HOW MUSIC CHANGED, PART 2

How Music Changed, Part 2

- THE DEATH OF EUROPEAN TRADITION (STRAUSS, DEBUSSY, SATIE, DVORAK, BURLEIGH)
Today we start in one place, and end someplace completely different. We continue our series on “How Music Changed” in America by focusing on how serious music shifted away from its established base and started to accept American ideas, even allowing American ideas to infiltrate (ye gads!!). If you recall, our previous show focused on the birth of the recording industry, and musically, on two great tenors whose operatic abilities caused the American ‘everyman’ to become familiar with professional music. This common familiarity with professionalism is why we have a music industry today, and that is why I consider the early tenors to be extraordinarily influential on the development of American music. However, they did little to provide America with its own musical identity. Today’s show will attempt to explain the subtle shifts that took place, allowing American culture to develop an identity of its own, one that would overwhelm external forces. Next week, we will look closely at the internal influences, but for today, let’s start in Europe.
As the 20th century approaches, the mores of the music business are firmly established. Germany is the center of all serious music culture. With Beethoven and Wagner as forebears, their reputation simply overwhelms most other cultures. Opera grows more and more popular, and Italy also develops a unique identity. It is the global craze for opera that fuels composers, musicians, and vocalists, aided in its course by the newfangled ‘phonograph’ (soon to be referred to as a brand name, the ‘Victrola’). The music’s availability turns common people into ‘fans’, and a global industry is born that cannot adequately accommodate the lengthy song structures of ‘classical’ music.
Richard Strauss, a German, represents a break with the past by avoiding ‘classic’ compositional forms. Rather than symphonies, he prefers to write ‘tone poems,’ a more ‘condensed’ form of composition, but he writes plenty of operas, too. In France, a few composers are detecting a shift in styles. Claude Debussy, along with Maurice Ravel, is the most significant of the bunch, and they compose music that is drastically different from the sturm and drang of Germanic composers. Instead of writing in ‘classic’ form, they write impressionistically, relying on sensibility and subtlety for inspiration. Debussy writes a piece entitled “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn.” He writes another three-part composition called “La Mer (The Sea)”. Suddenly, the fat lady with horns on her head (Wagner’s “Valkyries”) is rendered quaint. Others are inspired and write along similar lines, including Erik Satie, who suggests a total break with tradition, and composes songs with strange impressionistic titles, such as “Desiccated Embryos” and “Trois Gymnopedie” (loosely translated as ‘Three Gymnasts’). This work would eventually have a profound influence on ambient writers like Brian Eno.
Meanwhile, in America, the country is so busy growing that the changes in Europe barely register on our popular culture. African slave culture, besides providing labor, inadvertently provides entertainment, especially when European-Americans parody their culture, notably in the songs of Stephen Foster and minstrelsy (we cover this in show #3). Looking for inspiration and a way to break from Germanic tradition, a Czech named Antonin Dvorak comes to America, and is suitably impressed by America’s own developing indigenous musical culture. However, it isn’t the ‘serious’ musicians who aped European styles that impress him, nor is it the black-faced minstrels singing “Old Black Joe” and “Old Folks at Home.” Dvorak recognized that America’s unique identity came from Native American and African American influences. Dvorak befriends an African-American musician named Harry T Burleigh, who familiarizes him with Negro spirituals and plantation songs. While Burleigh provides Dvorak with inspiration, Dvorak assists Burleigh in obtaining a publisher. Some of the first examples of authentic African American music were then published by Burleigh. Meanwhile, Dvorak uses the experience as inspiration for his 9th Symphony, commonly called the “New World Symphony.” Indeed, it was a new world, as America would subsequently become the focal point of 20th century music.


Music from today’s show includes;
1) Thus Sprach Zarathustra – Richard Strauss
2) Clair de Lune – Claude Debussy
3) Golliwog (a Cakewalk) – Claude Debussy
4) Trois Gymnopedie – Erik Satie
5) Deep River – (Negro Spiritual)
6) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – Paul Robeson
7) New World Symphony – 2nd Movement – ‘Largo’ – Antonin Dvorak
8) Garth Largo – from “Largo”


FURTHER LISTENING AND SUGGESTED TRACKS;
1) Salome – Dance of the Seven Veils – Richard Strauss
2) Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn – Claude Debussy
3) La Mer – Claude Debussy
4) Bolero – Maurice Ravel
5) Daphnis et Chloe – Maurice Ravel
6) Gymnopedie (as orchestrated by Claude Debussy) – Erik Satie
7) Embryons Desseches – Erik Satie
8) Music for Airports – Brian Eno
9) Go Down Moses – Paul Robeson
10) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – The Soul Stirrers, with Sam Cooke
11) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – Jerry Garcia
12) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – UB40
13) Swing Low, Sweet Chariot – Beyonce