Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz

Katherine Baber

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780252084164, 9780252042379
• eBook ISBN: 9780252051210
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

Leonard Bernstein's gifts for drama and connecting with popular audiences made him a central figure in twentieth century American music. Though a Bernstein work might reference anything from modernism to cartoon ditties, jazz permeated every part of his musical identity as a performer, educator, and intellectual. Katherine Baber investigates how jazz in its many styles served Bernstein as a flexible, indeed protean, musical idea. As she shows, Bernstein used jazz to signify American identity with all its tensions and contradictions and to articulate community and conflict, irony and parody, and timely issues of race and gender. Baber provides a thoughtful look at how Bernstein's use of jazz grew out of his belief in the primacy of tonality, music's value as a unique form of human communication, and the formation of national identity in music. She also offers in-depth analyses of On the Town, West Side Story, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and other works to explore fascinating links between Bernstein's art and issues like eclecticism, music's relationship to social engagement, black-Jewish relations, and his own musical identity.

CHAPTER 1

Bernstein’s Philosophy
and the Language of Jazz

Leonard Bernstein shared his thoughts on music of all kinds with as wide an audience as possible. He was as skilled a music educator as he was conductor and composer, and he made audience education central to both of his chosen professions. The topics he explored in comments from the podium and preconcert talks, his Young People’s Concerts and Omnibus television programs, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, and several volumes of published writings and interviews vary widely. However, there is a coherent and stable set of musical values, worked out over decades, at the core of these texts. Even though his compositional actions sometimes belied his aesthetic statements, particularly concerning his famous distaste for atonality and twelve-tone composition, he was relatively consistent in his thinking. While his voracious listening, reading, and performing habits meant he accrued an ever-expanding repertoire of sounds and ideas, his intellectual universe revolved around a few central tenets—beliefs and priorities that worked like a gravitational pull on his musical philosophy. Beginning with his bachelor’s honors thesis in 1939, “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music,” and reaching its fullest articulation with his return to Harvard for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1973, Bernstein’s musical understanding depends on three assumptions that underlie nearly all of his speeches and even the smallest of his musical missives. The first principle is that tonality is an innate quality of human music making and therefore the most natural way of composing. Asserting the primacy of tonal language did create tension around various modernist styles and techniques for Bernstein, but even in the midst of postwar trends, he continually held that modernism and tonality need not be mutually exclusive. Second, in describing tonality as a kind of language, Bernstein yoked tonal principles to a belief in music as a form of human communication and connection. Though continually ambivalent about the ways in which music could or could not convey a message, he generally allowed that music was meaningful. Finally, and following these “musico-linguistic” principles, as he called them, Bernstein believed that music could define and express national identity. Although he spoke most frequently about American music, he held these principles to be universal. For example, he devoted considerable effort to defining and contributing to Israeli musical culture. But the question of what makes American musical culture distinct would preoccupy him throughout his career. In the search for answers, Bernstein frequently turned his ear toward jazz.

Although “jazz itself” is not among the principles that organized his thinking, it does appear as one of the most common elements in his musical world. Or, given its internal stylistic diversity, jazz provides its own group of elements, like the halogens or noble gases of the periodic table. Either way, his frequent use of the term “element,” not just in the title of his honors thesis, is revealing. To Bernstein, African American musics, including jazz, the blues, spirituals, ragtime, and any number of dance rhythms, were the fundamental building blocks of American musical life. As such, his use of the term “race elements” conformed to the broadly accepted usages of the word “race” before World War II, which included positive ideals like the exemplary “race man” or “race woman” alongside pejorative uses, and affirmed the foundational nature of black experience.1 In Bernstein’s version of music history, even when not clearly audible, the music of African Americans, in addition to the sounds and attitudes of New England heritage, was always present and had been “absorbed” into the habits of American musicians. The generational process Bernstein described echoed the assimilationist sentiments of Israel Zangwill’s 1908 play, The Melting Pot—the source of the metaphor that Bernstein and others frequently invoked. Sometimes the “melting pot” was conjured as a criticism of a composer’s formal understanding or “impurity” of material, as in Virgil Thomson’s summary of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.2 For Bernstein, however, the metaphor conveyed the complex, democratic nature of American “folk music.” Decades after his bachelor’s thesis, he still asserted, “We’ve taken it all in … learned it from one another, borrowed it and stolen it and cooked it all up in a melting pot,” a nourishment for composers that he believed was “probably the richest in the world.”3 Furthermore, these elements of African American music, by Bernstein’s generation, were so thoroughly absorbed as to be a natural or unconscious part of one’s background: “You can’t just decide to be American … you can’t be nationalistic on purpose.”4 Geoffrey Block has traced the formative influence of Bernstein’s thesis on many of his later discussions of American music, demonstrating that Bernstein had perhaps already answered his own question in 1939.5 But the consistency Block finds extends even further and is linked to other aspects of Bernstein’s philosophy and compositions. In reading Bernstein’s language closely, it becomes clear that jazz was not strictly central in Bernstein’s thinking, but pervasive.

Jazz was a significant part of Bernstein’s aesthetic, not just as a source or symbol of American quality, but as a part of the three major threads in his philosophy: tonality, communication, and nationality. To describe the ways in which the organizing principles of Bernstein’s philosophical universe manifest in his music, another physical metaphor makes sense: the weaving of a tapestry. All the stylistic choices available to Bernstein make up the colorful threads of the weft. Some of these threads are dyed in his own colors, some of them borrowed from the example of others, and among them the various styles and subgenres of jazz are numerous and vibrant. The values that, for Bernstein, emanated from tonality constitute the taut grounding of the warp. The sturdiness of the warp threads and the cartoon traced onto them (which in this metaphor would be the formal integrity that Bernstein also prized) organize the stylistic combination of the weft into a clear image. Of course, snares and flaws can still happen, but polystylism like Bernstein’s need not be the messy tangle that some critics would make it out to be.

The tapestry metaphor helps to untangle the long debate—among critics, analysts, other composers, and Bernstein himself—about stylistic eclecticism. Bernstein sets great store by eclecticism, his own and others. In a 1982 interview with Paul Laird, when there were few to question his status as an American icon, he was still arguing in defense of eclecticism, pointing out lines of influence and borrowing in the music of Beethoven and Stravinsky, among others. His examples sometimes strain credulity; he had a particularly good ear for affinities of motive, orchestration, and rhythm, combined with a faith in the composer’s unconscious not shared by all analysts. However, there is no doubt that his version of eclecticism (encompassing both borrowing and stylistic references) constitutes, in Laird’s words, “a revealing compositional credo.”6 We might, then, doubt his skill as a weaver—certainly no piece is a flawless combination of stylistic threads—but not the fact that this sort of musical tapestry is his intended creation.

This dedication to eclecticism on all fronts—as an analyst and performer of others’ music and in his own compositions—highlights another important aspect of Bernstein’s musical imagination. Not only does this music embrace a wider range of styles and models than practically any other composer of the mid-twentieth century, but these influences stem from deeply felt personal identification with the music and character of other composers. Among these affiliations were composers whose music he had performed at the keyboard (Mozart, Ravel, Gershwin) and conducted (Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky), and those whose music he had performed and whom he also counted as mentors (Copland and Blitzstein). These figures were a part of his lived experience and thus a source of his creativity: “Who are you if you are not the sum of everything that’s happened before? Everything you’ve experienced at least, not everything that has happened, but everything that has been significant in your experience, unconsciously mainly.”7 The influence of Gershwin and Copland on Bernstein, in terms of his absorption and transformation of the blues and jazz, will be the focus of chapter 2. The whole of Bernstein’s musical activity, though, is motivated by this identification and dialogue, real or imagined, with other composers.

Bernstein had a profound impact on generations of American musicians and public perceptions of American music. Furthermore, Bernstein’s roles as historian, theorist, conductor, and educator are as relevant to his compositional process as his keyboard skills—which is to say, the different facets of his musicianship are impossible to separate. It is also difficult to read any one lecture or essay of Bernstein’s apart from the others, as he often cannibalized prior pieces of writing for whatever the next project happened to be. In fact, it might be better to think of the total of Bernstein’s writings as one long thesis in progress, in which jazz figures in almost every chapter. By detailing the formation of his musical philosophy around his preoccupation with tonality, communication, and nationality, we can understand more clearly the unique value of jazz as an idiom to Bernstein.

Tonality and Naturalism

By the time of Bernstein’s return to Harvard as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry in 1972, it would be clear that his first explanations of musical style and meaning in his thesis were less a coda to his college years and more a refrain. At the conclusion of his residency at Harvard, in the fall of 1973, Bernstein delivered six lectures, first to students and then broadcast to the public in 1976, that he intended to stand as the ultimate refinement of his musical philosophy and to mark a permanent turn toward composition as his focus.8 The Norton Lectures demonstrate Bernstein’s dedication to a particular array of ideas, this time filtered through Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories, and it is telling that criticisms of the lectures tend to revolve around his adaptation of Chomsky. In his biography of Bernstein, Allen Shawn accuses him of reducing Chomsky to “an intellectual armature on which he could hang his discussions of music and the question of its direction.”9 In turn, Shawn’s take echoes the more immediate reaction of music theorist Allan Keiler in 1978, who argued that Bernstein’s lectures did not hold up as an interdisciplinary endeavor. Not only did Bernstein misunderstand the concept of “competence” in linguistics, but in choosing to follow the progression from phonology to syntax to semantics, he engaged in the “dangerous and usually trivial business to attempt to find analogies of theoretical properties intrinsic to one discipline for another.”10 Shawn and Keiler’s charge of superficiality is understandable if not quite correct—Bernstein used Chomsky’s linguistics as a rhetorical tool, not just an analytical one, in order to organize his own thinking on a grand scale. The purpose of what became the first three lectures was to “invent” his interdisciplinary theory of “musico-linguistics.”11 The final three lectures were then dedicated to applying this new theory to the evolution of harmony and style from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. The entire argument was founded on one proposition: tonality is natural.

Riffing on the title of Ives’s orchestral work The Unanswered Question, which juxtaposes tonal and nontonal elements, Bernstein sought to answer the “unanswered question” as he interpreted it: “Whither music in our own time?”12 In a way similar to Anton Webern in his 1932–33 lectures, published in English under the title The Path to New Music in 1963, Bernstein saw music history from the seventeenth century to the present as propelled by the ever-increasing ambiguity of chromaticism within the tonal system, ultimately leading to the “crisis” of tonality at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Webern, Schoenberg and his comprehensive system using all twelve tones was the “answer” to the twentieth-century question.13 Bernstein saw the same fork in the road—“on the one hand, tonality and syntactic clarity; on the other, atonality and syntactic confusion”—and took a different path.14 In order to justify his tonal turn, Bernstein approached this historical argument through the linguistic theory of monogenesis—that all languages have single source—and Noam Chomsky’s ideas of “innate grammatical competence” and transformational grammar.15 A thorough consideration of musical phonology, syntax, and semantics takes up the first three lectures, and his investigation rests on a straightforward statement: “All music … has a common origin in the universal phenomenon of the harmonic series.”16 The harmonic series, he believed, was evidence of the “innateness” of tonality in the human mind and senses, and it was the root of his theory of musical creation.

In his typical fashion, Bernstein includes a wide swath of musics, making the omission of twelve-tone serialism in the first three lectures all the more glaring. Atonality is a logical extension of the harmonic series, as the overtones of which eventually include not just all twelve tones of Western temperament but the microtonal pitches of other scale systems as well. Bernstein is careful to stipulate that innate and universal do not fully overlap; the harmonic series is a “universal” (it exists everywhere in nature), but what is “innate” is rooted in culture, which emphasizes different intervals among the many overtones. For example, in the first lecture he points out the near universality of the pentatonic scale among folk musics around the world, versus the lack of microtones (first produced at the fifth overtone) in Western scales and temperaments.17 Still, even though he acknowledged that the triad and equal temperament are not universals, in the lectures on syntax and semantics that followed, he refused to admit serialist music, or even atonal music, to his discussion. Their exclusion, by default, defines atonal and serial music as not “innate.” Bernstein is explicit in defining atonality as disordered; by omitting serialism from the discussion completely, he leaves us to assume it is unnatural.

Although Chomsky does posit an “innate” and universally human capacity for the understanding and creative use of language, the emphasis on the natural or innate in music, versus the artificial, appears throughout Bernstein’s writings and public remarks as far back as his honors thesis. Looking backward from the Norton Lectures, one can see how Chomsky’s theory jived with ideas Bernstein had first acquired at Harvard from philosopher David Prall and then reworked throughout his career. Indeed, Bernstein dedicated his lectures to Prall, a “brilliant scholar and deeply sensitive aesthetician” with whom he had first analyzed Copland’s Piano Variations (1930), to the point, he says, that they called it “our song.”18 Bernstein begins the substance of his lectures by recounting a discovery—that the first four notes of Copland’s variations were the same (with some transpositions or repetitions) as the subject of Bach’s C-sharp Minor Fugue (Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I), the theme for the variations of Stravinsky’s Octet, the motto of Ravel’s Spanish Rhapsody, and “some Hindu music” he had heard. At that moment, he says, the “notion was born” that there was “some deep, primal reason” for these similarities.19 Here the roots of Bernstein’s musical philosophy and his compositional style, heavily influenced by Copland, are intertwined. He confesses that from his time with Prall and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Bernstein’s Philosophy and the Language of Jazz
• 2 Trading Fours: Bernstein, Copland, Gershwin, and Jazz
• 3 A Jazz-Shaped America: Swing Styles in Fancy Free and On the Town
• 4 Jazz as a Rhetoric of Conflict in Symphony no. 2: The Age of Anxiety
• 5 West Side Story, Modern Jazz, and Musical Commitment
• 6 “Red, White and Blues”: Bernstein’s Blues and the American Soul
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index