March 2022 Print

By Dr. Andrew Childs

Cultural development in the 20th century prior to World War II occurred in response to two cataclysmic episodes: the ascendance of modernism and World War I. The relation of these two—something very much like cause and effect—merits its own analysis, but if modernism declared that the supernatural could not be believed, the horrors of WWI made it difficult to imagine, especially when amplified by artistic expression. A reader unimpressed by the factual news reports of the “War That Will End War”¹ should question his sanity; a reader unmoved by the war poetry of Wilfred Owen should question his humanity. The present discussion will consider musical development during this time of supreme disillusionment and will focus on two points as motivating factors: the lingering societal shock and exhaustion that followed WWI, and the emergence and coalescence of American popular forms that would come to dominate global musical culture by the outbreak of WWII.

The Faith draws a hard line between two incompatible views of reality. The life of faith assumes the necessary cooperation and compatibility of faith and reason and the existence of the supernatural. The humanist worldview progresses from the insistence on the distinction of faith and reason to the ultimate rejection of any possibility of supernatural reality. The believer who accepts the Church’s declaration “If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason by means of the things that are made, let him be anathema,”² and the agnostic philosopher who insists, especially in relation to religious belief, that “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence,” will find very little common philosophical ground.³ In fact, each views the other as delusional.

A denial of absolutes accompanies the denial of the supernatural—as truth evolves necessarily in the humanist construct—and the dismantling of hierarchy naturally follows. Preference replaces objective qualitative standards, and the leveling required to afford equal validity to every expression of art or ideas creates a very uncomfortable sort of critical chaos. Rubens and graffiti, Shakespeare and cummings, ballet and burlesque all deserve equal consideration according to the enlightened assessor, but just as the humanist philosopher commits a crucial mistake in denying original sin—wrongly assuming optimistically that left to his own devices man will choose to do good—the humanist critic errs in assuming that the elimination of standards allows artists the unchecked creative freedom necessary to develop greater and more advanced techniques and genres. In an atmosphere of unchecked amoral liberality things descend rather than ascend. Ultimate freedom, as it turns out, remains ultimately subject to the gravity of fallen nature.

Aristotle posited, “nature abhors a vacuum.” Culture abhors a vacuum as well. Throughout the history of western music, a healthy—or at least reasonable—balance has existed between cultivated and vernacular art.⁴ When and why, however, did the balance tip irretrievably toward the vernacular? I have suggested previously in these pages⁵ that vernacular dominance emerged as much from an abandonment of purpose and process on the part of modernist high-art composers as from the irresistibility of popular forms, though any honest observer must cede the point of undeniable appeal. With the overthrow of hierarchy, dissolution of standards, and betrayal by the musical Academy, audiences increasingly chose to indulge in the previously guilty pleasures of lower forms. Beyond this, listening well to music of substance requires significant effort. I would argue that the rewards—profound emotional consolation and transcendent beauty, not to mention an invigorating intellectual workout—make the work worthwhile, but the counter-argument exists that recreation should not require any real effort, and that a man should at some point be able to loosen his tie if not remove it altogether.

In the era in question, the issue of fatigue loomed even larger. “The average American youth,” writes Richard Weaver, “put into uniform, translated to a new and usually barren environment, and imbued from many sources with the mission of killing, has undergone a pretty severe dislocation. All of this runs counter to the benevolent platitudes on which he was brought up, and there is little ground for wonder if he adopts the inverted pose.”⁶ Or put even more passionately by historian Samuel Hynes, “Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to the war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.”⁷ Mankind had taken a supreme beating and never had easy and “rebellious” culture seemed so appealing.

At the turn of the 20th century, American popular music had begun to dominate on a global scale, building on the successes of indigenous talents Stephen Foster (1826-1864) and Scott Joplin (1868-1917). Foster “understood as did no other composer before him, that truly popular music must be grasped at first or second hearing, remembered with some accuracy after only a few more, and must be easily performable at home by those with rudimentary skills.”⁸ Foster’s songs, canonical and instantly recognizable to this day, have a universal, almost preternatural appeal. “Musicological methods,” according to music historian Charles Hamm, “cannot adequately explain how he was able to write…songs that have been popular for over a century. The means are so simple as to suggest that almost anyone could write such songs; yet no-one but Foster did.”⁹ Foster did not discover the vein of nostalgia in American vernacular music, but no one has mined it more effectively. For an increasingly world-weary audience, “My Old Kentucky Home” seemed a more comfortable and hospitable place than a Mahler symphony.

Ragtime, and particularly the music of Scott Joplin, expresses a perhaps unlikely but undeniable mixed European and African lineage. Though now a niche genre, ragtime at once legitimized baser elements of the African tradition and gained acceptance as part of the serious piano repertoire, imitated by numerous European composers including Debussy, Stravinsky, Dvořák, Satie, and Darius Milhaud. Joplin, through his distinctive stylistic and interpretive genius, proved instrumental in bridging the crucial socio-cultural gap between black and white, opening the door to broader popular acceptance of African-influenced styles marked by recognizable traditional elements: “call and response” antiphony, repetition of short melodic phrases, non-melodic vocalization, syncopation, polyrhythm, and improvisation.¹⁰

Two marginalized demographic groups had effectively conquered global musical culture before the outbreak of WWII: the predominantly Jewish composers of Tin Pan Alley, and black urban musicians who developed the Blues and more or less related strains of Jazz, first in New Orleans but eventually in major cities throughout the country. Tin Pan Alley originally referred to a lower-Manhattan neighborhood near Union Square which housed numerous music publishers by the end of the 19th century. These publishers employed genuinely talented and prolific composers and lyricists, now universally recognized—George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Cole Porter, Al Jolson, Johnny Mercer—as well as an army of “Song-pluggers” to pitch new songs in public places and performances. They effectively franchised popular music, creating easy to follow formulas guaranteed to succeed based on market research. Individual songs sold by the millions. “Probationary” white Jewish and black composers formed an understandable social and professional alliance, and their collaborative efforts not only continued to expand the genres of Blues, Jazz, and popular song, but resulted in the emergence of new genres—Musical Theater and the American Songbook, Big Band, Swing, and ultimately Rock ’n Roll.

Each of these popular sub-genres has persisted long enough to develop its own literature and scholarship, some of it legitimate (objective chronicling of stylistic development and cataloging of artists, performers, and repertoire) and some of it mildly embarrassing (pseudo-musicological paeans to popular artists or works).¹¹ The breadth of this literature notwithstanding, these sub-genres do not represent many distinct mansions in an exalted artistic realm, but merely different rooms in the same house in a questionable neighborhood, the occupants of which continuously redecorate, renovate, and expand. Though in certain aspects the “structure” has been altered substantially, the address has never changed.

Here the cautionary tale begins. Though tempting, demonizing popular or vulgar forms does little to inspire noble behavior. We can mock the architecture of the cultural boarding house of popular music and excoriate the residents as purveyors of sin. We can express outrage at the “spirit of fornication” that animates much of the genre, but this outrage can easily turn to caricature, which speaks as much to the critic as to the criticized. To wit, this piquant 50’s-era assessment of the effects of Jazz: “After the dissemination of Jazz, which was definitely ‘put through’ by the Dark Forces, a very marked decline in sexual morals became noticeable. Whereas at one time women were content with decorous flirtations, a vast number of them are now constantly preoccupied with the search for erotic adventures, and have thus turned sexual passion into a species of hobby.”¹² The Devil, who plays Jazz saxophone, made her do it. Jazz—specifically undefinable in technical terms, simultaneously monotonous and dazzling—does no more or less than any other popular form for its particular group of adherents: it proves that as regards cultural recreation separated from moral consequences, left to his own devices, man will choose to be naughty and seek pleasurable experiences at the lowest possible cost.

The hard fact remains that by WWII, men had lost the will to fight for transcendental absolutes, and the forward progress of nearly a millennium of cultivated cultural development had come to a near-full stop, hindered, derailed, and impeded by friend and foe alike. As with anything, lost cultural momentum requires more effort to restart than it would have to maintain. Every individual striving for nobility must make the difficult decision to take up his cross and work—to recommit daily to the efforts required to transcend the alluring desolation of a purely natural reality while never denying the realities of human nature, shared by base and beautiful souls alike. “Education,” writes Alan Bloom, “is not sermonizing to children against their instincts and pleasures but providing a natural continuity between what they feel, and what they can and should be.”¹³ The Devil is a wrecker, and 20th-century artists had to build amid the rubble for an audience of disillusioned souls. The popular artist built cheaply, but seeing no other shelter in sight, the whole world went inside and found an easy and familiar place to strike a comfortable pose. While neither denying the need for shelter nor underestimating the allure of ease, we must never lose sight of the fact that this pose is inverted; we must choose not to inhabit potentially dangerous cultural spaces no matter how inviting or legitimately pleasurable we find them. Culturally, we know where we belong. The journey there remains long, uphill, and absolutely glorious.

Endnotes

¹ The title of H. G. Wells’ 1914 book.

² Vatican Council I, De Revelatione, can. 1.

³ Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve Books, 2007), 150.

⁴ Handel composed alongside John Gay, and though audiences flocked to see The Beggar’s Opera—which contained such immortal and edifying numbers as “Our Polly is a sad Slut!”—few would have argued seriously for Gay’s artistic superiority.

⁵ “Modernism in Music—Who cares if you listen?” The Angelus magazine, September-October 2020, Modernism.

⁶ Richard Weaver, The Ethics of Rhetoric (Hermagoras, 1985) 225

⁷ Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (Atheneum, 1991) iii.

⁸ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (MacMillan, 1995) Volume 15, 101.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ J. Peter Burkholder, A History of Western Music: 7th Edition (Norton, 2006) 753-754.

¹¹ Scholarly consideration of any of the Beatles’ concept albums fall into this category.

¹² Cyril Scott, Music, Its Secret Influence Throughout the Ages (Aquarian Press, 1958) 152.

¹³ Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987) 80.