The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams
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Title Page Title Page At the Intersection of Jazz and Catholicism: The Sacred Music of Mary Lou Williams by Christopher Carnell Capizzi BFA, Carnegie Mellon University, 1991 MAM, Carnegie Mellon University, 1992 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2019 Committee Page UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH DIETRICH SCHOOL OF ARTS & SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Christopher Carnell Capizzi It was defended on July 17, 2019 and approved by Michael Heller, PhD, Assistant Professor, Jazz Studies Amy Williams, PhD, Associate Professor, Composition Paula Kane, PhD, Professor and John and Lucine O'Brien Marous Chair, Contemporary Catholic Studies Dissertation Chair: Aaron Johnson, PhD, Assistant Professor, Jazz Studies ii Abstract At the Intersection of Jazz and Catholicism: The Sacred Works of Mary Lou Williams Christopher Carnell Capizzi, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2019 In the 1960s, African American jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams (1910-81) used what was then known as the Negro spiritual, blues, swing, bebop, and even ragtime as inspiration for her settings of the sacred liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. She deliberately chose jazz, which she called “the only true American artform,” drawing from all the eras of jazz. In doing so, she documented the important achievements in black music history in a way that few have achieved within the confines of single multi-movement works. In this she should be compared to Ellington perhaps, whose multiple movement extended works, like Black, Brown and Beige (1943) had presented the diversity, depth, and variety of the African American experience. In the 1930s Williams was a traditionalist whose musical life centered around the composition and performance of swing dance music for the popular jazz market, presented in a style that was deeply rooted in the blues. In the 1940s, however, she became a modernist experimenter as a mentor to the main figures in bebop, like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell. In the 1960s, as a newly converted Catholic, she began to write liturgical music influenced by changes in Catholic practice brought on by the reforms of Vatican II, especially the shift away from the Latin Mass, to the vernacular Mass. In this project I explore how and why Williams crafted the vernacular Mass as a juxtaposition between the practice of redemptive suffering and the neo-bop framework in her sacred works. I argue that she used the musical side, the neo-bop framework, to memorialize and bear witness to the long history of physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering of African Americans. Thus, by using the suffering of a people iii as a metaphor for the suffering of Christ, Williams was able to bring the history of black Americans forward during a time of civil rights activism. This project looks through the lens of Williams’ Catholicism and her notion of the “spiritual feeling in the blues that arises out of suffering” to explore her late religious works, especially Mass (1967). iv Table of Contents 1.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 From the Secular to the Sacred ................................................................................... 16 Performing Race and Gender ...................................................................................... 19 2.0 Jazz and Catholic Practice ................................................................................................... 29 The Decline of Jazz ....................................................................................................... 36 2.2 The Decline of Catholicism .......................................................................................... 44 2.3 Liturgical Jazz .............................................................................................................. 47 3.0 Williams and Catholicism .................................................................................................... 56 The “Reverend” ............................................................................................................ 61 Post-War Currents in Catholicism ............................................................................. 63 3.3 Performing Suffering ................................................................................................... 73 3.4 Gender and the Church ............................................................................................... 78 4.0 Williams’ Major Catholic Works ....................................................................................... 82 4.1 Disembodied Jazz ......................................................................................................... 99 Embodied Jazz ............................................................................................................ 101 “Black Christ of the Andes” ...................................................................................... 107 5.0 Mass: Jazz, or Long and Drawn Out, Like a Symphony? .............................................. 110 Performing Catholicism ............................................................................................. 112 5.2 Mass ............................................................................................................................. 122 6.0 Conclusion and Recommendations ................................................................................... 133 v Appendix A Full Text, “St. Martin de Porres: Black Christ of the Andes” ........................ 137 Appendix B Complete Texts of the Ordinary from Mass (1967) .......................................... 138 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 141 vi List of Figures Figure 1 Composition timeline for the major Catholic works of Mary Lou Williams ......... 23 Figure 2 Habanera rhythm and comparion to the Spanish Tinge” ....................................... 35 Figure 3 “Jazz Tree,” by Mary Lou Williams and David Stone Martin ............................... 41 Figure 4 First stanza, “St. Martin de Porres: Black Christ of the Andes” ............................ 72 Figure 5 Text of the early Negro spiritual “O Yes, Lord” ...................................................... 97 Figure 6 Text to “People in Trouble,” from Mary Lou’s Mass ............................................... 98 Figure 7 Text of “One,” from Mary Lou’s Mass .................................................................... 105 Figure 8 Kyrie m.1-6 ................................................................................................................. 123 Figure 9 Melodic comparison between “Wade in the Water” and Kyrie ............................ 124 Figure 10 Kyrie m. 7 – 11 ......................................................................................................... 125 Figure 11 Gloria m. 1-8 ............................................................................................................ 127 Figure 12 Example of the 3-3-2 “Spanish Tinge” in Scott Joplin’s rag, “The Entertainer” ......................................................................................................................................... 128 Figure 13 Credo m. 1-5 ............................................................................................................. 129 Figure 14 Sanctus m. 1-4 .......................................................................................................... 130 Figure 15 Agnus Dei m. 1-4 ...................................................................................................... 131 Figure 16 Melodic and harmonic comparison between “Laura” and Agnus Dei ............... 132 vii 1.0 Introduction In 1954, Mary Lou Williams abruptly left the jazz scene, devoting herself to religious activities, Catholicism, and the composition of sacred music. She had become a major figure in the New York jazz scene by the 1950s, but a bad jazz economy had taken its toll on many musicians, including Williams, who was becoming increasingly disillusioned with her career, and with what she felt was a drug-infested, corrupt, and sinful environment in which professional jazz musicians were forced to work. As she dealt with an increasing despondency, she booked a short European tour that began in London in early 1952, that turned into a two year sojourn for Williams, who after the two-week tour, was not eager to return to the States. As her booking schedule brought her to Paris, her state of mind worsened, and she walked off the stage during an appearance at Le Boeuf sur le Toit in 1954, vowing never to play again. She spent most of the next eight years in virtual seclusion in Harlem, away from music, praying, often walking the streets looking for drug addicted musicians in need of care. Largely self-taught, Williams had struggled with many career obstacles, including racism, sexism and the cutthroat atmosphere in the business of jazz, to become one of its most established jazz artists. As a teenager in 1929, her first big break came in Kansas City through her husband, John Williams, a tenor sax player with the Clouds of Joy, a regional African- American swing dance band led by saxophonist Andy Kirk. As Kirk’s pianist,