Jazz Identity and La Création Du Monde
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THE OX IN THE CONCERT HALL: JAZZ IDENTITY AND LA CRÉATION DU MONDE Julio Moreno Gonzalez-Appling A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF MUSIC December 2007 Committee: Robert Fallon, Advisor David Harnish Katherine Brucher ii ABSTRACT Dr. Robert Fallon, Advisor Darius Milhaud heard jazz for the first time in a London dance hall in 1919, and resolved to incorporate jazz into a chamber work. In America during the late 1910s, jazz was not yet a recognized genre, but rather was still a composite of several contributing styles. In Europe, however, ragtime, the blues, and American dance band music had fascinated modernist composers since the turn of the century. During his 1922 trip to the United States, Milhaud took every opportunity available to him to hear as much jazz as possible and found an outlet for his studies in the ballet La Création du monde, which premiered in Paris in 1923. The ballet opened to mixed reviews and French critics had little to say of Milhaud’s score. Ten years later, La Création received its American premiere and was hailed by American modernists as a precursor to the jazz works of Aaron Copland and superior to George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924). Milhaud’s La Création du monde has often been categorized as one of many modernist forays into jazz. Milhaud employed a distinctly different approach to jazz, however, than his contemporaries. He sought not only to imitate jazz gestures, but to understand jazz culturally. This thesis examines how Darius Milhaud’s respect for folk music and personal commitment to culture led to La Création du monde, a work demonstrating a more comprehensive grasp of the jazz idiom than any of his European contemporaries. iii This thesis is dedicated to my grandfather, Fred Appling. “If it were easy, everyone would do it.” iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first and foremost like to thank my mother, Carles Appling. Your love and support means the world to me and I cannot possibly thank you enough. To Dr. Robert Fallon, I extend my most sincere thanks for guiding me through this entire process, cracking the whip when necessary, having more patience with me than I felt like I deserved, and providing encouragement when I needed it most. I also extend my deepest gratitude to my readers Dr. Kate Brucher and Dr. David Harnish for your help and support as well as for lending me your valuable time. To Dr. Carol Hess: Thank you for setting me off in the right direction and helping me establish the foundation of knowledge upon which I built my thesis. A special thanks to Kizzy Stepanich who, despite being three time zones away, has been a constant source of support for me through the highs and lows of this and many other adventures in the last two years. I love you, and I thank you. Finally, I’d like to thank God for giving me strength I never knew I had to do things I never thought I could ever do. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………….. 1 CHAPTER I. JAZZ IDENTITY IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY 6 Origins and Definitions……………………………………………………. 6 Modernism and the Folk Phenomenon…………………………………….. 10 The Adoption and Appropriation of Jazz …………………………………. 13 Style, Culture, and Jazz……………………………………………………. 16 CHAPTER II. DARIUS MILHAUD, FOLK MUSIC, AND JAZZ…………… 21 Milhaud and Identity……………………………………………………….. 21 Milhaud in Brazil…………………………………………………………… 26 Trouble on the Home Front………………………………………………… 30 Milhaud in the United States……………………………………………….. 34 Milhaud and the Exotic…………………………………………………….. 38 CHAPTER III. LA CRÉATION DU MONDE………………………………….. 43 Genesis……………………………………………………………………… 43 The Constitution of La Création……………………………………………. 46 French and American Reception……………………………………………. 51 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………….. 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………….. 62 1 INTRODUCTION During the early twentieth century, modernist composers questioned many traditional musical values. What is the role of the audience? How should we listen to music? What should we listen for? What defines “good” music? Some artists, such as Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, looked forward, exploring new approaches to handling tonality and keeping at the forefront of the musical avant-garde. Others, such as Stravinsky, hearkened back to established models, finding the road to the future rooted in ties to the past. A third option for composers such as Bartók came in the form of the present, exploring the seemingly limitless resources of folk and popular musics. Few composers limited themselves to one approach, and some, such as Darius Milhaud, exemplified all three. Milhaud was a member of the new generation of French postwar composers experimenting with the avant-garde, yet at the same time utilizing many of the established historical forms and asserting his ties to the French musical tradition. One of the more prolific composers of his generation, Darius Milhaud composed works in every major genre of his time, and following the outbreak of World War II in 1940, moved to the United States where he taught composition at Mills College in Oakland, California. Maurice Ravel identified Milhaud as “probably the most important of our youngest French composers.”1 Yet today, Milhaud is known for only a handful of works and his name appears predominantly in the context of his French postwar contemporaries, Les Six. 1 Maurice Ravel, Lettres, Écrits, Entretiens (Paris: Harmoniques/Flammarion, 1989), 50. 2 Immediately evident in his writings—particularly his autobiography—is the importance Milhaud placed on identity and tradition. He begins his autobiography with the statement “I am a Frenchman by province and Jewish by religion.”2 Milhaud asserts strong ties to his provincial homeland of Aix, and to his Jewish heritage through a comprehensive knowledge of his family’s history dating back to the 15th century and the history of the Jews in the region dating back to before the birth of Christ. Milhaud also stresses the importance of identity and tradition through his music. In identifying himself within the musical lineage of Southern France, Milhaud articulates his ties to his provincial musical heritage. Milhaud also affirms his Jewish identity through numerous settings of Jewish songs as well as his incorporation of Jewish folk material into his compositions.3 While his surrealist ballet The Ox on the Roof (Le Boeuf sur le toit) (1919) incorporated the sounds of Brazilian popular music, La Création du monde guided a more northerly ox, American jazz, onto the ballet stage and eventually into the concert hall. Darius Milhaud made his first acquaintance with jazz in 1920, attending a London performance of Billy Arnold’s Novelty Band. He was immediately fascinated with the new musical form and while visiting the United States in 1922, attended performances of the jazz orchestras of Paul Whiteman and Leo Reisman. He followed the music to Harlem, and in his autobiography he imagines an authentic connection to Africa that he envisions as originating “in the darkest corners of the Negro soul” and reflecting “the vestigial traces of Africa no doubt.”4 While these statements seems to imply a primitivist 2 Darius Milhaud, My Happy Life (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1995), 23. 3 Claude Rostand, Interviews With Darius Milhaud (Oakland: Center for the Book at Mills College, 2002), 67. 4 Milhaud, My Happy Life, 110. 3 view of jazz typical of the French artistic circle in the 1920s, I suggest that this was not intended as a stereotype, but an extension of Milhaud’s connection between musical product and provincial homeland. Inspired by his experiences and seeking to use the language of jazz in a composition, Milhaud composed the music for the ballet La Création du monde, an avant-garde ballet conceived by novelist and poet Blaise Cendrars, painter Fernand Léger, and dancer/choreographer Jean Börlin that depicted an African creation myth. The interest in African folklore reflects the powerful influence of African culture on Parisian art in the early decades of the twentieth century, or what Bernard Gendron identifies as “Negrophilia.”5 Parisian artists, most notably Pablo Picasso, were influenced not necessarily by the style of art itself, but by its “force and directness of expression.”6 Bernard Gendron traces the parallels that the young Jean Cocteau drew between a 1902 performance of an American minstrel show, “Mr. and Mrs. Elks,” and the values of modernism: There is no allusion to the primordial, the exotic, the magical, to lazy rhythms, smooth undulations, childlike innocence, or natural frenzies. What [Cocteau] accentuates are sharp angularities, flinty protrusions, broken rhythms, irregular pulsations, dismemberment, discontinuities, gaudiness, mechanical violence and modernity.7 Rather than being fascinated by the exotic, fin-de-siècle French artists seemed to admire the modes of expression that characterized the presentation of the play. Each artistic collaborator on the ballet La Création du monde brought his own interpretation of African culture to his approach, led more by imagination than fidelity to the culture. As a 5 Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 2002): 103. 6 Robert Goldwater, “Judgments of Primitive Art, 1905–1965,” in Tradition and Creativity in Tribal Art, ed. Daniel Biebuyck (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 29. 7 Gendron, Montmartre, 104. 4 result, La Création du monde amalgamated cubism, African