Oriental, Japanese and Chinese music.
All sorts of people have been held responsible for “jazz,” but especially the negroes and the Jews. The negro question has already been discussed “ad nauseam”—and as for the accusation against the Jews, that is really too absurd to require comment, and yet, since the statement has more than once been made, it might just as well be disposed of. The situation is this: that a good many of those who write our American popular tunes are Jews, but the arrangers and the players who have made “jazz” are not. The composers of some of the biggest “hits” that have been written in America in recent years have been Jews, but the tunes have not been “jazz” tunes. There is no such thing as a “jazz” tune—the “jazz” is in the arrangement—and those who have made the arrangements have only rarely been Jews. That disposes of that foolish and unfounded accusation.
The fact is that this “jazz” has not come from any single group—or should one say “bloc?”—of Americans, but from America as a whole, just as rag-time and other forms of American popular music came from America as a whole. There have been influences of all sorts, of course, but the determining factor in all this activity has been American taste. And is a taste for “jazz” confined to any single group of Americans? Obviously not. It is the same old story of the American idiom: if Americans did not like it, it would not stick. Who made “jazz?” Every American—North, South, East and West. But it was the arrangers who made it musically interesting, who put the color in it, color of such richness that it almost compensates for the trivial character of most of the tunes.
These leading arrangers, whose names have already been mentioned, assure me that “jazz” came from the West originally, brought here by some of the orchestra players and orchestras that came from San Francisco and other Western cities. It was greatly stimulated by the amusing antics of our soldier band boys during the war. “They discovered how to make a clarinet or a saxophone laugh” or squeal and how to do other stunts that greatly amused their fellows and made a “hit” at the many war benefit performances at which they played. It also—and this is a matter of no small importance—freed them of the stigma of being “sentimental” musicians.
An earlier feature in the development was the clown band of the circus—which was imitated from time to time in the theater—and the Oriental procession, also of the circus, with the beating of drums and the loud noise of Oriental
VIOLIN HOLDS UNIQUE POSITION
No Parallel Exists in History for Charm of Masterworks of Old Makers — Great Prices Brought by Authentic Instruments Causes many Spurious Violins to
Be Offered on Market
By B. J. FREEMAN
Violin Expert, Rudolph Wurlitzer Company
sion through which great violinists of the year 1922 could charm the thousands that today fill auditoriums like the Hippodrome and Carnegie Hall.
The Cremona Might Be Called the World’s Eighth Wonder.
More marvelous, I say, than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the Colossus of Rhodes or any of the other seven wonders, which we have been taught to accept as final, may it not well be a fact that the violin is the missing eighth wonder? Gladstone, as you may know, very truly said : “To perfect that wonder of travel—the locomotive—has perhaps not required the expenditure of more mental strength and application than to perfect that wonder of music, the violin.”
If further evidence is needed to convince the uninitiated, permit me to mention the fact that anyone of the five most famous Stradivarius violins of the world would cost you, (Continued on page 10)
The wisest prophets of Cremona in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries never could have dreamed what charm the violins which were being made by their fellow citizens at that time would exercise throughout the world in general, and in New York in particular, in this year of grace 1922.
That they would have a profound influence in the development of music for all time to come was no doubt recognized by Italian music students of that eventful period.
In their wildest flights of fancy, however, they could, not have dreamed that Cremona’s violins and those patterned after them made, as they were, for voice accompaniment in the home and church, were destined to form the background of the symphony orchestra of the twentieth century.
They could not have foreseen that in a settlement called New Amsterdam in the New World, but recently discovered by their fellow •countryman at Genoa, 200 years after violin making had reached its greatest glory, Cremona’s violins— made, let it be remembered, for use in church and home—-would be found to be the only perfect medium of expres-
There is some difference of opinion among the musicians themselves as to whether this music can ever be considered directly improper or conducive to improper dancing. They all agree that the “ad libbing” or “jazzing” of a piece is thoroughly objectionable, and several of them advanced the opinion that this bolshevistic smashing of the rules and tenets of decorous music, this excessive freedom of interpretation, tended to a similar letting down on the part of the dancers, a similar disregard of the self-contained and self-restrained attitude that has been prescribed by the makers of the rules of dignified social intercourse. Some of the musicians say that, in the great majority of cases., it is just pure fun, but that the danger lies in the odd case, the exception, whose impure mind reads sex into every form of play, and turns innocent pleasure into a near-orgy.
In a recent issue of Jacob’s Band Monthly there is an article by Edward C. Barroll entitled “In Self Defense,” in which the fate of the saxophone is discussed, and the saxophone player urged to defend his means of earning a living by “refusing to be the type of ‘maniac manipulator of a lewd saxophone’ whose ‘gyrations’ are those of an ape or clown or idiot, rather than being a part of the. legitimate performance of a musician. .	.	. By omitting the
cat-calls, smears and other wholly unmusical tricks and ‘effects’ which the perverted taste of your typical unclean-minded ‘jazz’-hound of the lowest type of the dance hall so vastly admires and applauds, you take another step in the direction of making your work a permanent proposition.”
The same writer says: “Every musician, if playing music is the way he earns his bread and butter, should assuredly be something of a leader in the strong, sincere,, consistent and openly advocated opposition to a venomous viper which is really striking at his means of livelihood—nasty dancing. And both individually and collectively .	.	. can be a
mighty force to discourage, weed out, elminate the perfectly well known things—some musical, others ‘personal’—which constitute the real evils of dancing .	.... and dances,
which are sometimes nothing more than a riot of suggestive display with little else in response to the hideous prostitution of the art of the musician which measures the estimate of some people of that thing which is called ‘jazz,’ and which means exactly whatever your own individual conception of it may cause you to accept as its meaning.”
Perhaps without knowing it, and probably unconsciously, Mr. Barroll has lit upon a deep philosophical, psychological and social truth which covers the entire problem of the moral aspects of music in its relation to the dance. It is expressed in the two closing phrases of the above paragraph : “The estimate of some people of that thing which is called ‘jazz’—and ‘which means whatever your own individual conception of it may cause you to accept as its meaning.” In other words, “jazz” is a frolic to the pure minded, an orgy to the evil minded. Or, it might be better, said, rollicking fun is pure to some, evil to others. To children it is always just pure fun. To grown-ups it will depend upon nationality, environment, up-bringing, culture, self-respect, and all of the dozen impulses and complexes that govern our conduct. But one thing.is sure: there is a great deal of perfectly pure dancing in America, done by pure-minded American boys and girls, and to them “jazz” is a harmless joke. It is not the music of “jazz” that is impure, but the interpretation that is put upon it by certain people. And those people would be impure anyway.
However that may be, Mr. Barroll is certainly perfectly right in his criticism of musicians who prostitute their art with their cat-calls, smears and other wholly unmusical tricks, and, it may be added, that sort of “jazz” is fast disappearing, and the highly artistic offspring of it, the symphony dance orchestra, is taking its place. Those who are making it are the arrangers and the musicians themselves. These arrangers are, as has already been intimated, cultured musicians. There is Frank Barry for instance, who does arranging and editing for Leo Feist. He is a young musician of skill and attainment. He was educated at Northwestern University, worked at arranging for a time in Chicago, and then took his present position in New York. He possesses a thorough knowledge of the classics, of harmony, counterpoint, form, orchestration. The arranger for Remick Company is J. Bodewelt Lampe, a musician and composer, orchestra and band player and conductor of many years’ experience. Conversation with him brings one very quickly to the realization that he is a man of wide reading with a thorough knowledge of music in all its forms and phases. In the home of Waterson, Berlin & Snyder one finds Arthur Lang, arranger in chief of their publications and stage productions, as well as arranger for his own dance and talking machine orchestra. He does not believe in “jazz,” and believes that “jazz” is fast coming to its end, but he does believe in the orchestral arrangements that are the evident result of “jazz” colors, and he is writing a symphony along these lines—a symphony of a serious nature but full of American vigor and color. Finally, at M. Witmark & Sons, there is George J. Trinkaus, who studied four years at the Yale University music department under Professor Parker, and amuses himself in his spare time writing fugues. He
has also composed numerous orchestra pieces, arranged for theater orchestra, by which simple expedient he gets publication and performance, while the American composer who writes for our own symphony orchestra is unable to get either.	*
These are a few of our arrangers, and the work they do and the way they do it is highly interesting and instructive. In the first place, they write at their desks, away from the piano, carrying their complicated scores in their heads. First they make a sort of tentative piano arrangement, much more complicated than the piano arrangement that is offered for sale. From this they work, building up the orchestration so that it will be available for almost any combination of instruments from piano and violin to a complete orchestra. Most of the essential parts are cued into the piano arrangement as well as into the other orchestral, parts, so that whatever instrument is missing can be filled in by another. There are generally three different arrangements of .the refrain, one of them being what is known as a “stop time