Joseph F Lamb's "American Beauty" Rag with score (Rifkin performance)

Now I have loved Scott Joplin's music for decades but there's obviously a whole lot more about and within ragtime as a style than the King of Ragtime.  Joseph Lamb was an acquaintance of Joplin's via John Stark, and Lamb wrote some great rags, too.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9p7WgM_5Rg

Give me a few strains from Joplin and Lamb and I could give you a couple of guitar sonatas.  They're works are public domain in the United States, after all, so ... a couple of guitar sonatas based on their best ideas sounds like a fun undertaking.  

They'd be tough to play, though. 

some reservations about Ethan Iverson's suggestion that symphonic musicians should learn how to play blues and a beat

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 20^th 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 20^th 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?

 Masters of American music know that their art is too esoteric to be written in a book, huh?  So why teach it? Worthy of receiving the secrets?  Yeah, that resembles a gnostic cult!  To whom are the dues to be paid and how does Iverson know for certain the dues are outstanding?  To whom are the dues due to be paid?  Violinists and conductors should play jazz drums?  

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. 

Ethan Hein's Joy to the Modes and a response post featuring Scott Joplin's The Entertainer in parallel minor, you probably have a really great melody on your hands if it can still sound good after modal mutation

https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2024/joy-to-the-modes/

 

Ethan Hein has used “Joy to the World” as a way to demonstrate different modes running from Lydian to Locrian. He points out he’s not the first person to have done this but he has done it better.  I agree.

In his concluding paragraph Ethan wrote the following, “Does this have any musical value beyond music theory teaching?“  In a way the question to ask back is, “Does it have to?” Bit O remember when I was reading Elaine Sisman’s book on Haydn and variation technique I got to thinking about how frequently in 18^th century variation forms the major key theme showed up in parallel minor for at least one of the variations.  Minor key sets of variations have also featured parallel major variations, too, and Hein’s presentation of “Joy to the World” in every diatonic mode reveals just how indestructible the tune is.  

My take-away as a composer and musician is that subjecting your melody to the harshest and most abrupt modal mutations you can think of helps you figure out whether you have a solid melody or not.  If your melodic contour still sounds good in spite of being run through all the modal mutational paces that’s a good sign that you have a versatile tune with a memorable contour.  If you shift into another mode and you find the melody begins to swim a bit then it may be best as a constituent part of some musical thing with other ideas.  

I’ll give you an example off the top of my head, you can take the first two strains of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and play them in C minor and I submit (being the highly biased Scott Joplin fan that I am) that the music will still sound great.

I'll give you an example after the break. I've limited myself to strains A and B and I just whipped this up in the last hour and a half so if it doesn't look so great pardon the made-to-demonstrate-a-concept layout.

Marc-Andre Hamelin plays William Bolcom's "Tabby Cat Walk"

You know, we haven't featured any ragtime here at Wenatchee The Hatchet in a while.  We gotta fix that.  So here we go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-oOHPY1wno

Hamelin isn't always playing piano sonatas by Medtner or Kapustin. :)

Someone got the Hamelin set of Bolcom's rags and while I haven't blogged about Bolcom that I can recall I wanted to share some of the fun on a sunny and muggy Seattle weekend.  

Doing a ragtime variation of the end of Haydn's "Joke" quartet is a pretty sweet finishing touch. 

there's a new record label that intends to highlight overlooked female composers--a request that someone tackle a set of May Aufderheide's rags and songs

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/07/new-record-label-raises-profile-of-forgotten-female-composers

So ... would they be game to consider recording the complete rags of May Aufderheide?  I haven't seen anyone do a project like that (that I know of). As Edward Berlin and other ragtime historians have noted over the last half century ragtime was a style that was pioneered by African Americans but many a middle-class woman also wrote rags and, as noted previously, I'm not aware that anyone has tackled the project of recording all of Aufderheide's published works.  

Anyway, best wishes to the new label now that my little request has been registered. As much as I love Scott Joplin's music to say that almost any of his near contemporaries who composed rags were "overlooked" by comparison is probably an understatement even if I threw up James Scott and Joseph Lamb as names of known associates who were masters of the style. 

might take a little break, a postlude to Ragtime and Sonata Forms where I talk briefly about Henry Martin's ragtime-with-fugue and Richard St. Clair's Piano Sonata No.7 both ragtime classical fusion works that I like but have some criticisms of

Ragtime and Sonata Forms is finally done and since it amounted to 131 pages of content I think maybe that gives me some wiggle room to take a break from blogging about anything for a while.  Plus it lets the entire series stay on the main front page for a while in case people want an easier time of reading through the whole thing.  There are also hard links to each installment at the separate music page.

I've thought about blogging about Henry Martin's ragtime and fugue in G flat major as part of the project.

You can check out a lively performance of the piece that breaks down the work into its sections over here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWzGZspu6I

Fugue starts 2:37 and runs through to the end.

Dale Cockrell on the habit of middle and upper class whites to impute their own racism to the working class while advocating for a German Idealist informed bourgeois transcendentalist approach to music, excerpts from his books Demons of Disorder and Everybody's Doing' It

https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2019/08/a-vital-new-book-about-music-and-race.html
...

That this world of sex, dance and music was interracial is crucial to Mr. Cockrell’s book “Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in New York, 1840-1917.” It makes the connection to his scholarly specialty and passion: American popular music and its black vernacular roots. In an earlier, essential study, “Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World” (1997), he brilliantly elaborates an unpopular truth—that, early on, blackface music-making was not necessarily racist. Rather, it could be about class: a means of empowering the little guy in a world of capitalist snobs and prudes. And Mr. Cockrell, accordingly, is an eloquent advocate for the most gifted, most popular pertinent composer: Stephen Foster, in whose songs of loneliness and hardship (though sung in exaggerated black make-up by white performers) he finds an empathetic voice arising from Foster’s own marginality. 

In “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” this theme returns newly embroidered and contextualized. Assessing the white minstrel singer whose signature blackface song was “Zip Coon,” Mr. Cockrell calls George Washington Dixon (1802-61) “surely one of the most complex, enigmatic, and colorful figures in American history.” He continues: “There is no question that the skeleton around which [the blackface minstrel show] was built was the denigration of black people. . . . And—too often forgotten—there is no question that its enormous, century-long appeal was because of the music and dance that gave it flesh. That music and dance . . . was an expression of urban, lower-class, dance-hall and brothel culture. To the throngs on the stage of the Bowery Theatre, ‘Jim Crow’ belonged to them. Who would have thought that lower-class music and dance deserved a place on the legitimate stage? . . . ‘Zip Coon’ belonged to them as well. The song was of them, and once Dixon sang their song . . . their point was made: our music; we made it; we belong here.” 

...

It would have been nice had Horowitz quoted more of Cockrell's work but so it goes.  Between Douglas Shadle's research in Orchestrating the Nation on the tacit or explicit suppression of bids at creating an American symphonic tradition and Dale Cockrell's books on the emergence of American vernacular styles from the still troubling idioms of minstrelsy and blackface throughout the American street theater traditions that became a foundation for vaudeville and other forms of lowbrow arts, there's a larger case to be made that is part of the more recent battles in music history, historiography and in musicology over just how beholden American conceptions of music education and culture need to be to the cumulative legacies of German Idealism and the Romantic era canons of western Europe.


DEMONS OF DISORDER: EARLY BLACKFACE MINSTRELS AND THEIR WORLD
Dale Cockrell
Cambridge University Press
Copyright (c) Cambridge University Press 1997
ISBN 0-521-56074 2 hardback
ISBN 0-521-56828 5 paperback

page 85

... Any reading of the daily newspapers of New York, Boston, or Philadelphia, especially the "Police Court" column, will reveal a common world in which blacks and whites lived by, worked with, drank among, fought with (to be sure and not to be understated), and loved each other.  Miscegnation was deeply distressing to middle and elite classes in part because it was so common among the lower. In Massachusetts in the 1830s the only legal distinciton between blacks and whites was that they could not marry with each other; yet apparently many did so, for the court reports are filled with mixed-race couples being brought into the halls of justice for the "unnatural" sin of amalgamation (the period's term for miscegnation). Of course the reporter, an agent of the paper's clientele, was always incredulous that a white man or a white woman could ever be attracted to someone of the other race.  

To read between the lines is to discover a world in which comradeship and love often had no eyes for color of skin, a world in which white women shrieked out in emotional pain because the courts condemned their black husbands to penitentiary for breaking the amalgamation laws.  

page 142

The powerful have a formulaic response to the ear culture of the weak: Dismisss it all as noise first, then associate it with antisocial behavior. 

pages 148-149

... Those working-class audiences of the 1830s who believed that theatre was participatory, as it had been to their ancestors for centuries  and centuries, were replaced in the 1840s by audiences who believed theater was better purchased than produced, as it had been by those in the first tier for a century. Management enforced a new code of behavior, one that led to the theatre becoming much quieter, more and more a private space  for reflection, in effect a temple of culture whose sacralization was complete by late century.  ... 

page 169
... It was to the advantage of the white middle class to scapegoat white, common Americans by painting them the racists, in the bargain cleansing their own respectably reformed consciences and driving a wedge in the real and reasonable alliance between white and black common Jacksonians. The means was simple: Reason would have it that laughing with the blackface must mean laughing at the black. Tragically, the flanking powers of reason and media convinced even working-class folk. By the last third of the [nineteenth] century blackface minstrelsy had become what the Virginia Minstrels had forecast: a weapon by which one group of Americans defined, marginalized and contained another--racism, sexism, money, power and (capital M) Music.  

For those who have not read either of Cockrell's books the sharp edge of his polemic is that middle and upper class whites, particularly those who regarded themselves as civilized, read their own racism and racist dispositions on to street theater, and that as minstrelsy became more mainstream and moved from the level of street theater and underground or folk activity the stereotypologies that were used to satirize "respectable" culture by way of black stereotypes shifted from satirizing the well-heeled through broadbrush send-up into satirizing blacks.  Cockrell's assertion is not necessarily going to convince everyone and this will partly be because mounting a qualified defense of minstrelsy as it evolved in the Jacksonian era is going to do nothing to explain to or for people the blackface tropes that permeated Hollywood a century later.  

At the same time, Cockrell's books, in their way, recount the battle between what Raymond Knapp described in his book on Haydn (reviewed over here) as a contest between advocates of German Idealism for American arts and the work of musicians and entertainers in the minstrelsy, light opera, and musical theater scenes.  Over the last century and a half a consensus has developed among scholars, historians and journalists that Americans in the nineteenth century pined for transcendent music while the musical styles that were actually taking America by storm were emerging from the brothels and saloons and red-light districts.  It is this point that Dale Cockrell makes with unusual clarity: 

Everybody’s Doin’ It: Sex, Music, and Dance in in New York 1840-1917
Dale Cockrell
copyright (c) 2019 by Dale Cockrell
W. W. Norton & COmpany
LCCN 2019000965
ISBN 9780393608946
ISBN 9780393608953 (ebook)

pages 60-61

The development of dance-hall and concert-saloon culture came about during a time in which many elite New Yorkers were asking probing questions about the nature of their nation's music. One such was Wall Street lawyer George Templeton Strong, a passionate amateur musician who for some years served as president of the New York Philharmonic Society. A prolific diarist, Strong left accounts of his day-to-day activities and musings that filled 2,250 pages at his death in 1875.  Many of his notations reflected his obsession with music. An entry for December 6, 186, serves as an example:

Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony [is] perfectly and transcendently beautiful. No music is beautiful in equal degree with his. Sublimity belongs to Handel. The power of Beethoven is in part due to the presence of an uncanny kind of intensity and power--a mighty spirit seeking rest and finding none. Haydn owes much to the goodness and healthiness and geniality embodied in his best works.

Strong's words idealizing European composers implied his agreement with a sentiment expressed by Putnam's Monthly Magazine in 1854: "Among civilized nations there is, probably, none so little musical as the American." Strong and Putnam's were not alone. A whole school of thought found nothing of transcendent beauty in any American music and set out on a project to sacralize the classical music experience through performances of European masterpieces. 

There was, however, some resistance to this approach.  Composer and critic William Henry Fry called for a "Declaration of Independence in Art" and issued a challenge to the American musician:

[He] should not allow the name of Beethoven, or Handel or Mozart to prove an eternal bugbear to him, nor should he pay them reverence; he should only reverence his Art, and strike out manfully and independently into untrodden realms, just as his nature and inspirations my invite him.

Strong and others in the "Transcendence School" surely never set foot in Harry Hill's, or brought a supply of stamps to John Allen's place (Fry probably did not either.)  They left it rather to Asmodeans like Crapsey, Smith, Dyer, and others of the "Expose School of Reportage" to peel back the roofs of Water Street dance halls and flash concert saloons and tell about the music they heard there.  To these Asmodeans, as it would surely also have been with Strong and those of his class, the sounds made in these places were manifestly not transcendently beautiful; they were, rather--in some of their own words--out of tune, wheezing, hideous, wild, cracked, thumping, execrable, wailing, wiry, low, squalling, jangling, murdering, savage, and lunatic. Yet there were three hundred or so concert saloons in New York City, and without daily music by the house band each concert saloon would have been just a saloon.  There were at least seventy-four dance halls like John Allen's in the city, and without a dance band every night each dance hall would have just been a drinking spot.

New York's musical elite were looking in the wrong places for America's music. In the nether reaches of the city a new music was being made by hundreds and hundreds of professional New York musicians, each highly trained in their own way, each striking out "manfully and independently into untrodden realms," just as Fry had charged them.  It was music that was being enjoyed and loved by tens of thousands of New Yorkers--overwrought, often hysterical protestations by elite Asmodeans aside. It was down in the lower wards and along the Bowery and the waterfront where a wide diversity of lower-class Americans--black, white, the newly immigrant--were making and sharing inspired music.  There the transcendently pertinent question--Where is America's music?--was being answered.  

As I've noted earlier, this kind of argument (or, if you will, a counter-myth that does battle against another myth, the mythology of post-German Idealist art-as-religion) coheres with a parallel case Raymond Knapp has made regarding camp and German Idealism in his monograph on Haydn.

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)

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.

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. (127)  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.

There have been Americans who have, for almost two centuries now, been eager to shake off the shackles of only ever assessing American music in terms of values imported from Europe and imposed upon would-be contributions to the concert-music traditions to find them wanting.  It's not altogether surprising that the American composers, the United States composers to be more accurate, who began to make music that became part of some kind of United States canon began to explicitly and emphatically reject the rules of the game when the game was named as German Idealism. 

But there's an ambivalence and ambiguity to the American popular and vernacular styles having emerged from the brothels and red light districts and the underground sex industries that Dale Cockrell doesn't necessarily account for that we can see addressed more directly by Scott Joplin when he made his bids at opera and the long-since lost piano concerto--Joplin was concerned that though the music itself was vital and full of possibilities, ragtime and the popular sounds of his era had songs full of what he regarded as ghastly and demeaning stereotypes. 

Joplin's sense of conscience about the vulgarity and brutality of American vernacular music was more than shared by those who kept him, at an institutional level, from having opportunities white contemporaries had.  A century after the emergence of ragtime there would be debates about the musical and literary merits of rap and hip hop that would parallel debates about ragtime, though with perhaps the signal difference being that ragtime may have been one of the later styles to evolve within what Richard Taruskin has described as the western European literate musical traditions.  We know from the work of writers like Cockrell and Edward Berlin and others that the notes on the page don't convey what ragtime sounds like but ragtime as a popular style nonetheless emerged within the context of the printed page before the commercial mechanically recorded music industry as we know it took shape.  Be all that as it may, Joplin's criticism of the vulgarity of coon songs and ragtime in his day does not necessarily oblige us to presume that some variation of Romantic era and post-Romantic German Idealism, some variation of the Matthew Arnold and Richard Wagner art-religion is the only possible alternative.

Even though I love the music of Haydn I don't feel obliged to regard Haydn in Romantic terms either in the positive sense of defining him in terms of a Romantic conception of genius, or in the negative sense of viewing Haydn as the less-than-Mozart or the less-than-Beethoven because he was willing to write music to order for aristocrats.  As orthodox as it is to assume in music history and musicology that Mozart wrote better music than Haydn and that Beethoven wrote better music than Haydn I just don't hear it that way.  I like some of Beethoven's later works a great deal but overall regard Haydn as the more enjoyable composer.  I admit to having both an avant garde sympathy streak and also a populist streak.  I like to listen to Xenakis and Messiaen and microtonalist composers  but I don't feel much obligation to write like them.  I admired a variety of works by Penderecki without feeling a big impulse to emulate his earlier style.  I was drawn, far more, to Haydn, and what I have found as I have studied Haydn's work and life and considered what music historians and scholars have had to say about his work is that, for my time and interests, Haydn and not Beethoven nor Mozart, is the composer whose work has something to offer this twenty-first century guitarist composer--for that matter I have even enjoyed works by Clementi and Hummel more than works by Mozart and that, I have discovered, can inspire genuinely shocked reactions from musicians ... but that is probably the topic of some other post. 

I also think that if we guitarists steep ourselves in the early Bohemian and Austrian and Italian guitarist composers of the early 19th century (i.e. don't "cancel" it, a la Doug Shadle) that a panorama of possibilities for developing fusions of American vernacular styles with 18th century approaches to musical forms open up but that, too, is really best saved for some other writing project. 

a question for people on the internet about May Aufderheide, has anyone ever attempted to record her complete works?

It's been on my mind since the centennial of the death of Scott Joplin that we have several good box sets of the complete piano music of Scott Joplin and a couple of recordings of Treemonisha and even recordings of his songs.  A comparable set of recordings of the complete rags and waltz of James Scott and Joseph Lamb have been done by Guido Nielson but it's gotten me thinking, has anyone don a comparable complete works recording of May Aufderheide?

For those who don't already know, Aufderheide was probably the best known and most successful woman composing in the ragtime style.  The ragtime revival ensured the classical piano rags of the Joplin school got attention (and it's attention they deserve since Joplin and the Joplin school have been musical heroes of mine for decades), but ragtime was more a genre of popular song than concert rags in the Joplin school and even among instrumental or piano rag there were contributions by a variety of women as well as the usually recognized men.

David Andruss plays Henry Martin's Prelude and Fugue in G flat major-A Slow Drag

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBWzGZspu6I

It took ... a while ... to get the scores for Henry Martin's cycle of preludes and fugues. The recordings by Sara Davis Buechner and Henry Martin are easy to get as digital downloads (if you got the recordings a decade or so ago David Buechner was the listed name).  But the scores, the scores are hard to get ahold of.  But I got them.

I hope to discuss this piece in some detail in the future.  This is a fun piece.  In terms of personal aesthetics I think it would be cooler to start with a ragtime that evolves into a fugue or, better yet, do a Charles Ives style cumulative form approach in which a fugal work is made from fragments of what eventually becomes a more traditional rag as the climax of the fugue.  Now that would be fun to compose!

Martin's cycle dates from the later 1990s and there have been some dissertations on his approach to developing a fusion of contemporary classical with jazz elements but I don't have those names and dissertations off the top of my head.  I hope, though, that gives you enough to do some research of your own. 

Meanwhile, do check out this video performance of Martin's Prelude and Fugue in G flat major.  It's a fun piece.  Clearly more contemporary composers from the later 20th century found ways to work the language of ragtime into sonata and fugue already but there are plenty of unexplored possibilities for continuing this kind of musical experimentation. 

Maybe that's not your kind of thing and if not, alright, but I've been intrigued by exploring possibilities for developing a synthesis of ragtime with sonata forms and fugues and other styles for decades so I'm happy to see there are experiments toward this end already out there.  I admit that I have my own convictions about what I feel works and doesn't work but I'm trying to save that kind of musical analysis for later.  For now I'm more happy to share a link or two thanks to there being online performances of works that are, I admit, obscure. 

Richard St. Clair Piano Sonata No. 7 (Ragtime)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUdG49V7BGw

I've been compiling material for a newer, more extended take on ragtime and sonata forms and part of that work has involved new discoveries.  For instance, I didn't know about Richard St. Clair's Piano Sonata No. 7 until this year and now that I know about it I want to spend some time studying it as part of an expansion on my old essay about the possibility of temporal/spatial correspondence between the syntactics of ragtime and sonata forms. 

Ethan Hein on receptivity to Ellington and jazz, a reminder that the debate about jazz continued what happened in late 19th century debates about ragtime

I first learned about Ethan Hein's blogging through Slipped Disc.  Now I'm relatively sure regulars at that website might not be happy to know that their vitriolic reactions to Hein's blogging would pique my interest in his blogging.  Though I think of myself as a moderately conservative stick in the mud sort on many things I'm sympathetic to what might be called avant garde ideas about the arts.  I am particularly interested in restoring a synergistic or, if you will, dialectical relationship between "high" and "low" arts that I believe have balkanized and separated since the dawn of the Romantic era.  So even if I don't share Ethan Hein's fondness for hip hop I am sympathetic to his interest in music theory and showing ways in which music theory can be applicable across styles.  I probably won't agree with him on any number of topics being a semi stick in the mud Presbyterian on the West Coast, but I like reading his blog lately.  Chalk it up to yet another author where irascible comments from the likes of John Borstlap boomerang and get me interested in reading someone to find out if they can even be half as bad as has been said.  I ended up binge-reading about half a dozen Adorno books that way!

So, anyway, here's a post Hein wrote that I want to look at.  It's been interesting reading how debates about the musical legitimacy of jazz in the 1920s seem to have more or less taken up the debates that were had about the musical legitimacy of ragtime ten and twenty years prior. 

http://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2017/duke-ellington-percy-grainger-and-the-status-of-jazz-in-the-academy/

…

While music educators acknowledged the popularity of jazz, they saw its main virtue as being effective bait to lure young people into the study of “serious” music. The Etude, a music education periodical, devoted its entire August 1924 issue to “The Jazz Problem.”

In his introductory essay, editor James Francis Cooke wrote that jazz would need to dramatically transformed by composers before it would have any real value: “In its original form it has no place in musical education and deserves none” (quoted in Maita, 2014). While other contributors to the issue had more conflicted and nuanced views of jazz, the general tone was dismissive. Viewed against this context, Grainger’s enthusiasm for jazz is remarkable—he even wrote a pro-jazz rebuttal in the following issue of The Etude.

Ellington was the first jazz composer to be taken at all seriously by classical critics, though even his supporters found ways to demean him, intentionally or otherwise. In June of 1932, R. D. Darrell wrote the first in-depth critical review of Ellington’s music. Darrell praised Ellington for “economy of means, satisfying proportion of detail, and the sense of inevitability—of anticipation andrevelatory fulfillment—that are the decisive qualifications of musical forms” (58, emphasis in original). However, when he placed the music in context, he was stunningly offensive by modern standards:

[W]hen I upturn treasure in what others consider to be the very muck of music, I cannot be surprised or disappointed if my neighbor sees only mud where I see gold, ludicrous eccentricity where I find an expressive expansion of the tonal palette, tawdry tunes instead of deep song, ’nigger music’ instead of ’black beauty’” (58).

While Darrell came to admire “Black and Tan Fantasy,” his initial reaction was derision:

I laughed like everyone else over its instrumental wa-waing and gargling and gobbling, the piteous whinnying of a very ancient horse, the lugubrious reminiscence of the Chopin funeral march. But as I continued to play the record for the amusement of my friends I laughed less heartily and with less zest. In my ears the whinnies and wa-was began to resolve into new tone colors, distorted and tortured, but agonizingly expressive. The piece took on a surprising individuality and entity as well as an intensity of feeling that was totally incongruous in popular dance music. Beneath all its oddity and perverseness there was a twisted beauty that grew on me more and more and could not be shaken off (58).

In fairness to Darrell, Ellington’s instrumental timbres are startling even now, as I will discuss below.

The British critic Constant Lambert was another early champion of Ellington from within the classical music world, but he too felt the need to qualify his praise with condescension. He prefaced his discussion of Ellington by observing that “Negro talent” was “on the whole more executive than creative” (Lambert 1934, 206). However, he found Ellington to be “a real composer, the first jazz composer of distinction, and the first negro composer of distinction” (Lambert 1934, 214). Unlike Grainger, Lambert recognized that Ellington frequently through-composed his music. Also, Lambert recognized that the canonical form of an Ellington piece is the recording, not the score. The Philadelphia Record interviewed Ellington soon afterward and asked him to respond to Lambert’s praise. They probably took wide liberties in representing his responses, describing “a look of simple wonder” on his face and rendering his quotes in dialect, e.g. “Is zat so?” (quoted in Tucker 1993, 112).

…

Beyond his love for black culture, Ellington was not overtly political. For example, he declined to join the March on Washington in 1963. However, he did play a role in what Kelley (1996) calls “infrapolitics”—subtle protest undertaken in cultural and informal spheres. Ellington cultivated a dignified and decorous public persona, one that demanded respect not just from whites, but from other blacks who disdained jazz as unseemly. His dandyism made a comparable statement to the prewar black fashion for ostentatious zoot suits:

What’s intriguing about Ellington’s public persona of respectability and dignity in his musical work is that he was, in a sense, reproducing what Scott Joplin did in the 1890s through to Joplin’s death in 1917 during the Ragtime Era.  Duke’s regal and well-spoken take had precedents in the black musical community and history of the U.S. which is not to say he necessarily copied Joplin.  As Edward Berlin’s work on ragtime has shown, Joplin felt that the lyrics to ragtime as popular song trafficked so freely in racial stereotypes and caricatures and celebrated violence to such a degree he felt the music would be easier to love and appreciate if it wasn't tethered to the coon song traditions.  

Fortunately for Joplin's work and legacy we think of ragtime now as primarily a genre of instrumental piano music and not as the genre of popular song that it actually was in its day.  The parallels between the vitriol directed at ragtime in the 1890s and early 1900s as musically worthless garbage by colored people and debates about rap and hiphop are hard not to notice.  Whereas in the late 19th century the lament was it took no musical talent to play ragtime compared to the classical piano literature, Edward Berlin and others have highlighted that "ragging the classics" was popular.  To translate that a bit, sampling classical literature into what was then a contemporary popular style was a well-known habit within the style.  It was even done into the 1920s.  George Cobb transformed a Rachmaninoff piece (Prelude in C sharp minor, Op. 3, No. 2) into a "Russian Rag", for instance.  

This video is probably the best example online of how "ragging the classics" works. There are other videos where translating classical piano repertoire into ragtime happens but this is a case of a historically known ragging within the ragtime era before it mutated into what has since been called the Jazz Era.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lezwzI3Kbr8

https://imslp.org/wiki/Russian_Rag_(Cobb%2C_George_L.)

Ragtime as a popular style so permeates the American musical legacy that ragtime scholars have made effective cases that you can't fully appreciate the evolution of country music as we have come to know it without some at least passing knowledge of ragtime.  Country, which is stereotypically thought of as the whitest of white music, has some debt to ragtime.  

I've published this in the past but here's a brief list of some books on ragtime

Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History

Edward A Berlin

Originally published by the University of California Press

Copyright (c) 1980, 2002 by Edward A Berlin

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3064-9

King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his era (2nd edition)

Edward A Berlin

Oxford University Press

Copyright (c) Edward A. Berlin 1994, 2016

ISBN 978-0-19-974032-1

ebook ISBN: 978-0-19-024605-1

Ragtime: It's History, Composers, and Music

edited by John Edward Hasse

Copyright (c) 1985 by John Edward Hasse

Schirmer Books

ISBN: 0-02-8716507

ISBN: 0-02-872650-2 (pbk)

I feel obliged to cross reference to Raymond Knapp's monograph on Haydn and camp, which I discussed last year.

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)

During the late 19th and early 20th century ragtime was regarded as low-grade scandalous popular song.  White and black clergy were set against it because of the bawdy lyrics and degrading racial stereotypes that were seen as presenting African Americans in the worst possible light.  It was also considered noise any incompetent musician might play rather than dignified classics.  Interestingly, some ragtime specialists have suggested that some of the roots of ragtime can and should be traced back to solo banjo music, with an observation that one of the insults shared in correspondence declared that when African Americans tried to play the piano and played their rags they sounded like they were playing the banjo rather than playing the piano.  Lowell H. Schreyer discussed this in the Hasse book on ragtime, pages 55-69.

As if being the musical domains of African American composers weren't troublesome enough for those who believed the future of American music was in the highest of German highbrow, ragtime was also a popular style with some significant contributions by women composers.  Music that was seen as the domain of African Americans and also of middle-class white women entertaining house guests was probably about as far removed from the high ideals of German idealism as you could get, and given the extent to which popular musical styles owed some debt to minstrelsy and African American song many of the more popular American styles simply had the wrong pedigree to please those advocates of high culture music that wanted musical America to sound like Beethoven and Wagner rather than Scott Joplin and his musical descendants ranging from Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington through to contemporary African American popular music.  In Raymond Knapp's reading of American musical history, the history of American popular music has been musical camp and that ties back more readily to the legacy of the knowing joker Haydn than to the serious prophet-of-art Beethoven. 

But while I find that comparing some of the polemical writings for and against ragtime to remind me of polemical writings for and against rap there is a difference.  Ragtime was a popular style of song and instrumental music that exploded on the American scene in the 1890s but was already developing. It remained immensely popular into the 1920s when, as ragtime and jazz historians have generally established, the Ragtime Era transformed into the Jazz Era.  Many of the polemics for and against ragtime were, if you will, transposed onto jazz when you compare what was said in one era to what was said in another.  

But one of the key differences between the ragtime controversy and rap was the mediating technology.  Even though ragtime was a form of popular music it was still a form of popular music that evolved within the context of what we would now think of as traditional musical literacy and music publishing.  The ragtime masters such as Scott Joplin, James Scott and Joseph Lamb all had at least some familiarity with and affection for what would be considered staples of the classical music piano literature and concert music.  Joseph Lamb read The Etude, for instance.  In writings about Lamb it's been noted that Scott Joplin advised Lamb to revise a work and replace parallel chromatic lines with contrary motion, showing that Joplin had an understanding of what was considered traditionally good voice-leading and encouraged one of his musical friends to follow in that. By contrast, late 20th century rap and hip hop evolved within the context of a stable and dominant recorded music industry in which machinery for recording and replaying music is the dominant means to create and distribute music rather than the printed page.  

Back in my teens and twenties when I contemptuously referred to "crap" I thought it was unmusical and that sampling was not really being creative.  The more I learned about Baroque music practices and the polemics advocates of the Renaissance "first practice" made against what they regarded as the unmusical trash of what we now think of as early masterpieces of the Baroque, the more I concluded that whether or not hip hop became a favorite style of mine (I also loathed country back in my youthful days before I discovered Hank Williams Sr. and Johnny Cash), I wasn't going to say it was unmusical or that it required no musical talent or thought to make the music. 

I generally don't care for the music of John Cage but I refuse to think of him as a charlatan.  In middle age I've reached a place where I may not enjoy music or I may even hate music but I don't want to say that whoever is making the music has "no" musical ability.  Even the person who makes a song I think is insufferably annoying and stupid has musical ability, I just wish they used it to make something else!  The fact that any time I hear John Mayer's "Love on the Weekend" I want to revise into "Blood on the Windshield" might just mean that I don't like the guitar-strumming bro song genre.   Coffee house rock, for want of a better term, annoys me immensely.  If someone can teach aspiring musicians how they can compose and play their own music using songs I hate, though, I can live with that.  

Which gets me to another point I've been wanting to make as I have been thinking about authors with whom I may disagree on a few things but who I learned about by the polemics of John Borstlap.  I disagree with Adorno strongly on the Marxist side of things, and I think Adorno's Marxism blinkered his ability to appreciate the possibility that art can actually emerge from what he regarded as the trash heap of entertainment music.  But I can also say that when he got into the work of analysis and technical discussions of music he was often brilliant and he distilled better than anyone else in the 20th century the chasm between "argument" listening and composing and "groove" listening and composing.  He was far less successful at articulating how to reunite the "argument" and "groove" that he believed existed in the best Western classical music but that was separated in 20th century art and popular musical styles.  

Another way to put this is to say that I can go read Ethan Hein's blog and see that he's doing the work of a music educator.  I respect that, despite my profound ambivalence about what I have come to think of as the educational-industrial complex.  I'm not against people teaching people by any means, and I like that when I read something at Hein's blog he breaks down how the theory he's discussing can connect to songs.  By contrast ... when I read Borstlap's sweeping bloviating rants on cultural decline and the loss of music I haven't seen him write about music in a way that has a practical application in terms of chords or voice-leading principles or paradigms of formal development.  

If I had to choose one of two bloggers to suggest to people to actually read to learn about the art and discipline of music, music theory and approaches to thinking about and making music, I'd recommend Ethan Hein's blog over John Borstlap's.  Even though on paper I'm a classical guitarist and I am interested in polyphonic music for guitar with particular emphasis on non-Spanish classical guitar traditions, and even though perhaps on paper that might put me more in the John Borstlap taxonomy of music compared to someone who is into rap and hip hop and popular music, I'm kind of a theory wonk.  I was more than just happy to read Elements of Sonata Theory, I love the book.  

I recently finished a dense but fascinating book by Nicholas Cook called The Schenker Project that 

makes an interesting long-form case that as a Galician Jew assimilated into the anti-Semitic Germanic culture of Vienna, Schenker's lifelong project was building a case for a German canon that culminated in Beethoven and had room for Chopin and Brahms but that was arrayed against a post-Wagnerian conception of German music and the "new German" school.  Cook argues that Schenker took this approach in order to create an ur-German musical canon that preceded the explicitly biologically racist anti-Semitic school of thought that evolved in the wake of Richard Wagner's culturally anti-Semitic stance in the mid-19th century.  

Cook thinks that Schenker was trying, paradoxically, to save the best of German music from the worst impulses he saw in the German-speaking people themselves.  Cook then proposes that what happened to Schenker's theories when they were imported to the United States was they were completely shorn of the cultural conservatism and the Jewish legal and literary traditions that Cook argues are necessary for understanding what Heinrich Schenker was trying to accomplish. Cook makes an interesting long-form case that we can (and arguably should!) reject the totalizing conservatism of Heinrich Schenker's theories but that this doesn't mean we cannot or should not try to situate his often contradictory streams of thought in the society in which he lived, particularly as an assimilated Jew who worked in the Viennese milieu that existed up through to the First World War.  

What can look to contemporary American musicologist like a Schenker who was trying to restrict real music to Bach through Beethoven can certainly still look like that, but Cook makes an interesting and I think persuasive case that within Schenker's own time he was arguing for a German musical canon that stopped right up to the point that German musicians advocated for what we think of as classical music in overtly and explicitly anti-Semitic terms as Schenker understood them.  It's not that we can't find evidence of anti-Semitic ideas in J. S. Bach, far from it.  It's not that the same couldn't be said of maybe Haydn. The difference is, in a name, Wagner.  From Richard Wagner onward a new ideological stance began to evolve that had it that Jews could not be real artists in a truly German sense and "human" sense and this was one of the things Schenker was reacting to.  

Now the legacy of a person's creative work can end up being at odds with what they may have thought they were doing.  I doubt that when Joseph Campbell finished The Hero with a Thousand Faces that he realized he was going to codify and commodity the most routine of rote scripting schematics for Hollywood from, oh, Star Wars on into our present day.  The idea that all the world's literature, folklore, myths, fables and religious texts can be distilled down to a single monomyth and/or cosmogonic cycle seems patently idiotic to me.  But Joseph Campbell was formulating his ideas as an American in an American context where we prevailed in World War II, warred our way ouf of the Great Depression, consolidated a global empire of influence and colonial bases, and had mastered mass production and technology.  

If in the dreams of 19th century European modernists the total work of art was to supplant medieval Christendom it lacked a truly compelling religious element for the would be new civic religion.  Joseph Campbell solved that problem, and how!  By transforming all of the earlier religious and philosophical texts into a consolidated monomyth, the Hero's Journey, the stage was set for the total work of art to emerge in American popular cultural as the adventure film in which the hero realizes the heroic destiny.  Campbell may well have been working toward a new conception of self not tethered to nationalist or jingoistic or racialist communal identities but what he inadvertently paved the way for was the most formulaic of formulaic American action blockbusters in which the egoism the monomyth was probably supposed to help tamp down allowed said egoism to flourish.  

a

By extension, I'm suggesting that Nicholas Cook has made a case that what American musicologists in the wake of Milton Babbitt made Schenker's theories into is not necessarily the same as what Schenker himself hoped to achieve.  I'm happy to do without Schenkerian analysis myself!  But just as I don't want to think of hip hop as not music because it's not my favorite style, I was intrigued by Nicholas Cook's book and his making a case that Americans would do well to try to engage with Schenker in terms of what he was setting out to do, not what his American disciples transformed his theories into.  

As a godfather, so to speak, of the musical styles that became jazz I don't know if Scott Joplin would have known exactly what to make of the music of John Coltrane, or Sun Ra, or George Russell or maybe even Thelonious Monk.  

The more I read in music history and musicology the more it seems to me that whether we're fans of Baroque music, microtonal string quartets, hip hop, early jazz, ragtime, country, blues or even what would be thought of as high Classic era music, there's a possibility that we all could have common cause in rejecting the music ideologies of the Romantic era that evolved from German idealism.  The music itself I don't necessarily have a problem with.  I can admire a lot about the music of Chopin and Mendelssohn and ... some bits of Schubert.  But I find that I love most the German language music written by composers before Germans became obsessed with establishing how German they were, much like the American music I love most was written by Americans who were more set on expressing themselves as Americans than proving themselves to be the great-American-artist.  Thus Ellington and Joplin and Monk and Hank Williams Sr are brilliant while Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson and many other American musicians who set out to be "the" American musician expressing the people leave me indifferent.  As I think Paul Dini put it in a commentary on Batman: the animated series, the saying is you don't win the Emmy by actually going for the Emmy.  Lately I feel that a great deal of the most brilliant music in the history of the United States and elsewhere was composed by people who were not "going for the Emmy".  

In a typically acidic moment in Aesthetic Theory, I think it was, Theodore Adorno quipped that the people who aim to make "timeless, eternal" art generally never do so and it's often, ironically, because they so completely fail to properly chronicle the struggles and concerns and events and people of their own times.  

That might be something to play with in a later post because I'm reading a book by Daniel Melamed called Listening to Bach, and his thesis about the "musical topic" of Mass in B minor is that J. S. Bach was demonstrating it was possible to develop a fusion of what were in his day the old and new styles of composition, juxtaposing them in various ways and highlighting their points of contrast and overlap.  As a self-designated "fusionist" I am happy to endorse such an understanding of Bach.  What advocates of Bach as "high" culture over against "low" culture might miss in their defense of the high is that Bach fused English and French and Italian and German styles during an era when these nation states and empires weren't always getting along but Bach lived in an era in which such stylistic fusions were praised even if the social and political correlate was not.  Of course the way Bach mediated the fusion and interaction of styles was in the text of the Mass.  As I was saying, that's probably another post for some other time.