The Ellington Century (33 page)

The name of Keith Jarrett became associated with modal jazz in the 1970s especially thanks to the recording of his solo concert in Cologne. Not incidentally, Jarrett later recorded the complete Preludes and Fugues, op. 87 of Shostakovich, composed in 1950-51. It took the insights and devotion of a great jazz musician to unlock a work that was still a buried treasure for most classical pianists. This massive cycle is a summation of Shostakovich's musical universe and also a commentary, at times satiric, on many aspects of twentieth-century music, including Stravinsky's neoclassicism (Fugue no. 2 in A minor) and twelve-tone composition (Fugue no. 15 in D
).

Jarrett's critics sometimes accused him of, in effect, rolling an orange on the white keys. The first fugue of the Shostakovich cycle can serve as a response to their accusations. It is a model of absolute white-key composition that shows how much musical coherence can be found in just seven pitches. Within that limitation Shostakovich followed Bach's practice closely. The fugue is in four voices. The subject is eight bars long and uses just six of the available seven pitches, so that it retains its exact intervals when transposed up a fifth to become the answer. The answer imitates the subject at the fifth, and there are two counter-subjects (counterpoints to the subject or answers that return rigorously). As in many Bach fugues there are also a couple of canons and pedal points, all part of the usual fugal machinery. Bach, however, would have constructed the harmonies of the fugue through a tour of related keys, going, say, from C major to G major, to a minor, to F major, and then back to C. In each of these harmonic regions he would use pitches from the chromatic scale not present in the C major scale. Shostakovich also visits different regions, but because he does not use any accidentals, they appear as modes. We hear statements of the subject in E Phrygian, B Locrian, A Aeolian, and D Dorian before we get back to C major, but Shostakovich saved the F Lydian for the end, where it seems to challenge the tonic key; the final cadence feels more suspended than resolved. Each of the fugue's modal regions has its own harmonic weight and flavor, so that the self-imposed harmonic constraints of the fugue feel like an expansion of resources. Only in the Lydian section,
however, does Shostakovich allow modal logic, and the contrapuntal logic of a canon, to produce dissonant-sounding tritone clashes that threaten, in passing, the mood of calm objectivity.

“
THE CLOTHED WOMAN
,”
OR WHAT IS THIS THING CALLED ATONALITY?

After the Second World War the history of European art music in the twentieth century was rewritten, first in Paris, then at Princeton, as an inevitable evolution from tonality to “free” atonality to serialism. Somewhere along the line this tale of harmonic progress became interwoven with T. W. Adorno's jeremiads against popular music and jazz, which branded these genres as infantile empty-calorie musical junk food manufactured by the culture industry. These views began to change (at least outside France) as early as the 1960s, when rock music seemed at least as interesting, both musically and politically, as much of the new art music. With the rise of the civil rights movement, the ‘60s were also a fertile and contentious period for African American music in a wide range of styles, from the gospel-inspired soul music of Aretha Franklin to the free jazz of John Coltrane. Ellington's
Far East Suite
and Sacred Concerts were very much part of that politically charged panorama.

Free jazz, often played without reference to harmonic progressions, provoked a new debate about atonality. When the style first appeared, with Ornette Coleman Quartet's gig at the Five Spot in late 1959, some critics heard the new jazz as a belated response to the European avant-garde, while others emphasized its political radicalism. Some heard it as a response to Stockhausen, others as a resurgence of primitive blues untainted by popular music. LeRoi Jones summed up the debate in
Blues People:
“[Cecil] Taylor and [Ornette] Coleman know the music of Anton Webern and are responsible to it intellectually, as they would be to any stimulating art form. But they are not responsible to it emotionally, as an extramusical catalytic form. The emotional significance of most Negro music has been its separation from the emotional and philosophical attitudes of classical music.” Jones advised that avant-garde techniques “be
used
not canonized” by African American musicians.
⁶

Ellington anticipated this controversy by more than a decade. At his December 27, 1947, Carnegie Hall concert he announced, without much ado, that he would now play “The Clothed Woman,” sat down at the keyboard, and let loose the most outside piano solo he or anyone else had imagined up to that time. Actually only the opening and ending
sections of the piece are so far out, and Ellington never revealed if their eccentric sounds were meant to describe a woman getting clothed or unclothed. Ellington recorded the piece twice in 1947, and the music was later published. The sheet music rather oddly claims to be Marian McPartland's arrangement of the piece, yet “like the Ellington original involves little improvisation.” Perhaps the sheet music is an arrangement in that it transforms the original, which was scored for piano and band, into a piano solo. The printed music, lacking indications of tempo and dynamics, is useful only if you listen first to the Ellington recordings. Its outer sections look like a random collage of arpeggios, blues riffs, and dense polychords sprinkled with seemingly incongruous F major triads. You wonder if Ellington had composed it Cage-style by consulting the
I Ching.
When you listen to Ellington's performance, however, these fragmented, discordant gestures reveal themselves as a slow and slinky blues in F, the apt prelude and postlude to the central stomp in B
, as harmonically mainstream as the framing episodes are not. Ellington's musical cocktail complicates any sense of distinction we might have between atonal and tonal, European and African American, out and in, extraordinary and everyday, pop and art. In its suave subversion of “category” it leapfrogs over the historical determinism of the decades that followed its premiere to a later eclecticism that didn't take shape as an artistic movement until after Ellington's death. But even though postmodernists treat atonality as an option rather than an imperative, it remains ill defined technically and culturally, and it is still very much tied to the works and ideas of Arnold Schoenberg, even though there is a lot of atonal music, by Scriabin, Debussy, Ives, or Ellington, that has little to do with Viennese expressionism and its aftermath. A century after its first appearances atonality still sounds out—and that remains its attraction.

Critics and theorists have applied the slippery term
atonality
to music ranging from the late works of Liszt to art rock, from music that departs ever so slightly from nineteenth-century textbook rules to music that doesn't even employ pitches. For the general public it denotes music that is both nasty sounding and deliberately obscure, the product of some diabolical system. To be sure, many twentieth-century composers from Scriabin on propounded harmonic systems or generated speculative compositional procedures. Evaluating the results of systems as different as those of Hindemith and Cage is complicated by the fact that ideas can sometimes be fascinating in their own right.
Some of the most admired music of the later twentieth century, like the works of Lutosławski and Steve Reich, sprang from the ideas of John Cage rather than the sound of his music. I have always found the music of Xenakis compelling at the gut level, though I don't understand the mathematics behind it at all.

Perhaps we can grasp atonality better if we go through the back door and briefly reexamine tonality. Theorists usually apply the term
tonal harmony
to European music written between, say, 1675 and 1900. The style of that music is characterized by:

  1. A tonal center or tonic defined for an entire piece in terms of major or minor scales. Modulations to other keys serve to confirm tonal unity (called “monotonality” by Schoenberg).

  2. Harmonic vocabulary of triads and seventh chords.

  3. Chordal progressions defined by the bass line and harmonic function.

  4. Voice leading (part writing) connecting chords smoothly while avoiding certain kinds of parallelism (no parallel octaves or perfect fifths).

  5. Nonchord (nonharmonic) tones prepared and resolved with specified sanctioned formulas.

Although the influential theorist Heinrich Schenker took an all-or-nothing view of tonality, and viewed any music that did not meet all the conditions listed above as aberrant, many composers, not surprisingly, disagreed. Both Bartók and Stravinsky claimed that their music had a tonal center, though Schenker would have been hard-pressed to find much evidence of tonality in
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
, or Stravinsky's Serenade for Piano, both works considered to be “in A” by their composers. Even twelve-tone works such as Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Berg's Violin Concerto can sound tonal at times, and more so on repeated listening. Theorists sometimes use the terms “centric” or “polar” for such nontraditional but tonal-sounding harmonies, but perhaps we can better understand a wide range of harmonic idioms, diatonic and chromatic, sweet and harsh, functional and disjunct, as part of an evolving, expanding tonality. I'll reserve the term
atonality
for works—and there are plenty of fine ones—that don't use pitches at all or that aim to be “out,” though, as “The Clothed Woman” demonstrates, even the “out” can sound tonal on repeated hearing.

We can test the proposition of expanded tonality on pieces by Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg that seem to travel far from anything you learned in Harmony 101.

Let's start with “Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut,” from Debussy's second book of
Images
, composed in 1907. Its opening phrase breaks all the tonal commandments but one. In the first three bars we hear a melody of chords, but the chords are not triads built in thirds but three different trichords with either a perfect or diminished fifth between their outer notes and a major or minor second between their two top notes. We might hear the first chord (E-A-B, from bottom to top) as what jazz players call a “sus” chord, where the fourth takes the place of the usual third, and we might hear the last chord (F-A-B) as implying a dominant seventh, but they don't resolve in any way that would confirm these readings. There is also no bass line. The music appears nontonal in chord vocabulary, indication of harmonic function, and also voice leading, since the three voices most of the time move in forbidden parallel fifths. Despite the mysterious inconsistency of the chords, the melody is relatively simple. It outlines an octave from B to B using pitches from the e minor scale and even sounds a bit like “I Didn't Know What Time It Was” (Rodgers and Hart). If we listen to the harmonies from the top down rather than the usual way, upward from the bass, we can hear the lower voices as forming dissonances against the melody, which Debussy resolves in bar 5 by contracting the three voices to a unison B. As the piece unfolds, with nary a traditional chordal progression, it outlines a double tonality centered on E if we give the bass notes priority, and on B if we give greater weight to the melody in the upper voices.

The large structure becomes clear if we imagine that Debussy, anticipating audio editing, spliced together two pieces. Piece I, centered on the pitch B, is heard in bars 1-5, 12-19, 25-26, 41-42, 46-52, and 56-57. Piece II enters in bars 6-11 with parallel triads over a pedal harmony (E-B) in the bass, both textural effects absent from Piece I. These textures return in bars 20-24, 27-28, 39-40, 43-46, and 54-55. Unlike Piece I, which always affirms the pitch B, Piece II uses the device of the sequence, repetition at a changed pitch level, to create a sense of harmonic motion. We might say that Piece I functions as the tonic, Piece II as the dominant. At the close of the piece the bass line resolves Piece II on a low E, but the upper voice brings the piece to rest on three octaves of B, a resolution that the pianist can make clear by raising the pedal to release the E in the bass and then lowering it again to emphasize the
B, or
“faites vibrer,”
as Debussy suggests in the score. The word
atonal
seems out of place here, even though Debussy has upturned the usual way of hearing harmony and also redefined harmonic function as alternation rather than cause and effect.