Variations on theme XV: When classical meets jazz
The magic of interwar music, dance and fashion is largely due to the jazz phenomenon. Which classical composers could not resist the lure of syncopation?
One does not have to be an expert to notice the influences of “serious” music – jazz – in the music of many composers of the 20th century. Jazz music was a phenomenon that swept America and Europe and did not remain unanswered in concert halls. After all, jazz music offered – in the words of Jaroslav Ježek – “sensual seductiveness of content, exotic colors, sounds and rhythms.”
Today we will imagine compositions mainly from the period of the 20s and 30s of the 20th century, even though jazz music was born in the United States of America, our starting point will be Paris, once a melting pot of nations, culture, smells and tastes.
“The hard blow of Impressionism”
When Bohuslav Martinů in 1923, thanks to a scholarship, he traveled to the French capital, he noted that jazz delivered “a sharp blow to the soft lyricism of impressionism.”
Not only jazz ruled the city above the Seine, but also Stravinsky, Ravel, the Paris Six, Satie, Josephine Baker, sound film, the Russian Ballet, the Moulin Rouge and jazz clubs… And the thirty-three-year-old composer lets himself be absorbed by the atmosphere of Paris.
Martinů’s jazz influences are most strongly felt in the jazz suite, but also in the ballets Kitchen revue AND Filming!
When it comes to the hard blow of Impressionism, even its leading representative Claude Debussy he is the author of compositions that sound, let’s say, proto-jazz, then more under the influence of ragtime: Colliwog’s Cakewalk (Jester’s cake).
Paris-New York route
While European composers were learning jazz, many of them also went across the ocean for this purpose, in 1926 an American musician visited Paris George Gershwin, to capture something of the elegance there. Maurice Ravel, who was to become his mentor, decided that it would be better for the young man “to remain a first-class Gershwin than to become a concoction of Ravel”. And he was right. From France, Gershwin brought with him a boosted self-confidence – and Parisian car horns. He gave them space in the suite An American in Paris.
The work premiered in 1928 and was received with mixed reviews. The author said something along the lines of: “Guys, don’t look for a Beethoven symphony in this, this isn’t meant to move you to tears, it’s light and cheerful.”
The music of Gershwin’s An American in Paris was immortalized on the silver screen in the 1951 Oscar-winning film of the same name, starring Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
In the opposite direction to Gershwin, i.e. from Paris to Harlem, to the heart of jazz music, the French composer traveled Darius Milhaud. When he first heard an American jazz band at home, he was so captivated, according to the story, that he had to go to New York to spend time in clubs and bars, socializing with jazz musicians. After returning to France, he began writing in what he called the “jazz idiom”. Even the instrumental cast draws from his memories of New York.
Milhaud’s ballet music references African myths and uses elements of jazz, blues and cakewalk. But you won’t confuse it with authentic Harlem: Milhaud was too French for that.
Schulhoff, Hedgehog
So that we don’t just stay in Paris. Understandably, other metropolises were not spared the jazz fever either. Berlin, where the left-wing avant-garde and Dadaism reigned, was for a while the home of Prague native Ervín Schulhoff. A great pianist from a German Jewish family, he also absorbed other influences that the pre-war era was full of. Jazz imprinted on the graceful Hot Sonata for alto saxophone and piano.
For piano solo, Schulhoff wrote, for example, these 5 jazz etudes. Virtuoso games! And a repertoire that is still waiting to be discovered.
If we stay in the domestic basin, we must not leave out Jaroslav Ježek among jazz-obsessed musicians. He discovered jazz in Paris and became its “apostle”. Almost everyone knows his hits, composed for the Liberated Theater, and if it weren’t for his early death, this genius could have become the second Gershwin in the US. Immortal Bugatti-Step is a tribute to the racing car brand and Eliška Junková.
In the examples we have chosen for you, you can tell that you are enchanted by the typical rhythms of jazz dances – Charleston, blues, ragtime, tango, etc. But the essence of jazz music is something else: it is about improvisation, the magic of the moment, freedom in harmony. And playfulness above all.
Swiss Paul Hindemith (lived most of his life in Paris) composed an orchestral Ragtime, in which he quotes the theme of Bach’s fugue. Hats off to a genius? Rather a cute tribute…
Stravinsky’s Chameleon
Igor Stravinsky, one of the most important composers of the 20th century, was a musical chameleon. He was inspired by many styles and integrated them into his own compositional language, including elements of Russian folklore, Renaissance music, twelve-tone technique, neoclassicism and jazz.
At the end of the 1910s, Stravinsky had not yet heard jazz music live, but his scores, which his friend, conductor Ernest Ansermet, had brought back from the USA, caught his attention. These were probably transcriptions of the early one ragtimeof the piano genre that made Scott Joplin famous.
Stravinsky Piano-Rag-Music (1919) already integrates a central element of jazz: improvisation. Much later Ebony concert for clarinet and jazz band from 1945, Stravinsky wrote for the jazz bandleader Woody Herman (the latter is said to have cried at the first rehearsal because instead of the jazz notes he was used to, he was given pure Stravinsky” and the score seemed unplayable to him).
The concerto is modeled after the baroque grosso concerto and incorporates jazz styles popular during the war. According to the composer, the word “ebony” in the title does not refer to the material from which the clarinet is made, but to the color of the skin of black musicians.
Although jazz music originated in imperial America, in the Soviet Union, just before World War II, they decided to establish the State Jazz Orchestra. Two suites by Dmitri Shostakovich were written for this ensemble. Their history is complicated: the score of Jazz Suite No. 2 was lost during the war, it was reconstructed according to the piano part. But in the meantime, another piece of music was circulating under the name Jazz Suite No. 2, which is properly called Suite for Mixed Orchestra. The most famous of them is Waltz, which was used by Stanley Kubrick in the film Eyes Wide Shut.
We have not exhausted the theme of the “invasion” of jazz into classical music with several samples. after jazz broke some “natural” compositional regularities, these two spheres influenced each other and today it is difficult to distinguish what is sophisticated jazz and what is “classical” contemporary music.
We are left with a line of compositions from the first half of the 20th century, from which one can recognize the initial enchantment of the composers and a touch of the unique atmosphere of the interwar period.
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