Literary Modernism and the Aging of the New Music: Ballets Russes to Bebop
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Literary Modernism and the Aging of the New Music: Ballets Russes to Bebop by Aaron Yale Heisler A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Aaron Yale Heisler (2013) Literary Modernism and the Aging of the New Music: Ballets Russes to Bebop Aaron Yale Heisler Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2013 Abstract This study examines the contribution made by literary modernism to the institutional legacy of the avant-garde music of the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it considers the vice versa – the role played by the institutionalization of avant- garde music in shaping literary modernism’s sense of its own aesthetic mission and institutional destiny. The musical developments in question include the European “New Music” theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, typified by works such as Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and the tonal experiments of the so-called Second Viennese School, as well as the African-American jazz avant-garde of the 1940s and ‘50s. Subject at first to fierce controversy, the New Music had, by the middle of the century, amassed a sizable audience and considerable bourgeois prestige, and its repertory had achieved a secure place in the academy. The institutional entrenchment of the New Music in the American academy would have a decisive influence on the emerging technical grammar and artistic self-conception of modern jazz, which itself was to undergo a similar, if smaller-scale, process of institutionalization in the decades to follow. The authors discussed – among them Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried ii Sassoon, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Adorno himself – at once bear witness to the New Music’s growing cultural privilege, and help give shape to the institutional discourses by which that privilege is constituted. Certain of these authors identify with or admire the music more than others, but all of them recognize that the reception of the experimental modern art exemplified by the New Music is a process on which their own institutional legacy depends. This recognition manifests itself in the texts both discursively and formally. For the literary artists of modernism, criticism of the New Music is almost inescapably an act of, necessarily provisional, self-criticism, an assessment of their own artistic and cultural ambitions or, retrospectively, their achievements. And since literature, whose materials are discursive, is most readily positioned among the arts to directly shape institutional discourses about art, and in this case discursive constructions of the modern, the reverberations of these literary judgments continue to be felt in the present-day academy. iii Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. A version of chapter 1 first appeared (as “Literary Memory and the Moment of Modern Music”) in Modernism/modernity 19:4 (November 2012), 693-715. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanks to Uzoma Esonwanne, Dana Seitler, and Sarah Wilson, who discussed aspects of the work-in-progress with me in its early stages and offered advice without which it is hard to imagine how I could have gotten my end of things off the ground. Thanks, also, to Susan McClary, who provided valuable suggestions and encouragement in the final stages. Throughout the process, I have been grateful for the expertise and generosity of Andrew DuBois and Malcolm Woodland. And I am especially grateful to Mary Nyquist: beyond the very significant role she has played in giving this project its purpose and shape, her extraordinary intellectual versatility has made it possible for it to move in directions and toward conclusions neither of us could have foreseen. I am privileged to call her my teacher, mentor, and friend. The worthy parts of this work are a reflection of the environment of love and support in which it was made. For this I am grateful to my family, and most of all to Jennifer O’Kell. In the three years I have been at work on this project, Jenny has gone from skeptical colleague to friend, lover, partner, and wife. From the beginning, she has represented all that I aspire to. Without her in my life I never would have been able to hand this in, not only because her incisive creativity has inscribed itself on most every page, but because without her it wouldn’t have been worth doing. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments .......................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 1 The Moment of Modern Music ................................................................................................ 10 1.1 “Quite the concert of the year!” ........................................................................................ 12 1.2 “Twenty years to finish this poem”................................................................................... 19 1.3 “a poem waiting, to be continued” .................................................................................... 24 2 The Square and the Oblong ...................................................................................................... 44 2.1 The System and Cult of the Wrong Note .......................................................................... 45 2.2 This House Which Contains Us All .................................................................................. 52 2.3 The Danger of the Dangerless ........................................................................................... 76 3 Bessie, Bop, or Bach .............................................................................................................. 113 3.1 Hawking Picasso ............................................................................................................. 114 3.2 New Lester Leaps In (For Sentimental Reasons) ........................................................... 127 3.3 Breaks and Disc-tortions ................................................................................................. 143 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 189 Works Consulted ......................................................................................................................... 191 v 1 Introduction “To speak of the aging of the New Music,” wrote Theodor W. Adorno in the 1955 essay from which I have taken the title of this study, “seems paradoxical.” By “the New Music” (“die neuen Musik”), Adorno meant, specifically, the experimental European art music of the first decades of the century, whose audaciously sustained dissonance strained against the limits of the common practice tonal system that had been in place for at least two centuries, and even deliberately worked towards its dissolution. Such music, by the Paris-based Russian composer Igor Stravinsky and the “Second Viennese School” of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg, among others, had helped to usher in the sensational period of European modernism: audience riots had greeted the debuts of Berg’s Altenberg Lieder (1912) and, most notoriously, Stravinsky’s collaboration with the choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and the Ballets Russes, Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913). And yet by 1955 this music, which had once seemed an all-out assault on established aesthetic standards and familiar structures of musical sense, which, according to Adorno, had had as its essence “the refusal to go along with things as they are,” had begun, Adorno now reckoned, “to show symptoms of false satisfaction.”1 The composers’ varied earlier efforts to resist the strictures of tonality had stabilized into the systematic, rationalized musical language of serialism. At the same time, the music’s bourgeois audience, and prestige, were growing; and the techniques, theories, and repertory of the New Music had achieved a secure berth in the academy. This, then, is the semantic paradox to which Adorno refers: can any art, “aged” in this way over time into a cultural institution, still be called, or thought of as, “New”? What is the meaning of “newness” in the context of a continuous European art music tradition – or, for that matter, in Western music culture generally? The German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus wrote of the “paradoxical permanence” of the “quality of incipient beginning, of ‘for the first time’” inherent in the early atonal works, which to Dahlhaus constituted an “immediate aesthetic quality” that even “half a century later . can be felt in almost undiminished form.”2 No doubt one of the reasons for this response, this enduring subjective sense of the New Music’s novelty, is that the systems of pitch organization devised by Schoenberg and his contemporaries never did manage to wholly supplant the existing ones, not even in the conservatory; in an era offering 2 unprecedented access to music production and reproduction, atonal and serial music remains an eccentric and, to