continued from Twenty-Four Negro Melodies.
& then everything changed.
What happened?
How (& why) did SCT's music vanish from view as quickly as it did?
Race is often blamed; but this can't be all - perhaps even most - of the answer... the story of SCT can be duplicated with almost tedious repetition with non-African composers such as Foulds, Brian & Tovey (not to mention SCT's close musical friend, William Hurlstone). As the highest flyer, SCT had the longest fall; but in terms of race, one can (at best) say that while race may have been a straw on the camel's back, skin color was probably not the straw which broke it.
On must begin by remembering that the process of SCT's musical vanishing was fast but hardly steady: towards the end of his life, SCT had explored the possibility of staged pageant-style performances of the Hiawatha cantatas; & even wrote piano sketches for new ballet music to flesh out the program... these epics (usually helmed by the flashest 'arry of them all, Malcolm Sargent; with the composer's son, Hiawatha, in charge of the orchestrated ballet music) finally filled the Albert Hall in the 1920s; & made SCT once again one of the most popular names in English choral music. The Petite Suite de Concert, similarly, remained a stalwart of the English Light Music era (a 1963 recording of this work by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the underrated George Weldon, two movements of which were last released on an EMI Laser disc ("Country Gardens"; CDZ 7 62529 2), is another must SCT reissue).
(Avril CT (p.112) quotes John Baribolli as saying that the first work he conducted in his Bernsteinesque debut was "... Coleridge-Taylor's "Petite Suite de Concert"... an admission he admitted to taking considerable delight in making)
The lack of royalties may very well have been a factor: had even a small share of the Hiawatha's Wedding Feast profits been redirected in the Coleridge-Taylor family's direction, they may have been able to bankroll performances of lesser known works in the SCT canon... but (despite a number of attempts to force Novellos to introduce retrospective royalties) this wasn't to be. Although both Hiawatha & Avril continued to push the cause of their father's music, the times they were a-changing... fast.
The question of Jaeger's loss of faith in SCT's music is relevant here; & also - not coincidentally - offers an interesting insight into SCT's place in the music of his time. One point should be stressed in advance: there is no evidence that Jaeger seriously worked against the career of the composer he once championed; although his private comments - quoted by Self, from correspondence between Jaeger & Elgar - could be (shall we say) refreshingly frank.
(SCT (& apparently his daughter as well, judging from the comments in her book) seems to have been quite unaware of Jaeger's change of heart; & loyally participated in a memorial concert for his former mentor in 1910)
Our discussion turns on two linked questions:
a) What did Jaeger see in the young composer that induced him to laud his talents so enthusiastically?; &
b) What didn't he see in the latter works which caused him to write SCT off as a major disappointment?
Another short diversion is probably called for:
Viewed from our T+100 years chronoscope, it's fairly easy to paint the whole of the English musical renaissance with a single Elgarian brush; but viewed in contemporary detail, a subtly different picture emerges. I've already mentioned the north/south players/gentlemen divide; but the tension between the Progressives (chromatic, self-consciously heroic artists who drew their inspiration from Central European icons such as Richard Strauss) & the conservatives was equally strong. The Progressives were the radicals of their (musical) day, inspiring both anger & respect in (roughly) equal measure; & for all his popular cantatas, his Pomp & Circumstance marches, Elgar's major concert works (the symphonies & concerti; as well as most of the major orchestral pieces) placed him firmly in the Progressive's camp... right next to his friend & mentor, August Jaeger.
SCT on the other hand was a real conservative; & a somewhat impersonal one at that: as mentioned above, his strongest musical influence was the Dvorak; & (apart from his overtly African-American inspired music, which is distinctly a special case; & which in any case largely postdates Jaeger's abandonment of the composer) on the few occasions he really seemed to get involved with his musical material, the results tended to be monumentally unsuccessful (The Atonement, most obviously). In glorious Technicolor hindsight it would appear that Jaeger should never have found anything of interest in SCT's music... but he did.
Why?
Part of the answer (probably) is that sympathy for the young outsider may have blinded people to the conservatism of many of SCT's early musical successes. I've already mentioned the barbaric gaiety (a revolutionary compliment if ever there was one) description of the Ballade in A minor... no matter how diligent the critic, enthusiasm for the brilliant young outsider was always likely to get in the way of objective analysis. Other works from this period almost certainly suffered from a similar misreading; but...
... the clear, clean exoticism of the original Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was a revelation; & something that a Progressive like Jaeger & a tune-loving conservative like Sullivan could equally enthuse over. Indeed (with the exception of the Onaway! Awake, beloved! aria; which is certainly beautiful if outrageously old fashioned), Hiawatha's Wedding Feast remains startlingly fresh to this day: there seem (to me) to be clear echoes of SCT's best writing in the popular oratorios of George Lloyd, for example; while Hubert Foss claimed to hear traces of SCT in the symphonic vocal music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (A Sea Symphony, most obviously)....
... but (as mentioned above), as early as the cantata's sequel, The Death of Minnehaha, it seemed cleared to Jaeger that SCT was pulling back his musical punches: there are more vocal solos; a more obvious internal separation into self-contained musical numbers & a greater use of unvaried repetition. To Jaeger, this return to conventionality smacked of writing for the market rather than writing for the sake of art; & was therefore a kind of betrayal of the holy (& Progressive) cause....
(Not surprisingly, when SCT submitted the Technicolor extravaganzas of Hiawatha's Farewell, Jaeger gave up completely on his former protege; & (privately) began dismiss the composer's music... with all the bitter passion of a jilted lover)
Why did SCT retreat so far, so fast?; & was Jaeger justified in claiming that Hiawatha's Farewell:
"... will never do, the public expects you to progress, to do better work than before; this is your worst"? (Self; p.102)
Partially.
While I personally think there are weaknesses in SCT's handling of the Hiawatha's Farewell (the great slab of repetition of the passage beginning "By the shores of Gitche Gumee" (pgs 140 to 148 in the Novello vocal score) may be formally acceptable, but it still looks - & to me, sounds - odd after the runaway canoe forward momentum of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast); but Jaeger's criticism seems to be largely based on a premise SCT appears to have had little or no interest in: 20th century's most precious (aesthetic) sacred cow... that art can (& therefore, should) progress....
There's no doubt that progress is real: that I can type these words in Sydney, Australia; & set them up on a virtual computer at ausnet.net.au HQ (wherever in cyberspace that happens to be... I honestly don't know) in such a way that they (hopefully) raise enthusiasm for SCT's music around the world reveals a technological progress unimaginable in SCT's day. Even in more social (including racial) issues, a little progress can be detected since SCT's death; though never as much as many would like...
... but this isn't the kind of progress Jaeger is referring to. Like most 20th century aestheticians, Jaeger is thinking of artistic progress per se (progress in the abstract, as it were): in this artistic worldview, each new composition had to BIGGER, BRIGHTER!, !!BETTER!! than the one before. To Jaeger, innovation & change was a goal in itself; not simply a mechanism on the way to somewhere else....
SCT saw things differently; & indeed - while it would probably would be overstating the case to suggest that the innovative techniques used in Hiawatha's Wedding Feast were somewhat unintentional - one can say that innovation per se was not of major importance to the composer. SCT rarely described the processes behind his musical craft; but in a number of articles quoted by Tortolano, SCT's view on musical progress is unambiguously revealed....
(Consider this quote:
"It seems as if the composers would wish to be classed with the flying men in his endeavours to 'go one better' than the last, somehow or other, and in many ways much of the music of the period reminds one of the automobile and the airship. It is daring, clever complex and utterly mechanical" (from an article published in 1911; Tortolano, p.154)
(The sound you can now hear is August Jaeger turning in his grave)
Simplicity - & beauty - of expression was far more SCT's intent than the intentional complexity of progress....
(In a strange sense, though, much of SCT's most interesting music is surprisingly modern.
(Taking his queue from Dvorak - &, no doubt, forced by circumstances of production to simplify his compositional style - many of SCT's best works often suggest what we would now call a minimalist approach (I've raised this point previously in relation to the Hiawatha - overture, which is almost SCT's Bolero): his rhythmic repetition of melodic material with variation in instrumental texture taking the place of conventional musical development may not exactly be Glass or Reich; but certainly suggests earlier American bop minimalists such as Harrison or Adams or (in his more popular style) Copland. Unlike a contemporary Jaeger, I'm not trying to make the claim that SCT was intentionally trying to create what we would now consider a modern style - the composer was far too traditionally inclined for that - only to suggest that even during his short career SCT had managed to establish his own, intriguing take on then-contemporary musical thought...
(... & that - as with Copland in his most popular score - SCT certainly knew "Tis a Gift to be Simple")
The (roughly contemporary) case of Arnold Schoenberg makes a useful comparison: why did AS feel the need to develop his distinctly unpopular twelve-tone compositional technique?
The composer's logic went something like this:
(assumption 1) because AS believed - as Jaeger did - that art must progress per se; &
(assumption 2) as AS also believed that composers like Wagner & Mahler had extended the range of tonality beyond all recognisable bounds;
(interim conclusion) the only way to continue to achieve a sense of artist progress was by developing a purely atonal method of composition; hence
(final conclusion) a method of twelve-tone musical construction is necessary for the progress of art.
(The possibility that the first two conclusions may have been invalid never even entered AS's head
(It's worth remembering here that AS believed that his twelve-tone composition technique (there were other, similar approaches developed around the same time) would "... guarantee the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years"... the only thing it really guaranteed was the irrelevancy of much modern CM composition during the next fifty)
Put as bluntly as this has been, Schoenberg's argument - & Jaeger's, too, for that matter - is revealed as perfectly circular; in that the assumption that art must progress justifies progressive art (one might even suggest that the argument is doubly circular, in that it also tends to defines artistic progress as working in a form one describes as progressive). Circular reasoning is generally considered woolly thinking; but unfortunately, exactly this woolly thinking underpins most 20th century aesthetic thought.
The Great War (WWI) played a huge part in this change. This was (probably) the great watershed event in recent European history; & its impact in the arts (including CM) was suitably tumultuous.
In this section, I have discussed Elgar as a Progressive; but after the Great War, with Schoenberg trumpeting his 12-tone revolution in Vienna & Stravinski developing the pared-back sounds of neo-classicism in Paris, Elgar was now the arch-conservative, a dinosaur even. His music continued to develop, to progress in Jaegerian terms (indeed: the masterworks of Elgar's last years - the Cello Concerto (1918-19) in particular - include some of his finest works); but the goalposts signifying artistic progress had shifted big-time, from Progressivism to Futurism (the basis of most modernist schools of thought)... in this context, Elgar's crime wasn't that he was Progressive; but that he wasn't progressive enough.
Such radical approaches to musical art didn't immediately impact on the concert stages of Purcell's fairest isle (this would happen more after the Second World War); but it did start to impact on English music's marketability overseas, particularly in Europe (the composer, pianist, conductor, critic, teacher & broadcaster - I think I've included everything - Donald Tovey was just one of many composers to question the relevance of his compositional style in the face of this cultural New World Order). Had he lived, the proudly traditional SCT would probably have struggled with these changes (though he may have found a private niche - see below); but dead, even a composer of popular memory could easily get lost in the shuffle.
& he did....
(Less one be tempted to put a more overtly political spin on this situation by suggesting that - as a working musician with more important social issues to deal with than mere artistic revolution - SCT was too busy in the real world to take such concepts seriously, Tortolano describes an almost Schoenbergian vision of artistic purity in SCT's view of the popular "Negro music" (including rag) as "... a mongrel product in which the most vulgar elements of White and Negro music are combined" (p.102) (admittedly: the actual source of this description isn't identified; but it certainly sounds like a quote of a composer who spent a large part of his career planning for a European debut which never quite came might make).
(From this, it's easy to guess what SCT would have made of the music of Scott Joplin: absolutely nothing. What intrigues me is what Joplin would have made of SCT: the father of rag was classically trained, if I remember rightly; & his dreams always included the wish to be accepted as a classical concert composer/performer. SCT, of course, achieved both dreams. Does anyone know any good Joplin quotes about his English counterpart?
(This is probably as bad a place as any to look at the question of race within The Song of Hiawatha....
(One doesn't have to be Umberto Eco to see the work in coded terms - the American Indian as African-American surrogate, in other words - & it's probably safe to assume that SCT's African-American champions at least subconsciously did so; but unlike Schiller (& Beethoven), who carefully remade their ode to freedom (freheit) as an Ode to Joy (freude) to avoid political persecution, SCT had no pressing need to hide his message... indeed: works like the Dream Lovers, Songs of Slavery/Five Choral Ballads & the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies explictly dealt with African or African-American issues. SCT is quoted as saying he wrote Hiawatha's Wedding Feast because he loved sound of the names... & the rest - as they say - is history)
to continue: hit the link to Symphonic Variations on an African Air.
to return to the Samuel Coleridge Taylor cover sheet, just hit the link here.
Page created by Robert Clements