Ragtime and Sonata Forms, Part 2: Arthur Weld's plea to combat musical "cholera"

2.     Arthur Weld’s plea to combat musical vulgarity, including rag-time and coon songs

In his book Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music and Dance in New York, 1840-1917, Dale Cockrell quotes briefly from a piece written by Arthur Weld in the The Etude. Cockrell makes reference to Weld on page 124 of his book, noting that Weld was a professor of music at Wisconsin Conservatory of Music. Cockrell only mentions Weld in passing in a chapter discussing the ways in which ragtime as a musical style and a dance style was viewed as an exemplar of racial mixing and of gay sexuality in New York in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  More significant for the purposes  of this project is Cockrell’s observation that many recognized ragtime first and foremost as dance music rather than the concert music for piano we tend to think of it as being here on the other side of the 1970s ragtime revival.

For my purposes quoting Weld’s piece in its entirety is necessary:

The Etude and Musical World

Volume XVII February 1899, Number 2

published by Theodore Presser

page 52

THE INVASION OF VULGARITY IN MUSIC

by Arthur Weld

Something must be done to stop the deluge of the so-called "popular music" which is flooding this unhappy country, doing more harm in an evening than scores of conscientious, earnest musicians can accomplish good in a month.

If one goes into a music store to day and examines what lies conspicuously on the counter, one finds a profusion of idiotic and unmusical "coon" songs, a mass of badly composed two-steps and marches, and a general confusion of rubbish; and, alas, this is what "sells"!

Every one is a "composer " to-day; and position in society can be said to be assured only when one has "composed" a two-step or waltz, "arranged for publication" by some well-known local musician. These wretched things sell, also, because one's friends, after all, must step up and buy in order that the gifted "composer" can find the miserable tune lying on the piano when next he or she comes to call. But you will also find the "coon" songs on your friend's piano when you go to his house, and the chances are that he will insist upon "rendering" a few of them for your edification.

This may all seem trivial enough, but it has, unfortunately, a far deeper significance, and little by little the people at large have forgotten the noble melodies which used to interest and please them, and have sold themselves body and soul to the music (?) Satan, who superintends the construction and propagation of this style of thing. Pass along the streets of any large city of a summer evening when the windows are open and take note of what music you hear being played. It is no longer the great masters, or the lesser classicists--nor even the "Salon-componisten" that used to be prime favorites with the boarding-school misses. Not a bit of it!  It is "rag-time"--"coon" songs, skirt dances , and all the rest of the tawdry crew.

How can we regard this invasion of vulgarity in music other than as a national calamity, in so far as the mental attainments of the nation are concerned?  Is it for this that so many earnest, honest American musicians have sent their lives? Is it for this that the grand orchestras of Boston, New York, Cincinnati, and Chicago exist?  Has all that the real workers--the pioneers of American music--strove to accomplish, did accomplish, really been in vain?

Surely, no one will deny that music does influence people--almost all people--greatly; and if that be so and it is so, we should be careful as to what music is presented for their consideration.

This cheap, trashy stuff can not elevate even the most degraded minds, nor could it possibly urge any one on to greater effort in the acquisition of culture in any phase. [emphasis added] I do not deny that some of these melodies are vastly superior to others. Among those at present much before the public which are unobjectionable, I will quote the Chevalier coster songs, certain of which (notably "Old Dutch") have just claims to consideration as art products; or "Two Little Pumpkin-Colored Coons"," which has the merit, at least of harmonic interest of an elementary description, and which is also written fairly correctly.  "I Loves Yer in the Same Old Way," which is analogous to the Chevalier songs, and a few others. Ever one knows what the "best " in music is, and I have always maintained that a person who cares for music at all can easily be brought to an appreciation of that same "best" and a liking for it.. But there must be no administering of antidotes. If you are endeavoring to cause an elementary musical mind to appreciate Beethoven, you must not let him escape you and visit a vaudeville show, even for a single night, or you will find yourself the next day set back weeks in your work.

These people have such a strange idea of what the word "melodious" means. They will claim in an obstinate fashion that Bach is unmelodious, and that the works of the vaudeville composers are, to their ears, very tuneful; but this is merely a question of degree.  You should have little difficulty--if you go about it in the right way--in making such a person learn to regard the "coon" songs with positive abhorrence, and turn to Schubert and Schumann when in search of true melody and that sense of relaxation and comfort which music at its best can bring to the most tired and fevered brains. [emphasis added] There is certain no repose in the stimulating vulgarity o fa "rag-time" melody, or the debasing excitation of a "coon" song shouted boisterously by harsh, worn voices.

In other words, this evil actually exists.  This plague of trashy music is upon us, like an epidemic of cholera, and it is not necessary to spend more time in asserting that a disease of the evil effects of which can be seen (or rather heard) every instant and in all places really exists. [emphasis added] Let us rather plan a remedy, for a remedy there must be, and the persons to bring about a change must be the actual musicians of the country; the men who love their art, and treat it as an art, not as a business. They are the only ones who can combat this thing, and they can only accomplish any tangible results by working together.

Any man or woman claiming to be a musician and yet unwilling to go out in battle against this musical vulgarity has no claims to consideration as an artist, and, indeed, in so refusing they are allying themselves with the "composers" who scratch this rubbish together, and with the public to which they cater.

In answer to questions certain to be promulgated as to what can be accomplished, I would say: The educated musician individually ought to be the equal of many charlatans, but he must fight all the harder to make that superiority felt. He must force his individuality upon those with whom he is brought into contact, and he must fight to win.  For the individual working in this fight there will be hard work and but little glory; but a great artistic reform can not be promulgated and completed alone by a few of us who write articles or talk noisily in the market-place.  It must be everybody's fight, so far as true artists are concerned. 

The fight for noble standards and pure ideals in music must be made by musicians themselves, nor must it be made sordidly.

At present our unworthy opponents have the best of the figuring, but if the musicians--the real musicians--will arm themselves for combat, and not leave the battlefield until this hideous hydra is stone dead, we may win.

Ragtime and coon songs as a musical epidemic of cholera is a vivid image. That the coon songs of the 1890s were rife with demeaning racial stereotypes and musical narratives of violence and mayhem with men wielding razors is something you can read about in histories of the style.  Edward A Berlin’s work is probably one of the best starting points.  Ragtime historians have managed to unearth tens of thousands of works published as “rags” and only about a tenth of them are the classic high class rags of the sort we tend to associated with Scott Joplin, James Scott or Joseph Lamb.  Many of the other published rags were songs and, as songs, the coon song and ragtime song traditions of the 1890 were greeted by self-identified serious musicians with about as much equanimity as gangster rap was regarded by parents sympathetic to the aims of Tipper Gore in the 1990s.   

Scott Joplin himself complained that ragtime, as a style of music, would have a better reception if the lyrics for the songs in the style were less vulgar.  Scott Joplin aimed to make ragtime a more respectable and elevating style whether or not his peers and contemporaries intended to do the same.  Joplin, at least, was successful in his endeavor even if he died too soon to see his music become part of the 1960s and 1970s ragtime revival the way his associate Joseph Lamb did.

What’s telling in Arthur Weld’s polemic against musical vulgarity is how much it assumes what Raymond Knapp would identify as the ideals of German Idealism in music. In some key respects Knapp’s book is more about musical camp and the long shadow of German Idealism than it ever manages to be about Haydn but the book is still worth quoting for Knapp’s summation of how the styles of music that most “caught on” in the United States tended to be styles that were set deliberately against middle-class aspirational culture and indirectly against the German Idealism that could be summed up as a kind of post-Matthew Arnold or post-Richard Wagner art religion:

MAKING LIGHT: HAYDN, MUSICAL CAMP, AND THE LONG SHADOW OF GERMAN IDEALISM

Raymond Knapp

Copyright (c) 2018 by Duke University Press

ISBN 9780822372400 (ebook)

ISBN 9780822369356 (hardcover)

ISBN 9780822369509 (paperback)

Preface

xii-xiii

...

1. US American popular music grew up primarily in theatrical contexts, including minstrelsy, variety, and operetta, all of which largely opposed the strictures of an emergent “classical music” culture that was based in German Idealism.

2. These origins and their significance for the emergence of popular music in the twentieth century have not been joined well by popular-music scholarship; indeed, advocacy for twentieth-century popular music seems most often based on rationales borrowed from the very musical culture its forebears had rebelled against.

3. Camp—a hallmark of popular musical theater—has been particularly ill served by popular music’s advocates. While this may be due in part to camp’s association with gay subcultures, it probably stems more fundamentally from camp’s fascination with the artificial, the contrived, and the theatrical—preoccupations anathematic to the cult of authenticity that has taken over popular music studies.

4. Camp itself has not been properly understood within historical contexts, perhaps because of a widespread insistence on understanding it as essentially gay, even though that association took hold relatively late and has been steadily eroded since Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” in 1964.

It was considering the tenacity of camp’s appeal as it has since become mainstreamed, along with aspects of camp’s mostly unexamined prehistory, that led me both to the intuition that what made Haydn matter for me was actually quite close to the mix of elements I have found so appealing in musicals, especially in the genre’s camp dimension, and to the realization that therein lay a fundamental difference between “serious” music and the square pegs of Haydn and musicals. Both consistently make light of serious art even when taking that art seriously. And both do not “belong” within the round holes of German Idealist musical paradigms, the one owing to historical circumstance, and the other to its persistent undercurrent of resistance to idealist seriousness.

While Knapp’s larger case was for understanding Haydn’s music as steeped in camp, his observations about American popular music developing in theatrical and dance hall traditions through the work of people who deliberately set themselves  against German Idealism is worth considering at some length.  Knapp would later point out:

Knapp, pages 217-218

German Idealism’s new paradigms for Music privileged musical experiences that involved quasi-ritualistic practices of contemplation, often communal and ceremonial but in any case accompanied by attitudes of reverence (e.g., concerts in established venues such as municipal concert halls). Music thus became experientially similar to religion, most specifically like Protestant Christianity. Like religion, it imposed a purifying conformity and seriousness at the same time that it promised access to an otherwise inaccessible and mystical realm.  Moreover, music conceived in these terms became a political instrument, often associated not only with aspirational cultural values but also with establishing mainstream respectability as the basis for broad communality and, often, nationalist projects in which the relevant “people” are unified by a shared history and culture. Such is not an environment that might be happily embraced by marginalized groups, be they (specifically) working class, racially or ethnically “other,” or homosexual. There was thus quite a lot at stake for such groups, both in undermining this top-down way of organizing who belonged and who didn’t, and in furthering through theatrical representation and performance a more participatory basis for community, giving literal voice to the particularities of difference—even if often disparagingly and, in the case of minstrelsy with regard to blacks, also patently disenfranchising.

Minstrelsy, notwithstanding its inherent racism, created a space of carnivalesque inversion to attract and entertain working-class audiences, involving marginalized populations (most often Irish Americans early on, and later African and Jewish Americans) who purported to depict an even more marginalized group (everyday African Americans). Minstrelsy’s music was often raucous and rhythmic, if sometimes sentimentally nostalgic, but always cutting against the grain of more serious, high-toned music. As well, minstrelsy mined a rich vein of humor grounded in the interplay of surfaces, taking the specific forms of masks (blackface), stereotyped personae, drag, and outrageous wordplay.

Being ex-Pentecostal that I am I would dissent from such a simplistic presentation of “Protestantism”, since some Pentecostals regard themselves as Protestant and no one would confuse a Pentecostal church service with an Episcopalian one. 

Knapp’s case, however, is easily understood if we take his reference to “Protestant Christianity” as a reference not to the low church Protestant liturgies and traditions of Baptists or Pentecostals but of high liturgical traditions such as Lutheran, Episcopalian, Catholic or Orthodox Christian services.  This is more in keeping with a prescription for high, elevating music that partakes of the divine.  Post-Wagnerian art religion, in order to fulfill what Richard Wagner described as the potential for Art to do for Religion what Religion could no longer do , was expected to happen at the most elevated artistic levels. This art-doing-for-religion what religion could no longer do for itself, described recently by the late Roger Scruton as a Wagnerian goal, was going to be “elevated” music.  It most certainly wasn’t going to be found in dance hall music or songs.  Arthur Weld’s argument against musical trash so readily partakes of this kind of polemic that for anyone already familiar with a post-Wagnerian religion of art it almost doesn’t even need to be formally noted.

It does, however, need to be noted because opponents of ragtime as a style could invoke the vulgarity of the coon songs and ragtime as song to argue that there’s nothing elevating about the music. That these arguments hinged upon a series of assumptions about class, race and sexual behavior is one of the key thoughts of Dale Cockrell’s recent book Everybody’s Doin` It.

A couple of decades on, however, from Arthur Weld’s plea to suppress trashy music, another musician would argue that ragtime, whatever its vulgarity in song, demonstrated a vitality of rhythm and in particular an art in the rhythmic setting of American vernacular speech to the natural rhythms of the spoken word.  That’s going to be worth quoting in full, too, because for those with a long view of American musical history it’s worth considering the possibility that the battles of ragtime as song and music would in key ways be replicated a century later in debates about the musical and cultural value of hip hop, rap, and associated styles.  Having looked at a general argument against ragtime and popular music from 1899, let’s look at a later argument on behalf of the music.