“The Jazz Problem”: How U.S. Composers Grappled with the Sounds of Blackness, 1917—1925 Stephanie Doktor Cumming, Georgia
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“The Jazz Problem”: How U.S. Composers Grappled with the Sounds of Blackness, 1917—1925 Stephanie Doktor Cumming, Georgia Bachelor of Arts, Vocal Performance, University of North Georgia, 2003 Master of Arts, Musicology, University of Georgia, 2008 Master’s Certificate, Women’s Studies, University of Georgia, 2008 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Music University of Virginia December, 2016 iv © Copyright by Stephanie DeLane Doktor All Rights Reserved December 2016 v For Hillary Clinton and Terry Allen, who both lost the race but the fight still rages on vi ABSTRACT My dissertation tracks the development of jazz-based classical music from 1917, when jazz began to circulate as a term, to 1925, when U.S. modernism was in full swing and jazz had become synonymous with America. I examine the music of four composers who used black popular music regularly: Edmund Jenkins, John Powell, William Grant Still, and Georgia Antheil. For each composer, whose collections I consulted, I analyze at least one of their jazz-based compositions, consider its reception, and put it in dialogue with writings about U.S. concert music after World War I. Taken together, these compositions contributed to what I call the Symphonic Jazz Era, and this music was integral to the formation of American modernism. I examine how these four composers grappled with the sounds of blackness during this time period, and I use “the Jazz Problem” as an analytic to do so. This phrase began to circulate in periodicals around 1923, and it captured anxieties about both the rise of mass entertainment and its rootedness in black cultural sounds in the Jim Crow era. For some U.S. modernist composers, jazz offered a compositional ingredient—unique, native, and modern— that could articulate a distinct national style. Yet, the music’s associations with dancing, sex, commercialism, and working-class blackness made it controversial to bring into the concert hall. It is this conflict that fueled “the Jazz Problem” among composers: that jazz was modern but also commercial, that it was uniquely American but also black music. “The Jazz Problem” for the composers studied in this dissertation was not about if jazz belonged in the concert hall but how. I argue that these four composers used a series of mutually constitutive dichotomies to negotiate exactly how to depict blackness in their compositions. These composers held different and sometimes contradictory definitions of modernism and jazz, but they articulated them through a common language which contrasted vii representations of highbrow with lowbrow, black with white, and the past with the present. These were not the only discursive formations at play but they were the most prominent. They gave meaning and form to concert jazz. How composers negotiated the intersection of these dichotomies changed radically between 1917 and 1925. Jenkins and Powell wrote compositions in 1917 and 1918 respectively well before the most widely known piece of concert jazz premiered at Paul Whiteman’s 1924 Aeolian Hall concert: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Jenkins and Powell placed jazz idioms alongside other common modes of depicting blackness: the Spirituals and Stephen Foster tunes. In 1925, Still and Antheil wrote pieces at the height of the symphonic jazz vogue when the language of representing blackness in the concert hall had changed to jazz. They used jazz as a bold challenge to concert hall norms. A comparison between the early compositions of Jenkins and Powell and later compositions by Still and Antheil shows changes in approaches to concert jazz. These changes reveal a crucial link between the commercial explosion of jazz and the institutionalization of U.S. modernism after the war. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Examples and Figures ........................................................................................................ x Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... xiii Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 Section I: Composing Blackness before the Jazz Explosion Chapter 1: From “Folk Jazz” To Cosmopolitan Jazz: Edmund T. Jenkins and the Formation of the International New Negro ..................................................35 Chapter 2: Symphonic Jazz & White Supremacy: John Powell’s Rhapsodie nègre (1918) & the Antimodernist Response to “the Jazz Problem” .....................75 Interlude: The Jazz Explosion ......................................................................................119 Section II: Composing Blackness after the Jazz Explosion Chapter 3: Jazz Is Modernism: Black Experimentalism in William Grant Still’s Levee Land (1925) ...........................................................................................131 Chapter 4: George Antheil’s “Hyper-Jazz”: Seeing and Hearing Race at the 1927 Carnegie Hall Premiere of A Jazz Symphony (1925)…. ......................163 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................................200 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................203 ix LIST OF TABLES 1.1 Lyrics of “Old Folks at Home” (1851), Stephen Foster .......................................................47 2.1 Excerpts from the program notes of Rhapsodie nègre (1918) by John Powell ......................86 3.1 Lyrics and Form, “Levee Song,” Levee Land (1925), William Grant Still ...........................135 3.2 Octatonic Collections Representing a Blues Harmonic Progression, “Levee Song,” Levee Land (1925), William Grant Still ................................................................................................141 3.3 Lyrics, “The Backslider,” Levee Land (1925), William Grant Still .......................................154 4.1 Form, A Jazz Symphony (1925), George Antheil ..................................................................182 LIST OF FIGURES A.1 Copeland and Vera Doktor (2013) ..................................................................................... xvi I.1. Cover of “The Jazz Problem” Issue of The Etude (1924) ........................................................2 1.1 Theme One, Charlestonia: A Folk Rhapsody (1917—9), Edmund Jenkins .............................43 1.2 Melodic Transcription of the Spiritual, “Stars Begin to Fall” ..............................................43 1.3 Theme Two, Charlestonia .........................................................................................................45 1.4 Theme Three, Charlestonia ......................................................................................................47 1.5 Melody for “Old Folks at Home” (1851), Stephen Foster ...................................................47 1.6 Melody of Humoresque No. 7, Op. 101 (1894), Antonín Dvořák .......................................49 1.7 Cadenza, Charlestonia ..............................................................................................................51 1.8 Second Theme, Charlestonia ....................................................................................................52 1.9 Advertisement for Will Marion Cook’s Negro Nuances, 1924 ................................................59 1.10 Piano reduction of “Danse de Guerre,” Afram (1924), Edmund Jenkins ..........................68 2.1 Telegram Correspondence between Edward Young Clarke and W.C. Maddox of the Ku Klux Klan, 12 May 1922 ........................................................................................................78 x 2.2 “Principal Theme,” Rhapsodie nègre (1918), John Powell ......................................................88 2.3 “Dance Motive,” mm. 9—19, Rhapsodie nègre .........................................................................90 2.4 “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 148—154, Rhapsodie nègre ..............................................92 2.5 First Interruption of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 164—172, Rhapsodie nègre ...........94 2.6 Second Interruption of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 181—183, Rhapsodie nègre .......96 2.7 First Quotation of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 66—73, Rhapsodie nègre ...................97 2.8 Second Quotation of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 121—127, Rhapsodie nègre ..........99 2.9 Final Quotation of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” mm. 437—447, Rhapsodie nègre ............102 2.10 Jazz Textures and Timbres in Final Theme, mm. 292—299, Rhapsodie nègre ..................105 3.1 Altered Scale .........................................................................................................................137 3.2 A section, “Levee Song,” mm. 26—29, Levee Land (1925), William Grant Still .................139 3.3 Motive in the A Section, “Levee Song,” mm. 27—28, Levee Land .......................................142 3.4 Motive in Return of A Section, “Levee Song,” mm. 58—59, Levee Land ............................143 3.5. “HEY-HEY,” mm. 1—5, Levee Land ....................................................................................145 3.6 Introduction, “The Backslider,” mm. 4—7, Levee Land ........................................................155 4.1. 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