The history of African American music is fascinating because on the one hand very little disappears, but also nothing remains the same. The features that give African American music its unique character can be found in many of its genres and time periods. Differences only occur in the degree to which elements are emphasized. Although several of the features associated with black expressive forms can be found in the music of other cultures, the manner in which these elements are externalized and blended suggests that African American performance practices are derived from Africa (Wilson 1974). However, the type of music blacks created in the Americas, particularly before 1900, depended upon the extent of interaction and ethnic distribution among Africans, the demography and geographical location of black and white populations, the demands of the white masters, and the characteristics of the economy.

To appreciate fully the essence of the black music experience in the United States, a thorough understanding of its African roots is critical. While there have been several excellent studies that have examined what African Americans have created (see works by Southern and Epstein), few scholars have looked extensively at the roots, contextual factors, and demands which caused blacks to create their music. In addition, most overviews have not been successful in providing a clear and complete picture of the continent of Africa during the period when Africans were transported to the Americas. Not only have peoples on the African continent been presented as a homogeneous group, but the central focus has been on societies in West Africa. Africans were drawn from numerous ethnic and linguistic groups and different societies.

The beginning of the twentieth century marked the first true infiltration of African American music into popular culture. Through the medium of sheet music, piano ragtime won the general public over to lively syncopated music in duple meter. It was arguably the first “youth music,” embraced by young people of the day and a cause for concern to their parents. A generation later, the African American music that came to be called “jazz” emerged from New Orleans and was proliferated primarily in the commercial music centers of Chicago and New York. The Great Depression that began in 1929 threatened to bring an end to jazz, but it reemerged in the 1930s more popular than ever and sporting a new name – “swing.”

Benny Goodman (1909–1986) is the figure who most readily comes to mind when marking the beginning of the “Swing Era.” He gave the popularization of swing jazz big bands its momentum; but he was not a stylistic originator, anymore than Scott Joplin originated ragtime or W. C. Handy originated the blues. Goodman culminated a long process that changed the context, format, and very nature of jazz. The “King of Swing” built his empire on a foundation laid by a number of innovative black and white musicians from across the United States.

More than any other entity, the Casa Loma Orchestra convinced Goodman to form his own band. The group began life as the Orange Blossoms, part of the Detroit network of bands overseen by Jean Goldkette. (This network also included McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, the band that hired arranger Don Redman away from Fletcher Henderson in 1927.)

The concert grand to c.1860

Piano making in the years c.1825–60 was characterised by the development of ever more powerful and sonorous instruments. In order to achieve their aims, makers continued to experiment with all aspects of piano design and as each small change was made in one part of the instrument, modifications were inevitably required elsewhere. So, for example, greater string tension necessitated a stronger frame and heavier hammers, which in turn led to a deeper touch. However, a deeper touch made fast note repetition more difficult, so a new kind of action was invented. It was a combination of hundreds of such developments (each of them painstakingly patented by makers, and listed by piano historians) that led to the emergence, around 1860, of grand pianos which were essentially the same as those used on concert platforms today.

A wooden structure was sufficient to cope with the string tension on early grand pianos. Nevertheless, small amounts of metal were used by some makers to strengthen the most vulnerable parts of the piano's structure. The first Broadwood grands, for example, from the 1780s, had small hoops of metal between the wrestplank (the block of wood which holds the tuning pins) and belly rail (the substantial wooden frame member that runs across the width of the piano and supports the end of the soundboard nearest the player) in order to prevent the gap closing through which the hammers pass on their way to hit the strings. Viennese makers soon adopted the same practice having first used wooden supports for the same purpose.

Salon and concert hall

Britain was an early pioneer in the development of public concerts: they were well established throughout the country by c.1750. In France, concerts were equally popular but, as in other aspects of French life and culture, were centred mainly on the capital to a greater extent than were their British counterparts. Public concerts were less in evidence in Germany and Austria until the early nineteenth century, though by then the citizens of Frankfurt, Leipzig, Berlin and Vienna were able to participate in a relatively thriving concert environment.

The salon is less easy to describe than a public concert. There had been a long tradition of intellectual gatherings of connoisseurs and aristocrats, but today ‘salon’ usually refers to ‘a part-intellectual and part-social gathering in a domestic (aristocratic or bourgeois) setting: a peculiarly nineteenth-century phenomenon principally found in the larger European capitals’. This is fine as far as it goes, though it is hardly comprehensive, since an all-embracing definition is far from easy. (It is therefore curious that most music dictionaries, including The New Grove, make no attempt to define ‘salon’.) When Amy Fay, the American piano student from Boston, studied with Liszt in Weimar during the 1870s, the salon in which she was invited to perform from time to time was a large room in the ducal palace. These essentially private functions were attended by highly intelligent and articulate, frequently titled, persons: here the depreciatory overtones sometimes suggested by ‘salon’ are inappropriate. The same is equally true of many of the Parisian salons throughout the nineteenth century.

After the fifty-seven performances of Days Without End in 1934, just enough to cover the Theatre Guild subscribers, Broadway would not see another O'Neill play until The Iceman Cometh was produced in 1946. The twelve years between the play that affirmed a sunny faith in God and the play that revealed O'Neill's dark existentialism are referred to as O'Neill's “silence.” Many believed that O'Neill's supposed return to Catholicism, as revealed in Days Without End, marked the end of his artistic powers. Of course, O'Neill did not return to Catholicism, nor did he feel spiritual peace. Quite the contrary, during his absence from Broadway he was engaged in his most intense exploration of his country and himself. Beset by continual physical illness, troubled by his relations with his children and wife Carlotta, deeply disturbed by the miserable state of the world - with Hitler, the world's “iceman,” on the march - O'Neill, exhausted physically and perhaps spiritually, was at the end of his tortuous journey. He was ready to write the plays of his history Cycle, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed,” a task not completed, and to write the four last plays which crown his formidable career, plays of the highest accomplishment - The Iceman Cometh (1939), Hughie (1940), Long Day's Journey Into Night (1940), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943).

Like many other male writers, Eugene O'Neill created a world populated primarily by men. From the sea plays at the beginning of his career to such late works as The Iceman Cometh and Hughie, men dominate his theatrical space. A simple number count confirms that only about one-third of the onstage characters in O'Neill's dramas are female. It is also true that the playwright's conception of women is rooted in a traditional equation of “feminine” with “maternal” that limits his ability to cast women in subject positions rather than as objects of masculine desire. Still, O'Neill's female characters cannot all be easily pigeonholed into neat categories, and even his myriad Madonnas and whores frequently transcend the cultural and theatrical clichés he inherited.

Introduction

In his introductory remarks to Lilian McCarthy's autobiography, Myself and My Friends (1933), Shaw wrote of the Court Theatre experience: “It did not seem an important chapter when we were making it: but now, twenty years after its close, it falls into perspective as a very notable one.”

When the Court Theatre venture was properly launched in the autumn of 1904 by Harley Granville Barker and J. E. Vedrenne, G. B. Shaw was' known as a minor novelist, a highly rated music and drama critic, and a failed playwright. A leading article in The Era (May 14, 1904) attributed his incontestable lack of success to his didacticism, his dehumanizing of characters, and his idiosyncratic egotism that revealed itself even more distastefully when his plays were performed rather than read. In March 1905, the leader in the same paper referred to“The Bernard Shaw Boom” at the Court Theatre. By 1907 when the Barker-Vedrenne partnership was planning a move to the larger Savoy Theatre after an artistic triumph and at least a respectable financial outcome at the Court, no less a theatrical knight than Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree was extolling Shaw's virtues as a dramatist who had by this time been happily acknowledged by the presence of the King, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Prime Minister, and numerous notable politicians at his Court productions.

“The truth,” Eugene O'Neill wrote in 1926, in response to the first draft of Barrett Clark's biography of him:

And Clark later quoted Carlotta O'Neill's observation, made in 1933, that “he will never tell the truth about himself, because in so doing he would have to tell the truth about others close to him.” O'Neill did cooperate with Clark, though, and the biography, first published in 1926, includes an account of O'Neill's wanderings and his collapse with tuberculosis in 1912.

Rarely has a writer been so explicit about his literary preferences in a fictive work. Edmund Tyrone's bookcase in Long Day's Journey Into Night tells us what his alter ego, the young Eugene O'Neill, was reading round 1912. Significantly, Shakespeare is present only in the form of a picture. His collected works are found in the living room's other “large, glassed-in bookcase,” representing the contrasting taste of James Tyrone, Edmund's father. Naturally, O'Neill has arranged the two book collections to fit the generation conflict in the play: old versus new values.

O'Neill criticism falls essentially into two categories: (I) the reception of his plays in critical reviews following their performances, and (2) the interpretation and evaluation of his plays by scholars and historians. The former have obviously appeared in newspapers like the New York Times and magazines like Time, Newsweek, The Nation, and The New Yorker; the latter in scholarly journals and in books devoted to his life and works. From the early 1920s until the late 1930s - the period of O'Neill's heyday as a popular dramatist - journalistic reviews were the chief category, though some quasi-scholarly studies also appeared in that period, most notably Barrett H. Clark's Eugene O'Neill, which was originally published in 1926. With the appearance of Sophus Winther's O'Neill: A Critical Study in 1934, evaluation of the playwright as a (if not the) major American dramatist and a significant figure in world drama has come to predominate, though obviously reviews of individual productions in the United States and, increasingly, abroad continue to appear.

By the time Desire Under the Elms closed in the fall of 1925, Eugene O'Neill was firmly established as the leading artistic playwright of the American theatre. The “Triumvirate” of O'Neill, Kenneth Macgowan and Robert Edmond Jones had successfully reorganized the Provincetown Players into The Experimental Theatre, an off-Broadway company ready to stage virtually anything which O'Neill could conceive. Guided by the tenets of the Art Theatre movement which Macgowan promoted, O'Neill indulged his imagination, composing the historical extravaganzas “Marco Millions” and Lazarus Laughed and the allegorical The Great God Brown, and sketching out two studies of modern bourgeois America, Strange Interlude and Dynamo, as well. But Marco, Interlude and Dynamo were not produced by the Triumvirate but the Theatre Guild, a prestigious Broadway company whose embrace of O'Neill signalled his arrival as a popular dramatist.

What Richard Sewall suggests is the most salient characteristic of true tragedy is not its plots, themes, or subjects so much as the range of human feeling it incorporates in a single work, notably the “capacity for suffering” and the “stamina” of its central figures. To this I would add that it is not suffering and stamina alone, important as these qualities are in tragedy, which contribute to the greatness of a work but also the range of often contradictory feelings underlying the characters' statements and actions. In Sophocles' Antigone, it is not Antigone's monumental courage and fortitude in insisting on her brother's burial that contributes to our sense of who she is so much as it is that courage and fortitude set next to her equally monumental rigidity. Her heroism does not rule out this rigidity nor does the rigidity discredit the heroism. It is in taking those qualities together that we come to see her as tragic.

Not many today question the pre-eminence of Eugene O'Neill as America's leading playwright. The playwrights who followed him - Williams, Miller, and Albee, and, more recently, dramatists like Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner - all have acknowledged their profound debt to him, as have younger playwrights in countries as remote from one another as Sweden and China. He is internationally recognized as the quintessential American dramatist of the twentieth-century world stage. Some are uncomfortable with what occasionally seems the melodramatic excess of even his most successful plays. There have been and continue to be vociferous nay-sayers about the playwright's work. But they are a relatively small minority, and many of those who express reservations about the excesses of earlier plays acknowledge that he “forged” those excesses (to use Jean Chothia's word) into a uniquely powerful medium that culminated in America's greatest tragedy, Long Day's Journey Into Night.

When attempting to select the important American productions of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, I was struck by the unavoidable conflicting views of what should make a production of a play significant in presenting a capsule stage history of the work of one of our most enduring playwrights. How important are the first productions of a play compared to revivals since the production personnel were the first to attempt to solve the problems of the plays? Yet some later efforts were clearly more finished or exciting. Furthermore, if a first production occurred while O'Neill was still living he often participated in production. And what of plays which are revived professionally nearly every year, like Long Day's Journey Into Night or Ah, Wilderness! versus important but only occasionally revived plays like Anna Christie or The Great God Brown? What of popularity versus critical approval? And what of the literary value of the play? Is a clear but uninspiring production of Mourning Becomes Electra more important than a fascinating interpretation of Welded?

Shaw's efforts to publish his plays for a large reading public helped define the “New”or “Modern” Drama as a reading as well as performing canon. Deliberately following the example of Henrik Ibsen whose plays often circulated in printed translations before being produced, Shaw aimed to fashion his plays as “high” art by giving his published scripts the material look and poetic weight of fiction and poetry. Shaw promoted play publication not to devalue stage production but to reclaim for the playwright from the actor-manager both legal ownership and primary authorship of the written script. Determined to strengthen playwrights' economic and cultural leverage by establishing their status as authors, Shaw argued for the literary merits of drama and for the author's exclusive right to the script as a property. Grounding his economic plan for selling his labour in Fabian socialist principles, Shaw anchored his aesthetic plan for publishing his plays in a modest adaptation of William Morris's revolutionary return to the arts of papermaking, printing, and bookbinding.