by Jarrett Hoffman
APOLLO’S FIRE & FOUR SEASONS — TODAY, AND WHENEVER YOU’D LIKE:
At 7:30 pm, Jeannette Sorrell and The Cleveland Baroque Orchestra head to St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills to present the final performance of “Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Rediscovered,” a program that joins that work with the composer’s Concerto for Two Cellos and La Folia. Soloists include violinists Francisco Fullana (Le quattro stagioni), Alan Choo and Emi Tanabe (La Folia), and cellists René Schiffer and Sarah Stone. Tickets are available here.
If you want more Apollo’s Fire and more Four Seasons in your life, first of all, stay in Cleveland, which has plenty of both of those to offer (weather joke). And second of all, check out the ensemble’s most recent CD, released last week — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons, again featuring Francisco Fullana, and billed as “Not your mother’s Four Seasons.” Purchase here, and listen on Spotify here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC — MILHAUD & JAZZ IN 1920s PARIS:
In the 1920s, negrophilia — the term used among the French avant-garde to describe their fetishization of Black culture — was all the rage in Paris. That trend was also related to a longstanding interest in the “exotic,” as well as a post-WWI yearning for what was perceived as the “simple” or “primitive.” And the latter term, off-puttingly enough, was associated with jazz, which fascinated the public.
Among the many artists and composers influenced by those ideas was Darius Milhaud (above), who was part of a multi-disciplinary artistic group that particularly “took it upon itself to promote jazz as the badge of its own identity,” writes Bernard Gendron in his book Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde.
Those trends mentioned above are deeply problematic, as you probably don’t need me to tell you, and it’s important to consider Milhaud in that light. But in the eyes of many, the composer stood out in taking a more respectful approach to jazz than his contemporaries. One piece of evidence is his ballet La Création du Monde (premiered on this date in 1923 by the Ballets Suédois at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris), one of the most notable jazz-related works produced by members of that group of artists.
Milhaud was of course not alone in his desire to draw on popular culture for his own artistic creations — that was a common thread among many modernists. But according to Gendron, the composer went further than most “by viewing jazz not merely as cultural raw material for modernist experimentation or avant-garde shock tactics, but as an innovative art form in its own right…”
After first encountering jazz at a dance hall in London in 1920, two years later Milhaud traveled to New York, where he visited a club in Harlem. Based on his descriptions in his autobiography, what he was hearing was likely blues — and he was so astounded by it that he “resolved to use jazz for a chamber work.”
In his mind, European composers needed to pick up the slack on the part of the American musical establishment at the time, who didn’t realize what they had in jazz and thus left it “relegated…to the dance hall.” At the same time, he hadn’t been impressed with other Europeans’ attempts to incorporate the genre into classical music — using jazz simply to signify popular dance, and failing to consider its instrumental combinations, unique from those of traditional classical music.
He got the chance to leave his own mark in this area when Rolf de Maré, director of the Ballets Suédois, commissioned a ballet inspired by African folk mythology about creation, as collected by writer Blaise Cendrars in his Anthologie nègre.
A good example of Milhaud’s aim to synthesize jazz and classical in La Creation du Monde is the fugue section. As Gendron explains in music-theoretical terms, “Each of the fugal voices traces out the first six bars of a typical twelve-bar blues song, shifting to the next voice at the point of resolution from the subdominant chord (rooted in the fourth note of the scale) to the tonic chord (rooted in the first note), thus highlighting the subdominant-tonic tension that is so characteristic of the blues.”
Leonard Bernstein sums things up more simply: “The Creation of the World emerges not as a flirtation but as a real love affair with jazz.”
Listen here to a recording (accompanied by score) by Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Jazz + New World Symphony, sliding to the 3:32 mark to go straight to the fugue.
And to return to the start of today’s almanac, Lilyana D’Amato focused more squarely on the topic of negrophilia in an article for ClevelandClassical.com last year.
“When entertainer Josephine Baker, the hugely influential African American expatriate, arrived in Paris in 1925, she became the face of this racialized mania. Her body and persona came to signify the exotic, used to satisfy colonialist sexual fantasies,” D’Amato wrote in “The Legacy of Black Musicians: Entertainer Josephine Baker.” Read the article here.