“On Emancipation Day,” echo the opening of the Largo of Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
Cook’s musicals, sophisticated in technique and assertive in tone, anticipated the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, which came into its own around 1925. Since the beginning of the century, W. E. B. Du Bois had been calling for a “Talented Tenth” of black intellectuals and artists to lead the masses to a better place in society. The upsurge of artistic activity in Harlem in the twenties fulfilled Du Bois’s prophecy, although the elitism implicit in the phrase “Talented Tenth” would prove problematic. Music was essential to the Re naissance spirit, and Du Bois, the philosopher Alain Locke, and the poet James Weldon Johnson all argued that black composers should avail themselves of European forms, even as they explored the native African-American tradition. Cook himself wrote in 1918: “Developed Negro music has just begun in America. The colored American is finding himself. He has thrown aside puerile imitations of the white man. He has learned that a thorough study of the masters gives knowledge of what is good and how to create. From the Russian he has learned to get his inspiration from within; that his inexhaustible wealth of folklore legends and songs furnish him with material for compositions that will establish a great school of music and enrich musical literature.”
Still, Cook could not break into “straight” composition. In the second de cade of the century, he became a bandleader, putting together a sharp group called the New York Syncopated Orchestra, which later toured Europe under the name Southern Syncopated Orchestra. Although Cook never felt comfortable with jazz—improvisation grated against his conservatory training—he highlighted the new sounds that were emerging from New Orleans, and hired the young clarinet virtuoso Sidney Bechet as his star soloist. The conductor Ernest Ansermet, who took an avid interest in jazz just as it was developing, heard Cook’s orchestra play in 1919 and, with an alertness that has won him a place of honor in anthologies of jazz writing, acclaimed Bechet as a “genius” and Cook as a “master in every respect.” Back in 1893 Anton Rubin-stein had predicted that Negro musicians could form “a new musical school” in twenty-five or thirty years. Twenty-five years later, Ansermet perceived in Bechet’s and Cook’s performances “a highway that the world may rush down tomorrow.”
Cook was hardly the only black musician to turn from classical study to a popular career. Many classically trained black musicians played significant roles in early jazz, giving the lie to the simplistic and racist idea that it was a purely instinctive, illiterate form. Will Vodery worked as a librarian for the Philadelphia and Chicago orchestras in his youth and showed promise as a conductor, but his career took off only when Florenz Ziegfeld, the master showman of Broadway, hired him to arrange music for his Follies. James Reese Europe trained on the violin but found no work when he arrived in New York in 1903; instead, he began playing bar piano, conducting theatricals, and leading bands. His all-black Clef Club Orchestra and Hell Fighters band introduced a broad audience to syncopated music that was a step or two away from jazz. Fletcher Henderson, Ellington’s future rival for the crown of king of swing, started out as a classical piano prodigy; when he went to work with Ethel Waters in New York, he had to learn jazz piano by listening to James P. Johnson piano rolls. Johnson himself, Harlem’s reigning stride pianist, had compositional aspirations that were only partly fulfilled. In a later generation, Billy Strayhorn, destined to win fame as Ellington’s chief collaborator, shone as a composing prodigy in his youth and wowed his high-school classmates with a Concerto for Piano and Percussion.
The same scenario kept repeating. Middle-class parents would send their sons and daughters to Oberlin or Fisk or the National Conservatory, hoping that they could achieve the wonderful things that Dvořák had forecast for African-American music. Hitting the wall of prejudice, these young creative musicians would turn to popular styles instead—first out of frustration, then out of ambition, finally out of pride. The youngest players embraced jazz as their birthright; they gave little thought to Dvořák’s old fantasy of Negro symphonies. Cook, however, never forgot the ambitions that he had nursed as a boy, when he stood on Lookout Mountain. He still dreamed of a “black Beethoven, burned to the bone by the African sun.”
Charles Ives
Inscribed above the stage of Symphony Hall in Boston, one of America’s great music palaces, is the name BEETHOVEN, occupying much the same position as a crucifix in a church. In several late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century concert halls, the names of the European masters appear all around the circumference of the auditorium, signifying unambiguously that the buildings are cathedrals for the worship of imported musical icons. Early in the century, any aspiring young composer who sat in one of these halls—a white male, needless to say, blacks being generally unwelcome and women generally not taken seriously—would likely have fallen prey to pessimistic thoughts. The very design of the place militated against the possibility of a native musical tradition. How could your name ever be carved alongside Beethoven’s or Grieg’s when all available spaces were filled? The fact that so many American composers still came forward is a tribute to the willfulness of the species.
Charles Ives was one such stubborn youth. He came from a distinguished New England family, the descendant of a farmer who arrived in Connecticut fifteen years after the voyage of the Mayflower. His grand parents George White Ives and Sarah Hotchkiss Wilcox Ives had connections to the Transcendentalists, the royalty of American intellectual life; Emerson himself supposedly once spent a night in their Danbury house. Ives’s father was the bandleader George Ives, about whom little is known beyond Charles’s not always reliable recollections. Whether the father really anticipated the son’s experiments is impossible to determine, but one famous tale is corroborated by eyewitness testimony: the bandleader once marched two bands past each other for the simple joy of hearing them in cacophonous simultaneity. Ives also remembers that he and his brothers were directed to sing Stephen Foster’s plantation tune “Old Folks at Home” in the key of E-flat while George played the accompaniment in C.
Charles attended Yale College, where he studied composition with Horatio Parker, under whose tutelage he produced an expert, Dvořákian four-movement symphony. In 1898 the young composer went to New York, where he worked a day job at the Mutual Life Insurance Company and played the organ and directed music at the Central Presbyterian Church. (He had been an expert organist since his teens, using the instrument to experiment with spatial effects and multiple layers of activity.) In 1902 Ives attracted positive attention with a cantata titled The Celestial Country. The Musical Courier detected “undoubted earnestness in study and talent for composition”; the Times called the new work “scholarly and well made,” “spirited and melodious.” Ives seemed poised for a distinguished career. First he would study with an important name in Europe, then he would find a position on an Ivy League faculty.
Just one week after the successful premiere, however, Ives suddenly resigned his church position, and subsequently vanished from the musical scene. Why he did so remains a mystery. Perhaps he had been expecting a more ecstatic reception to his debut; tellingly, he later scrawled the words “Damn rot and worse” over one of the reviews of The Celestial Country. Biographers have added speculation that this athletic young male, Yale’s “Dasher” Ives, had a sort of macho hang-up with respect to American classical-music culture, which, to his eyes, appeared to be an “emasculated art,” controlled by women patrons, effeminate men, and fashionable foreigners (“pussies,” “sissies,” “pansies,” and so on). More prosaically, Ives may have lost faith when an acquaintance was picked to teach at Yale as Parker’s heir apparent.
Instead, Ives chose to make his living in life insurance, at which he proved remarkably adept. He was a proponent of the hard sell, skilled at getting people to buy policies that they didn’t know they wanted. He didn’t go door-to-door himself; his job was to think up sales techniques that could be passed along to a network of freelance brokers. Ives codified his innovations in the pamphlet The Amount to Carry, which laid out a sales pitch “simple enough to be understood by the many, and complex enough to be of some value to all!” Ives told each salesman to plant himself firmly in front of a potential customer’s door and “knock some BIG ideas into his mind.”
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