https://www.amazon.com/Speakeasies-Symphonies-Genius-Johnson-American-ebook/dp/B0GCNYWJVS/
Of note, Iverson points out that Scott Brown seems to be
the first to bring to light that James P Johnson and Thelonious Monk had a
piano teacher in common:
https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-1
… Alberta Simmons also
taught Thelonious Monk. According to Monk’s biographer Robin D.G. Kelley,
Simmons frequently played Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You,” and this may be why
Monk played “Memories of You” so often in later years. At any rate, the fact
that James P. Johnson and Thelonious Monk actually shared a piano teacher is a
wonderful detail. I believe Scott E. Brown is the first to bring this detail to
light: one of many revelations from Speakeasies to Symphonies.
Parts 2 and 3 of Iverson’s little series of posts are …
https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-2
https://iverson.substack.com/p/james-p-johnson-3
A ew years ago I read Kyle Gann’s discussion of Johnson’s Harlem
Symphony and so it’s worth it to revisit that again, at least by way of his
introductory remarks:
https://www.kylegann.com/JohnsonHarlem.html
"Authenticity"
is a word one bandies about at one's risk these days, since abundant doubt has
been cast on who is qualified to decide what is authentic in terms of whose
music. Yet the Harlem Symphony of James P. Johnson (1894-1955) has long fascinated
me as a jazzman's contribution to the classical repertoire. Many, many
composers, both white (Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein) and
black (William Grant Still, Florence Price, William Dawson) have written
orchestral works which introduced jazz and blues idioms into European
conventions. But the Harlem Symphony stands out as a jazz and blues piece, by
one of the outstanding stride pianists at the peak of his career, that fits its
materials into classical forms without much compromising their character.
Johnson was trained in classical music, of course, since in his youth classical
music was virtually the only kind in which tuition could be found. And he
follows the classical formulas - but almost perfunctorily, simply making the
requisite key changes, never distorting the style he's most familiar with to
put on classical airs. The result is a piece that fills out a classical
architecture, but sounds honest, fun, unpretentious - and not divided in its
allegiances.
Contra Ted Gioia, the
reasons musicologists and arts journalists can be diffident about “authenticity”
is because gatekeeper after gatekeeper has judged this or that work of art as “inauthentic”. Infamously, Theodor Adorno claimed there was
nothing provably, genuinely “African” about jazz in his notorious “On Jazz”
essay.
What do we call Johnson’s Harlem Symphony? Jazz?
Stride? Classical? The work is simple and expressive and I don’t
mean those terms in a derogatory way. I
revisit the Johnson symphony by far more than I finish listening to any given
piece by Eliot Carter. Johnson’s
symphony can be heard as existing as a nexus point across and within
idioms. My skepticism about “authenticity”
is less about whether X or Y or Z work can be construed as “authentic” blues
and more out of a concern that “authenticity” tends to be policed by gatekeepers
who want to keep their genres pure and prevent musical miscegenation. Yes, I
chose that word deliberately. As the son
of a Native American dad and a white mom, inheriting exposure to low church Calvinist
Christian traditions through Dad and Pentecostalism through Mom (albeit of the
heavily Gordon Fee-influenced kind of Pentecostalism you might only run into in
the Pacific Northwest?) I have not been
purely anything and I don’t want to be “authentic” based on some single
label. I don’t think of myself as
American Indian or white. Dad was
himself the son of a marriage between two different people from two different
tribes even within the Washington range of tribes.
All too often tests of authenticity have extramusical
categories that are predicated on race, class, sex, sexuality and whatever else
scholars and gatekeepers may name and claim.
These days it’s sexier to talk about how you don’t fit easily within
simplified and simplistic taxonomies; it’s more appealing to define identity as
constantly fluctuating and negotiated within the liminal spaces of dualisms
presumed to have been handed down to us since days of yore.
But that is its own scholastic canard, a counter to the simplistic
tropes of, say, a Blues Mafia.
Americans can talk about how the “roots” of music come from
“Mother Africa” or “Father Europe” depending on what their agendas are. American Indians don’t rate in such
discussions and yes, I use that term precisely because it is antiquated and
because it has been largely displaced by Native American. As Sherman Alexie used to put it, if you know
what tribe somebody comes from say they’re from that tribe. The use of Native American and American Indian
as terms are less troublesome than how people actually treat people.
I have been thinking off and on about a point Douglas
Shadle made in Orchestrating the Nation.
There’s the Beethoven problem and there’s the Wagner problem. American symphonies that did not pay tribute
to Beethoven were frivolous but symphonies that paid tribute to Beethoven were
anemic imitations. The Wagnerian
variation is what you might already have guessed, you either pay tribute to the
Great Masters of Europe or risk being insignificant but if you wear your
influences on your sleeve you’d get dismissed as cheap imitation.
Well, as authenticity policing goes comparable cults
existing along Afrological as well as Eurological schools of thought and valuation.
When a work like Harlem Symphony sounds fun to listen to and is unpretentious
it’s a work I like to think manages to just be an American work without having
to necessarily navigate the Scylla and Charybdys of Mother Africa and Father
Europe tropes in musicological writing.
Arnold Schoenberg remarked that he thought the music that would have the most lasting impact within America would be “light music”, the stuff dismissed by “serious composers” as beneath serious consideration. The American composer George Rochberg made an observation back in the 1970s that Schoenberg had a patently neurotic fixation on legacy--he was so set on having a significant legacy he paradoxically precluded his music from having that kind of legacy. There are people and movements so eager to be important they don't end up being significant at all in the long run. I'll just pick on two favorite examples from the last thirty years--the New Atheists and the New Calvinists alike were brimming with guys who were legends in their own minds and within their own clubs ... but it's tough to say that either group has made a substantive or substantial contribution to cultural life in the last thirty years.
Which brings me back to Johnson's symphony It's fun. I have fun when I listen to it, it's beautifully made. And I come back to it, which is more than I can say about Copland symphonies. The big names in American symphonic efforts have come across to me, too, like the works of people so eager to be important they don't pull off the feat. I come back to Ellington decade after decade and am impressed with the beauty of what he and his bands created.
Let me reframe this still another way, James P Johnson and Haydn wrote symphonies and they wanted you to have fun. If you had fun, great! If not, well, let's hope you find whatever it is in music that is fun.
To put this in theological terms yet again, arts critics are like priests and prophets proclaiming what constitutes a good and authentic offering to the god of Art Religion. But Providence becomes a post hoc just so story in their tellings of arts histories, and providence is not what so many musicians and composers have discovered the hard way providence can be, what is colloquially known as the luck of the draw.
Some scatter thoughts for a late June Saturday afternoon.
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