https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-468-identity-politics-postmortem
…
On the musical front,
let me take this time of liberal bloodletting to mention Florence Price. In the
woke era, the classical establishment decided that elevating this long dead
black woman composer would expiate their sins.
Price’s ragtime-ish
piece “Nimble Feet” has had new reach; I just counted 40 performances uploaded
to YouTube in the last few years. The piece is attractive although a bit bland.
However, that’s not my problem, for a basic argument for diversity is easy to
understand. What I find so frustrating is that none of the performers I
listened to treated “Nimble Feet” like common practice black music, meaning a
situation where the pulse is ruthlessly even and the syncopations work in
African opposition to the ground rhythm. Rather, the performances are full of a
romantic European attitude.
Going one step further:
Florence Price took the gatekeepers off the hook. The gatekeepers could fund
the performance of an old Price symphony (or a new Concerto in Memoriam George
Floyd or whatever), get the social justice kudos at the gala, then go home and
watch their stock index go up. Meanwhile, nothing about common practice black
music was learned within classical institutions.
Our symphonic musicians should just finally learn to
play the blues and a beat! It’s not that hard! If you can learn to play Mahler,
you can learn to play the basic blues and a basic beat. Once again, this was
the point of my New York Times essay about Rhapsody in Blue, “The Worst Masterpiece.”
…
Related post: Philip
Ewell’s musicological book from 2023 is peak woke, and I found plenty to
criticize.
The question begged in Iverson’s comment is why “symphonic
musicians should just finally learn to play the blues and a beat”?
What does Iverson really mean by common practice black
music? Which blacks? In the United States? In Kenya?
In Indonesia? In Ghana? I pick Kenya and Ghana non-randomly because I’ve
benefited greatly from books by Christian pastors and theologians from Ghana
and a few of my friends in my college years were fellow Christians from
Kenya. I can intuit what Iverson really
means by common practice black music but if I intuit correctly then Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha is emphatically not part of that common
practice black music. There are a
variety of questions begged behind two claims and I don’t consider it hair-splitting
to ask what assumptions have gone into the claims.
What does Iverson think symphonic musicians have to gain
from learning to play blues and a beat?
The ability to improvise? Well, no, they won’t learn anything about
improvisation from blues and a beat that didn’t exist in the centuries of
figured bass usage or in the Italian partimento practices that span
centuries. Blue notes? If by blue notes
we mean notes that can only be found “between the keys”, well, Anton Reicha was extolling the use of
quarter-tones in his Treatise on Melody back around 1810. False relations where G natural and G sharp
show up at the same time or in close temporal proximity? Those show up in English liturgical music
from around the time of Tallis and Byrd.
The trouble is that you could pick almost any random element Iverson
might potentially propose symphonic musicians could learn by learning to play
blues and a beat and not a single one of those elements, taken in isolation, is
something that hasn’t been around within concert music traditions. Sure, the combination of ingredients
in blues is different but there’s a more foundational question that is begged
behind the question what is to be gained.
Whatever common practice black music Iverson means it is
clear that just playing more Florence Price somehow fails to convey the secrets
and wisdom contained in common practice black music. But if Lorence Price, a black woman composer,
is bereft of those qualities in such a way that playing her music adds “nothing”
whose music would?
But which common practice Iverson means leads to another
question, whether common practice black music and common practice white music
are necessarily different. We know this
isn’t the case when it comes to, say, Christian hymnody. Thomas Andrew Dorsey made very few changes to
“Maitland” when he composed his most famous and justifiably beloved hymn. This is well-known and gets mentioned by Michael
Harris in a book about Dorsey’s Gospel blues legacy.
William T.
Dargan wrote about the lining out tradition and showed fairly persuasively that
the lining out tradition began in the seventeenth century in low Anglican
parishes where literacy was low. The
lining out tradition among poor English and Scottish parishes was so
commonplace that the tradition of lining out metrical psalmody migrated to the
American colonies. There it flourished for a time until nascent black American
churches used it and higher brows contended that white churches should switch
to shape-note hymnody so as not to have the same kind of lined out metrical
psalmody and Dr. Watts idioms in common with their black churchgoing
contemporaries. At different stages in
the American experiment white and black churches in the low liturgical scenes
had so much in common there were edicts against the shared vernacular. There have been periods among white and black
communities where there were shared musical practices and yet one side or
another decided that for the sake of some kind of racial differentiation or
pursuit of distinction commonalities needed to be de-emphasized or a tradition
needed to be overtly sidelined.
While in predominantly white churches in the 1970s through
1990s there are accounts of worship wars it might be precisely on this topic of
Christian battles over what liturgical music is or isn’t suitable that we learn
these battles happen in age after age.
In the United States in the early 20th century a case can be
made that was in black churches in what religion scholars would probably call
the mainline in which worship wars were fought in the early 20th
century. You won’t get a very fair take
on the situation Richard Allen faced in founding the African Methodist
Episcopal Church if you only read something like Michael
Harris’ book on Thomas Andrew Dorsey and the birth of Gospel blues.
On the other hand if you read Mark Burford’s magisterial Mahalia Jackson and the Black
Gospel Field you will learn something, the triumph of Gospel blues and
the whoop-it-up Gospel shouter singers was so complete that figures among black
classical music who openly expressed reservations about this new popular
direction in black American church music were functionally sidelined. William Levi Dawson was doubtful about the
new direction because it would pave the way for pastors and church music
directors to just run with the least trained and least talented musicians who
knew how to work crowds. But were those
reservations informed by Eurocentric highbrow pretenses? You could choose to read Singing
Like Germans that way.
But the salient point I am trying to make here is that
people choosing to reject entire bodies of music in the interest of preserving
a perceived racial distinction goes in every direction. One of my personal reservations about Ewell’s
book was that he wrote as though the erasure of BIPOC composers within
classical music were done by white theorists.
Doubtless this would be the majority pattern, I surmise, but Mark
Burford’s work suggests another possibility, that the triumph pf black popular
musical styles entailed a parallel rejection of musical styles and forms that
were construed as too Euro-aspirant. In
other words, if Burford’s observation that men like William Levi Dawson had
reservations about nascent Gospel blues as the purview of musical hacks it’s
not a foregone conclusion that blues and ragtime and jazz were all there is or
was to a common practice black music. The violin works of Joseph Boulougne will be
sidelined if those whose idea of black music is Armstrong and Davis keep
calling the shots just as much as it will be sidelined if people of the cult of
Beethoven keep doing their thing.
Classical music by black composers may have been sidelined by black
communities choosing to stop backing composers of symphonic and operatic music
as by white hostility.
The triumph of blues and jazz as “the” common practice
black music may be an overlooked part of the failure of Florence Price’s music
to have gotten more traction. It’s not
that her work is badly made it’s that we’ve already got Scott Joplin and I just
think it's patently obvious Scott Joplin’s music is more memorable than the
music of Florence Price. I recall Iverson had a
few words about Harrison for the centennial of the composer’s birth but I
don’t recall a similar post that same year observing the centennial of Scott
Joplin’s death. Harrison’s music for
guitar using just intonation octatonic scales is fun and I recommend you give
it a listen. That said, is there some
kind of tell in Iverson having not written much about Joplin’s death and his influence
back in 2017? What was it about Harrison
that got a post but not the King of Ragtime?
Since I’m on the matter of ragtime now might be a time to
ask whether or not a common practice is actually an accurate handling of a
musical style. Jazz pianists may say you
ought to play rags with swing. I don’t
recall Joplin ever mentioning swing in his School of Ragtime. For ragtime composed and published before the
Jazz Age it’s not a given that you should swing the sixteenth note or any note
values. We know that Scott Joplin’s
contemporary Joseph Lamb did not exactly play with swing.
There’s nothing in Joplin’s School of
Ragtime to suggest swing was a concept to apply to his music. “Play
slowly until you catch the swing” is not proof that “swing” as jazz players
define it was what was meant. Joplin elsewhere said that Exercise No. 2 would
be screwed up by pianists who liked to vamp. When a jazz pianist says that ragtime should
be played with swing it’s okay to be skeptical, especially if you’re familiar
with the primary sources (Joplin and Scott and not any jazz musicians from 1917
onward who played Joplin).
Let’s say symphonic musicians would benefit from
learning to play blues and a beat.
Should blues players be expected to know how to handle a partimento
exercise, a figured bass or writing a fugue with triple counterpoint? Dismissing a blues guitarist for not playing one of Bach’s
two-part inventions would be obviously dubious and yet Iverson’s case, as he’s
made it, simply flips a script. Iverson’s suggestion is simply saying their
music would be better if it took my music more seriously and were
informed more by the musical values of my music. But hasn’t this been precisely the script
used by symphonic musicians to cast aspersion on popular music made by black
American musicians? How is flipping the script rejecting the script?
Ethan Iverson’s prescription is very simple, “Their music would be better if they learned to play my music.” If he means that pop and classical could benefit from synergistic interaction and affection, I agree. If that’s not what he actually meant his prescription risks being, dare I say it, a bit Roger Scrutonish.
POSTSCRIPT:
There are
times when Iverson writes about American popular music in a way that can read
as if he’s nudging and winking to fellow initiates about the things you could
only see if you were part of some mystery cult.
Take these excerpts, which again touch on the recent work of scholars to
highlight the work of Florence Price. These comments from Iverson’s writing
about Philip Ewell’s book:
https://iverson.substack.com/p/tt-257-new-book-by-philip-ewell
…
Masters of American
music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book; they know
that trying to explain some basics about the mechanism to the committee is
casting pearls before swine. A whole lot of college professors need to prove
that they are worthy of receiving a few secrets before any of this gets much
better.
The road for respect is
long. Sometimes it feels like we take two steps backward after one step
forward. The last decade has seen the elevation of minor romantic symphonist
Florence Price to something like sainthood in the classical music academy. The
academy thinks it is paying off some dues, but those dues are still waiting to
be paid. Celebrating Florence Price offers little currency in the actual fight
against racism down in the subconscious where it really matters.
I strongly doubt that
any of Price’s recent advocates can sing one Louis Armstrong solo.
In his book, Ewell
discusses Price, of course, but the few pages on jazz are an afterthought.
Indeed, nowhere in On Music Theory does Ewell
mention African-influenced rhythm as a theoretical organizing principle.
…
For the violinists and
the conductors, swinging at the drums will help them play Mozart and Mahler.
Guaranteed. Indeed, new horizons of expression will be right there for the
taking, for there can be a kind of stiffness in classical musicians, a way the beat
can be uptight. Jazz drums teaches the triplet, the luminous three within the
two that is such a marvelous feature of the formal music descended from Mother
Africa. And this also might quell some of the lingering racism in elite musical
institutions, where some of the practitioners still think jazz and other black
music is “easy.” If it’s easy, let’s hear the first violinist and the conductor
play a bit of drums with a decent jazz pianist and bassist.
Knowing basic jazz
drums is a quick fix for a variety of issues. But apart from renovating the
room, an entry-level command of the drum set would unlock new forms of
compositional creativity. What fresh combinations of sounds might appear from
the best and the brightest if our elite ensembles understood rhythm as well as
they understood notation?
This extended excerpt I've quoted is a more overt form of “their music would be more legitimate if they took my music seriously.” It’s in these kinds of paragraphs that Iverson comes off as a flipped script to the paternalism of Roger Scruton. This time around it's the symphonic musicians who aren't worthy of the raw realness of blues and jazz musicians and not the other way around. I made this same point in response to Wesley Morris' 1619 Project piece, flipping the script is not the same as rejecting it outright and rejecting the script outright is what we most seem to need. It's as true on the jazz/blues/rock/country/pop side as it is on the classical music/"serious" music side.
PS
None of this means I won't be blogging about Iverson's sonatas because I really have been enjoying those lately. But sometimes Iverson's writing reminds me that practical musicians would do well to take seriously that the theories we think by become all the more harmful if we've never examined them. As Charles W Mills put it, the theories we least examine that govern our thinking are the ones that most bind us, whether it was in The Racial Contract or Black Rights/White Wrongs escapes me at the moment. That Ewell's book was not an equivalent to the work of Mills' work in political philosophy with respect to music education doesn't mean I have to take the worst account of Ewell's motives. I agree with Iverson that the possibilities of a synthesis of classical forms with the vocabularies of American popular music are worth exploring. I more than agree with that. It's all the glib potshots he feels obliged or entitled to take along the way that I find off-putting.
