1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
1914 - 1929 The Modernist World Jump to:
 |
4 White Popular Music
|
|
The opening of the Metropolitan, for all its importance in the world of music and drama, illustrated even more vividly than any formal dinner or fancy-dress ball society's irresistible impulse to make its amusements an occasion to flaunt its wealth. For true music-lovers of the 1880's the operas currently being given at the Academy of Music fully met all artistic standards. The sole difficulty was that while there was plenty of available room at these performances in orchestra and galleries, every box at the Academy was taken for the season. And society had made an opera box one of the hall-marks of social success. The Metropolitan was built not in response to a demand for music, but to meet this need for fashionable display.
This did not mean that the Metropolitan did not uphold the highest standards of operatic art. It did. Italian operas were staged during its first season, and musical history was made when German music and the Wagnerian operas were given the Metropolitan's formal approval in 1884. The company made an annual post-season tour, visiting Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington. . . . The world of society in these cities had its opportunity to emulate that of New York. Grand opera took its place, despite a sprinkling of more humble musiclovers in the upper galleries, as one of the most exclusive and fashionable of all diversions.
The white audience was also far from homogeneous. "Hillbilly" music began to be recorded in 1923, and again surprised the record industry by showing that there was a market for the distinctive regional styles of white America. The music of non-English language groups also began to be recorded. The social effects of these developments were complex, but the hostility of the poorer, often fundamentalist rural communities to urban culture was to some extent deflected by this opportunity to become consumers of their own vernacular culture in mass-produced form.
It was through recordings that each social group acquired a public voice, which was both used within the group and also formed part of alarger pattern of cultural communication, of a type not known before. Marketing policies aimed particular products at particular audiences, so wider familiarity with the different musical styles would never have taken place if records had been the only means of communication. It was through radio, broadcasting "music in the night, every night, everywhere" and recognizing few barriers, that music of different kinds reached new audiences. The staple fare of radio was provided by the dance orchestras of Vincent Lapez, Guy Lombardo and others who could be relied on to behave respectably in the nation' s homes.
The studio band system on which radio depended in effect excluded black musicians, but the practice gradually grew of plaeing "radio wires" in certain New York nightspots. in this way a few black bands were provided with a much wider exposure and areas of America were given their first taste of a black jazz band, and something of the accompanying thrill. In areas where "hillbilly" music was popular, radio stations began to broadcast non-networked "barn dance" programs featuring fiddlers and string bands.
The safer experience s offered by the white dance bands and vocalists remained popular. However, before the end of the decade outright opposition to new styles of popular music had modified considerably, principally because bands such as Paul Whiteman' s succeeded in convincing the public - if not the various custodians - that with its mare "offensive" and "raucous" elements removed the music was no longer a threat.
Whiteman had been as irritated as anyone by traditionalist opposition, but his response had been to seek a compromise. By blending techniques derived from classical music (especially in scoring), he sought to show that same of the wellknown morally uplifting qualities of that music had been absorbed. He wanted his music to be thought of as "art".
It was to be an art that depended on the successful incarporation of "native" American elements, but the effect, at least superficially, was rather different. Greater rhythmic freedom, individualistic sound, the hint of bodily emancipation - these qualities were still controlled by pre-regulated harmony and rhythm. The question that lurked beneath the surface, however, was whether these new elements could ever be truly assimilated or whether they would refuse to shed their identity or their power to challenge.
4 Next Page: The New Woman and the Twenties
|
||
In this chapter: 