shows in its techniques that it is closer to white music. In fact the first jazz musicians to gain popular attention, especially those we know from the record companies, were white (King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, and their black contemporaries were initially relegated to the “race records” category). From its earliest days until, in the music of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and Albert Ayler, it abandoned contact altogether with the idea of the fundamental bass, at about the same time as the post-Webernian revolution in European art music, it has maintained the harmonic progression to a greater or lesser degree as one of its expressive devices. Throughout its history it has maintained a flirtation with European art music (the word is apt; it is the sheer playfulness of jazz that is one of its most enduring features, giving it a personal quality and almost physical presence that the other lacks), and the closeness of its contact with white society at any time can be assessed from the importance of the harmonic element in the music. The swing era, for example, was characterized by complex harmony in elaborate arrangements played from written scores; it was at the time a largely white and perfectly “respectable” art in the eyes of the middle-American majority. The revolt against the over-smooth banalities of swing in the late forties, which became known as bebop, in its origins an entirely black movement, diminished the importance of harmony to a point where its role was associative rather than explicit (much of it was blues-derived), while rhythm regained the central position it had lost. Bop was also, quite explicitly, a music of black social revolt, so it is understandable not only that tonal harmony was the first casualty but also that at the time white people mainly detested it (today, of course, bop is history and thus safe to like).
It is a commonplace that much of the vitality of jazz comes from the tension between the African and the European elements that it incorporates. It is interesting, therefore, to see that the moment when it rejected tonality altogether in favor of a modal or even atonal heterophony in the music of Coleman, Coltrane, Ayler, and others was the point at which it stopped being a popular art and became virtually another branch of art music appealing to a public of cognoscenti rather than to a community. Blues, on the other hand, remains a communal art, and it was blues rather than jazz that became, along with country and western music, the main source of the other major non-harmonic (although still tonal) music of our time, rock’n’roll, and its successors in the sixties and seventies. These will be discussed more fully in the next chapter [Music, Society, Education].
I stated earlier that American culture is full of music, a line of thought that brings us directly to Charles Edward Ives, the one composer who brings together all the threads of specifically American music and links them with the European tradition. He had a wide knowledge of European music and a comfortable mastery of its techniques, yet his relationship to it was highly ambivalent and his commitment was first and foremost to America. I have already remarked on his experience of the outdoor camp meetings at which his father led the singing, and there is a memorable passage in his Memos telling how his father rebuked a smart young Boston musician for ridiculing the out-of-tune hymn singing of an old stonemason: “Watch him closely and reverently, look into his eyes and hear the music of the ages. Don’t pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do you may miss the music. You won’t get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds.”15
The view of Ives as a cranky amateur who stumbled almost unawares on some of the most revolutionary musical discoveries of the century is now, one hopes, well and truly dead. He was a sophisticated, cultured musician with a powerful mind and an incredibly alert ear, and was very clear about what it was he was doing, as can be seen from his Essays Before a Sonata,16 and the more recently published Memos. The reason why his music makes so little appeal to so many European academic composers and critics is that it celebrates, not some beautiful, orderly ideal world but the real world, contradictory, untidy, even chaotic as it is. He accepts and glories in the multiplicity of human experience, and the asymmetry and unexpectedness of the music is not the result of incompetence or naivety but arises naturally from his personality, from his belief in the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and above all in the unity that underlies all the variety of nature. There are those who, like David Wooldridge in his biography, and John Cage, blame Ives for abandoning the full-time profession of music and going into business. Cage writes: “I don’t so much admire the way Ives treated his music socially (separating it from his insurance business); it made his life too safe economically and it is in living dangerously economically that one shows bravery socially.”17 Wooldridge and Cage reveal what is in fact an inappropriately romantic view of the position of a composer in society, which would no doubt have been quickly dismissed by William Billings and his colleagues. Ives’s life in business is an expression of his faith in the unity of life; it was a gesture towards life and against fragmentation and the isolation of the artist. The rightness of his course is shown by the fact that his inspiration dried up as soon as he retired from business.
In considering both his beliefs and his techniques, the idea of Ives held by many Europeans, even among those who are sympathetic to his music, as a great original who sprang from nowhere, dissolves when we become aware of the nature of the American musical tradition, outside that of the Europeanized art music of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he had been thoroughly grounded in the European tradition both by his father (whose own musical training had included the working of Bach chorales and the transcription of opera scenes from Gluck and Mozart as well as of baroque masses, and whose small-town orchestra was capable of turning in excellent performances of Rossini, Mendelssohn, Verdi, Meyerbeer and even Mozart) and by the conventional but expert Horatio Parker at Yale. But his attitude towards the great masters of that tradition remained equivocal; on the one hand he could assert with confidence that “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms are the strongest and greatest in all art, and nothing since is stronger than their strongest and greatest,” while at other times he could voice interesting doubts, speaking of “a vague feeling that even the best music we know—Beethoven, Bach, and Brahms—was too cooped up—more so than nature intended it to be—not only in its chord systems and relations, lines, etc, but also in its time, or rather its rhythms and spaces—blows or not blows—all up and down even little compartments, over and over (prime numbers and their multiples) all so even and nice—producing some sense of weakness, even in the great.” And again: “I remember feeling towards Beethoven that he’s a great man—but Oh for just one big strong chord not tied to any key.”18
His relationship with the indigenous music of the United States, on the other hand, was much more positive. His awareness of the continuity of the outdoor camp meetings with the psalm singing of the early colonists is as obvious as his love of the music. There is little in his compositions that actually suggests the quality of such meetings in a literal way, although the marvelous choral outburst at the end of the Thanksgiving movement of the Holidays Symphony comes near to it. But this wild, highly individualistic quality runs through all of his music. The Second String Quartet is in fact based on it; the four instruments are all characterized (the second violin is cast as Rollo, the type of prissy milksop musician whom Ives so despised), while the three movements are entitled: Four Men Have a Discussion, Arguments and Fight, and They Climb a Mountain and Contemplate. Other examples are to be found in the early scherzo, Over the Pavements, a representation of the different independent walking rhythms that could be heard in a busy street before the advent of the internal combustion engine.
In most of Ives’s work, as in that of the New England tunesmiths, the needs of the individual voice or part take precedence over the neatness or consistency of the over-all effect (one is reminded of Whitman’s bold “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself!”). It is this fact that accounts for the notorious dissonance of his work, as well as for its rhythmic complexity. In allowing each voice to go its own way he was expressing his version of the ideal of individual freedom, but we should notice that while the relationships between the voices are complex in the extreme, often allowing no room for the stately, logical chord progressions of tonal functional harmony, they are not chaotic; Ives has them under control. There are accounts from those who knew him well of his ability to keep a number of rhythmic patterns going simultaneously, and he was well able to play his own music
