The Ellington Century (55 page)

For his tone parallel, Ellington created an unusual form: two sets of free variations, back to back. The first half of the piece develops a melody that begins with a musical intonation of the word “Harlem”. The variations present the melody in constant flux, with a new groove in every phrase, alluding to a variety of jazz and Latin rhythms; the music seems to get ever faster and louder, and then it suddenly breaks off with a slow, plaintive clarinet solo that initiates the second wave of variations. The new theme has something of the quality of New Orleans funeral music and a certain suggestion of the morning after; it picks up countermelodies slowly, wistfully, gradually regaining its strength. By 1950 the fake Harlem was a vague memory; whites from downtown no longer arrived in ermines and pearls. Instead of counterposing fake and real, Ellington portrayed a daily cycle of the secular and sacred, nighttime and daytime, two faces of the same community, both essential to its identity.
Harlem
solved the problems in
Beige
by reimagining its dualisms as complements, thereby redeeming the historical past of both Harlem and Ellington from the scars of otherness.

SQUARE DANCE: THE TWO SIDES OF
APPALACHIAN SPRING

One minute and thirty-six seconds into the ballet
Appalachian Spring
a single gesture foretells the action to come. Or does it? Watching the video we see a story about gender, about men and women, their connections and their differences. It is also a story about spaces, interiors and exteriors, delicately but rigidly mapped out by Isamu Noguchi's spare set. Almost as soon as the music starts a man enters, clad in the black garb and wide-brimmed hat of a nineteenth-century American preacher. He walks calmly, steadily. Behind him a woman enters, moving with a similarly stately gait. They both walk past the outlines of a
house. He strides toward the front of the stage, steps up on a circular platform, like a tree stump, and stands erect, looking confidently outward. This is his land. She walks to the side of the stage and sits facing away from the audience, as if opposite a spinning wheel. This is her domain. Throughout the ballet her billowing skirt and circling motion will give her the quality of an earth mother (the “prevailing spirit” as May O'Donnell described her),
⁴⁰
even though her actual relation to the other characters is not clear. A second man now enters, dressed with rural formality in a vest and tie but no jacket. As he walks past the house he touches its wall, stroking it gently. This is his house. He strides toward the preacher then takes up a position on the fence, looking outward. A second woman enters. In her dress and movements she seems younger than the first woman. She enters the house, looks across at the younger man, and suddenly recoils, taking a step backward before walking forward to embrace him. This is her fate. The recoil is seismic; it is the one moment of uncertainty in the unfolding action. What does she fear?

I questioned whether this moment actually occurred because it is in no way present in the music. Copland's famously atmospheric opening betrays not a quarter note of anxiety. It employs only the notes of the A major scale in a steady pulse of half and quarter notes without syncopation, and with a veiled timbre that Copland refers to in the score as a “white tone”. Listeners to the music would never suspect that the Bride (as the second woman is designated) had wavered in her simple devotion to the Husbandman (as Graham termed the second man). Nor would they imagine that the danced action for which Copland created his music describes what Lynn Garafola has termed a “netherworld of evil.”
⁴¹

The dance historian Marta Robertson has pointed out the conceptual issues raised by
Appalachian Spring.
Is it a work of dance theater or a musical composition? The title applies to a large family of works: the ballet “conceived and choreographed by Martha Graham” (as it says in the video), with music by Aaron Copland and set by Isamu Noguchi; the original Copland score, subtitled “Ballet for Martha”, for thirteen instruments (a number dictated by the small size of the auditorium at the Library of Congress, where the premiere of the ballet took place in October 1944); and the various instrumental works that Copland drew from that score: a suite for the original instrumentation, a suite for full orchestra, and
Variations on a Shaker Theme
for orchestra or band.
⁴²
Copland completed the suite for orchestra in May 1945, right after the ballet score received the Pulitzer Prize for music on V-E Day. Arthur
Rodzinski conducted the premiere with the New York Philharmonic in October 1945; the suite was soon played by major orchestras around the country and around the world. Within a few years Copland's final variation on the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts” would attain the status of an unofficial national anthem.

As Robertson points out, the music world assumed that Copland's score “had transcended its choreographic origins.”
⁴³
As the music entered the orchestral repertory, Graham's choreography, like Nijinsky's for
Le sacre du printemps
, appeared as just part of the birthing process of a musical masterpiece, even though, like
Le sacre
, the original
Appalachian Spring
was the product of collaboration, created as a work of musical theater. When Graham produced a video of the ballet in 1958, fearlessly dancing the role of the Bride at the age of sixty-four, the opening credits gave her own creative role precedence over Copland's. She was attempting to reclaim her own work, whose dark vision had been buried under the runaway success of Copland's score.

Because
Appalachian Spring
evolved during the war years it offers an instructive counterpoint to
Black, Brown and Beige
in its representation of American history and ideology, and in its critical reception. In many ways Martha Graham's career paralleled Ellington's, and the similarities may shed light on the way critics framed their achievements. Like Ellington, Graham developed a body of work for her own company and had little interest in having it performed by others. Like Ellington she built her works out of the specific qualities of the members of her company, including herself. Like Ellington she evolved her own idiom that broke with European tradition. (Copland called the work “Ballet for Martha”, but technically speaking it was not a ballet but a work of modern dance using a movement vocabulary distinct from classic balletic practice.) Finally, like Ellington she devoted herself to representing the experience of a part of human society that had not been able to tell its own story; in her case this meant telling the story of women from Medea and Clytemnestra to the present. Critics attacked her dances with the same barbs aimed at Ellington's longer works; they were termed pretentious, overloaded with message, too idiosyncratic to last. Even today the fate of Graham's oeuvre, like Ellington's, remains uncertain. How should they be preserved? How can they be reinterpreted? These questions never arise in relation to Copland's music.

If music can write history it can also erase it. In its development and subsequent history,
Appalachian Spring
gradually covered over all of its discordant elements in favor of a picture of American innocence
with which it quickly became synonymous. The process of erasure predates even the earliest discussion of a commission in 1942.
Appalachian Spring
was Copland's third ballet with a Western theme, after
Billy the Kid
(1938) and
Rodeo
(1942). Prior to these scores Copland was not a “Western” composer but a quintessential New Yorker whose music emulated the syncopations and sonorities of jazz, at first overtly, as in his
Music for the Theatre
(1925) and Piano Concerto (1926), and later more abstractly, as in the Piano Variations (1931) and Short Symphony (1934).
Music for the Theater
evoked the sleazy mood of a Bowery burlesque show;
Statements
(1934) quoted “The Sidewalks of New York”. In his three Western ballets, however, the jazz element disappeared, replaced by cowboy melodies and the Scots-Irish lilt of the square dance.

Copland's westward turn can be explained in several ways; Copland himself liked to point out that although his father was born in Russia, on his mother's side he was related to one of the founders of Neiman Marcus, the famed Dallas department store. Virgil Thomson, on the other hand, accused Copland of stealing the idea from Thomson's score for the film
The Plow That Broke the Plain
, which made use of cowboy songs, including “I Ride an Old Paint”, which Copland used in
Billy the Kid
and
Rodeo.
That film, though, illustrates a more general trend in historical representation. It told the story of how the American plains were turned into a dust belt due to the market demands of the First World War and the economic speculation that fueled the boom of the 1920s. The film portrayed the excesses of the ‘20s with fleeting shots of black jazz musicians crosscut with ticker-tape machines spinning out of control. Pictorially and musically, it seemed to blame the dustbowl equally on capitalism and blacks. Jazz, the musical idiom of the 1920s, was now counterposed against the sufferings of “real” Dust Belt Americans, Western and white.

In the 1930s the defining status of frontier America appeared in the murals of Thomas Hart Benton, cowboy movies, the songs of Woody Guthrie, and the music of Roy Harris, who was born in a log cabin in the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. All of these works redefined American national identity away from the conflict of North and South and toward the opening of the West and the experience of the frontier. In doing so, moreover, they erased African Americans and their music from American history. Although there were, in fact, many African Americans in the American West, they would not appear in a cowboy movie until
Blazing Saddles
, Mel Brooks's Western parody,
which featured a black sheriff and a cameo by the Count Basie Orchestra playing “April in Paris.”

With
Billy the Kid
Copland did not just jump on board the Wild West bandwagon; he hijacked it.
⁴⁴
Despite its Western theme
Billy the Kid
was the brainchild of a wealthy Bostonian impresario, Lincoln Kirstein. Its composer was Brooklyn-born, and its choreographer, Eugene Loring, hailed from Wisconsin; Billy the Kid himself was born as Henry McCarty in an Irish slum in New York City. According to Lynn Garafola, Kirstein was attracted to the subject out of a left-leaning politics he shared with Copland. Billy “belonged to a new breed of American working class heroes popularized in proletariat dramas like
Stevedore
”.
⁴⁵
Kirstein provided Copland with a book of cowboy tunes, but Loring created the scenario, and, infusing the ballet with ideas from modern dance, he created a movement vocabulary for the work that was “weighted rather than light, angular as opposed to rounded and full of percussive punch.”
⁴⁶

Two themes emerged strongly from the ballet: the inexorable movement of Americans westward, presented as a “horizontal trek across the stage” (inspired by an earlier work by Martha Graham,
American Document)
set to Copland's weighty saraband rhythm, and Billy's isolation and tentative existence, spelled out in brief scenes that are “terse, rapid and cinematic”. While the opening “prairie music” echoed Roy Harris in its open texture and primitive-sounding parallel fifths, much of Billy's music is modernistic and nervous; the famous gunfight scene could take place as easily in a Brooklyn alley as at the O.K. Corral. The new immediacy of expression in these passages owes as much to the film music of Prokofiev as to Copland's westernizing contemporaries.

If Kirstein's choice of American subjects for his Ballet Caravan reflected the Popular Front slogan, “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism”, Copland's score, insinuating the composer's own New York sensibility into a frontier setting, demonstrated that musical modernism could be as American as a Conestoga wagon. Not everyone was convinced, though. In his influential survey
Our American Composers
, written in 1941, John Tasker Howard wrote that Copland's music “brings us the sophistication of the cosmopolitan cities on the sea-board.”
⁴⁷
Copland, though, might have considered that a compliment. His second Western ballet,
Rodeo
, choreographed by Agnes de Mille, once more portrayed a misfit, this time a cowgirl rather than a cowboy.

At the time of its premiere in 1942 with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo,
Rodeo
appeared as a crowd-pleasing comedy, “The Taming of
the Shrew—cowboy style”, as de Mille described it, with a commonsensical plot premise: “the problem that has confronted all American women…how to get a suitable man.”
⁴⁸
Copland's music, too, sounded more folkloristic than in
Billy the Kid.
As Howard Pollack notes, the folk songs that Copland borrowed from various anthologies “appear in their entirety and in relatively traditional settings.”
⁴⁹
The suite from the ballet, and especially its “Hoe-Down”, finally earned Copland popular success beyond the confines of new music. The score remains a staple of both symphony and pops concerts, and the ballet, alone of the trilogy, continues to be danced in its original form.

Seen today, however, its action, if not its music, reveals a psychological complexity that no longer seems like a joke. It is a story about gender roles that can be read several ways. The Cowgirl (danced by de Mille herself) is a jeans-clad tomboy who finally puts on a dress to land a husband. Before the change in outfit, though, she shows that she can keep up with any of the guys by outdancing them all, yet she finally conforms. Garafola writes that “to the extent that it was about the curbing of female independence”, the ballet “anticipated the postwar ideology that sent Rosie the Riveter back home.”
⁵⁰
Comic though it may seem,
Rodeo
represented wartime anxieties about the redistribution of power on a home front devoid of “suitable” men. De Mille would develop this theme further in the Dream Ballet of
Oklahoma!
Rodgers and Hammerstein asked her to choreograph their new musical after seeing
Rodeo;
the Dream Ballet at the end of act 1 was her conception. It portrays Laurey's despair at having to choose between two defective men, the violently sexual Jud and the sweetly asexual Curly. Laurey can be considered a link between the Cowgirl in
Rodeo
and the Bride in
Appalachian Spring.
But what is a cowgirl, or a tomboy? Is she a lesbian who finally yields to the pressures of society? Or does “she” represent a closeted gay man who, donning that dress, finds a way to come out? Or a woman more in touch with her masculine side than men can tolerate? The ballet endures today because it accommodates all these possibilities, and with a smile on its face. At the same time, though, the Cowgirl, Laurey, Rosie the Riveter, and the Bride in Copland's next ballet were, without knowing it, women poised on the uncharted frontier of feminism.