As his name indicates, Abū Hāmid al–Qudsī, an unprepossessing scholar of the fifteenth century, was a native of Jerusalem. In his youth, however, he moved to Egypt, where he studied with many of the leading traditionists and jurists of his day. Overwhelmed by the splendors of his adopted country, he wrote a treatise extolling its virtues and, in particular, comparing it favorably with his native Syria. Such compositions, celebrating the “wonders” (fadā’il) of a city or region, were of course common in the later medieval Islamic world, and the inhabitants of Damascus or Medina could draw upon comparable works to bolster their civic pride. But Abū Hāmid had a strong case when he identified Egypt as the “heartland of Islam,” and the last bastion of civilization. He was by no means alone in his admiration: the great historian Ibn Khaldūn, another immigrant to Egypt, had himself been attracted by the reports which reached him in the Islamic west of Egypt’s magnificence.

That Egypt should have emerged over the course of the Middle Ages as the fulcrum of the Islamic world is a matter which, despite the antiquity of Egyptian civilization, requires explanation. After all, for much of the first several centuries of Islamic rule, the country was politically and culturally passive, following political developments and decisions taken in the east, the occasional efforts of an Ahmad Ibn Tūlūn or Abu’l–Misk Kāfūr notwithstanding. Moreover, the astounding fertility of the Nile valley cannot obscure the non–agricultural poverty of medieval Egypt. Apart from its vast expanse of unproductive desert land, Egypt consisted of a utilizable land area roughly the size of Holland, and was almost completely lacking in those resources which fueled the rapid expansion of late medieval European civilization, such as undeveloped arable, iron and wood, let alone specie. Eventually, the scarcity of natural resources would take its toll.

The emergence of an autonomous Egypt

From 850, the attention of Arab chroniclers ceased to focus on the eastern provinces of the Dār al-Islām, the ‘Abbāsids’ primary concern for a century. Southern Iraq, potentially so rich because of its high–yielding agriculture, its vast port of Basra, its convergence of caravans and riverine navigation (the main route directing the Iranians toward Mecca and the commodities of the Indian Ocean toward the Byzantine markets), was nonetheless shaken by unrest. From 820 to 834 the disturbances engendered by the undisciplined Zutt, buffalo breeders who had arrived from India during the Sassanid period, compelled the ‘Abbāsid caliphs in 222/837 to relocate them in northern Syria, confronting the Byzantines. Subsequently, the general uprising of the Zanj erupted, a rebellion of black slaves imported from Zanzibar to cultivate the southern Iraqi plantations of sugar cane and rice under unbearable climatic conditions. Inspired by an ‘Alid pretender, they were initially victorious. The Zanj temporarily occupied Basra and, after 255/869, menaced all the fertile agrarian lands of southern Mesopotamia. Although they were vanquished in 270/883, the region’s agriculture did not recover from the devastation that was inflicted on it. A group of Ismā‘īlī agitators, the Carmatians, had inaugurated their programs of indoctrination in the region of Kūfa around 264/877. After founding a state at Bahrayn on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf in 286/899, they instigated revolts among the poor peasants of southern Iraq and the Arab tribes of the Syro–Iraqi steppe at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century.

The events of 1882 mark a watershed in the modern history of Egypt. By defeating the Egyptian army and occupying the country, Britain brought a forceful conclusion to almost a century of Great Power rivalry and of increasing Egyptian independence. While Egypt remained a province of the Ottoman empire, and the dynasty founded by Muhammad ’Ali continued on the throne, the country now moved to an even further orbit of Ottoman influence, and its direction fell to a small number of Europeans backed by a British garrison. Whether the mistaken result of haste in the face of diplomatic protest, or the inevitable consequence of geo-political realities, Britain’s promises soon to evacuate Egypt went unfulfilled, and there began a long new chapter in Egypt’s foreign domination and Britain’s global empire.

Early in the occupation it became clear that the problems that had precipitated intervention would not quickly be solved, however benign or uncertain were British intentions. The financial crisis that had led Isma’il inexorably into the web of European bondholders had worsened; the weakness of the Egyptian regime, exploited by ’Urabi and fully revealed at Tall al-Kabir, was only worsened by the obvious subordination of the new khedive, Muhammad Tawfiq, to the British; the insecurity of imperial communications that political and financial collapse had threatened was deepened, not corrected, by British intervention; rebellion in the Sudan threatened Egypt’s entire African empire and even the security of her southern borders. To restore Egypt’s finances would take years of painful and painstaking economizing; to restore authority to the Egyptian government while maintaining British strategic objectives would require a constant balancing act.

Fāṭimid political history

At the heart of the Fātimid state lay the imamate, which challenged both the political hegemony and the religious authority of the Sunnā ‘Abbasid caliphate. The Fātimids were a sect of Shī‘īs, that is, one of several groups who argued that ‘Alī ibn Abī Tālib should have succeeded the Prophet Muhammad as head of the Islamic community of believers. These partisans of ‘Alī (shī‘a, hence the term Shī‘ī) also eventually claimed that the headship of the Islamic community should rest with the descendants of ‘Alī and his wife Fātima, the daughter of the Prophet. They also believed that the descendants of ‘Alī and Fātima had inherited special authority to interpret the Qur‘an and religious law and belief. Disputes among different groups of Shī‘īs often centered, therefore, around genealogy. The Fātimids traced their own descent through Ismā‘īl, one of the early Shī‘ī imams, and thus we call them Ismā‘īlī.

When the Fātimids came to Egypt, they had already worked out their genealogical claims in detail, moved from being a secret missionary group to an openly declared caliphate, and founded a state in Ifriqiyya (modern–day Tunisia). The turning–point for the dynasty came with the accession of the fourth Fātimid imām–caliph, al–Mu‘izz li–dīn Allāh in 342/953. In 358/969, he succeeded in conquering Egypt after three unsuccessful attempts by his predecessors. The relatively bloodless campaign was led by his general Jawhar, who founded a new capital city, Cairo, just two miles north of the original Arab capital Fustāt. Several years later, al–Mu‘izz moved his court from north Africa to Cairo, and Egypt remained the center of the Fātimid empire until the end of the dynasty in 1171.

The period 1525–1609 covers approximately the first third of the history of Ottoman Egypt, and has distinct characteristics. It starts with the pacification of the country after the suppression of Ahmad Pasha al-Kha’in’s revolt and of the serious disturbances by Bedouin tribes that followed it, and the promulgation of the code for the government of Egypt, Qanun-name-i Misir by the grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha. Egypt remained tranquil and passive under Ottoman rule that was firm and effective. Around the late 1580s, however, the army became unruly owing to economic difficulties and in the context of the general decline of the Ottoman empire. After that the viceroys had increasing difficulty maintaining their rule. The whole period, which can be described as the ascendancy of the viceroys (or pashas), ends in 1609 with suppression of a serious soldiers’ rebellion by a strong viceroy. New political forces came to the fore, and the viceroys acted merely as formal representatives of the sultan.

The main sources

Historians attempting to describe the period face a dilemma of meager source materials. Egypt during the Mamluk period is unusually rich in historical sources – chronicles, biographical dictionaries, handbooks, and the like. The last decades before the Ottoman occupation, the conquest itself, and the next six years (until Dhu l-Hijja 928/November 1522) are superbly covered by Ibn Iyas, one of the best representatives of the great Egyptian historiographic tradition. ’Abd al-Samad al-Diyarbakri, an Ottoman judge who came to Egypt with Salim’s army, stayed there to serve as a qadi. His chronicle is a translation into Turkish of Ibn Iyas’s work, with significant changes, and then a detailed continuation of the chronicle for a period of two-and-a-half years (up to Shawwal 931/July 1525).

Cairo’s visual culture so impressed the medieval scholar Ibn Khaldūn that he pronounced the city the umm al–dunya (“center [lit. “mother”,] of the world”). Cities and their buildings stood at the center of the visual culture of medieval Egypt. Recognized as significant forms in themselves, the cities and their buildings both provided a central focus and constituted an underlying structure to which other elements of the visual world related. Medieval authors saw this structure evolving in the visual world they described.

Ibn Khaldūn was overwhelmed by the richness of Cairo’s arts, particularly in its architecture and the related arts of woodworking, gilding and masonry. He noted as well those arts he understood as supporting a luxurious lifestyle such as textiles, fine glass, ceramics, costly papers and books, and the working of precious metals. To Ibn Khaldūn, Cairo was the epitome of “sedentary culture,” a term he used to highlight the role of cities as the locus of civilization and as a fundamental art form in themselves. The luxury and diversity he found in early fifteenth–century Cairo was something he believed went hand–in–hand with the strong dynasties which had maintained it as the capital from the tenth century on. He noted also that travelers spread its sedentary culture throughout the Mediterranean by bringing Cairene luxuries back to their home towns.

If the history of American music in the twentieth century can be said to have imparted at least one clear lesson, it is that tonality has proved to be a far more durable and resilient force than many, at least among the more progressively minded, would ever have predicted at the century’s beginning. Indeed, although there is still an identifiable musical avant garde, and although prominent figures in modernism’s second (post-World War II) wave, such as Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter, are still making their voices heard, it is tonality in all its many varieties that seems poised to set the tone, as it were, for the concert music of ad 2000 and beyond. Among those performers and audiences with at least some interest in recently composed music, it is tonal music especially during the last two decades that has garnered the lion’s share of attention. Elderly composers who grew up neoclassical and never wavered; middle-aged composers who started off as atonalists or dodecaphonists only to repent later on; and younger composers for whom a nontonal idiom was never really a viable or seriously considered option – all are enjoying exposure in performances and recordings as never before.

Why has this happened? And why now? For all its history as a melting pot, open to new influences of every sort, America has, paradoxically, always had a deeply conservative streak. And this conservatism is nowhere more evident than in its attitude toward the arts. As has often been pointed out, the Þrst Caucasian arrivals in the territories that eventually became the United States, as well as the many succeeding waves of immigrants over the next several centuries, brought what “culture” they had from their former, European homelands.

This chapter traces the complex results of a paradigm shift: around the middle of the twentieth century, commercially mediated working-class and rural musics disrupted the dominance of Tin Pan Alley popular song. Records became more important than sheet music, and oral traditions grew ever more audible and less local. The music industry resisted these changes, which rewarded ‘untrained’ performers and songwriters, upstart record companies, and eccentric disc jockeys more than the composers, arrangers, copyists, crooners, and studio orchestras of the reigning commercial system. But by 1952 the value of record sales exceeded that of sheet music, and the handful of major record companies saw their share of the popular music market drop from 78 percent in 1955 to 34 percent in 1959, even while that market tripled in size during those few years. Never before had the sentiments and critiques of working-class music been so accessible and persuasive to other groups. Previously separate audiences found new affinities as mass culture offered them fresh pleasures and identities. Music that had expressed the world views of primarily marginal groups brought its styles and sensibilities to the center stage of American life.

From the early days of the recording business, genre categories served to separate artists and audiences along racial lines, implying that “race records” and “hillbilly, ” for example, came from mutually exclusive sources. But demographic shifts encouraged cultural mixtures throughout the twentieth century: not only generational changes, but perhaps more importantly, the mass movements of people from the country to the cities.

In chapter 2, I discussed three aspects of the interaction between individualism and egalitarianism which characterizes American music as well as her politics and society: elitist art and egalitarian folk musics, which in some respects mark the poles of a spectrum, and the mediational role of musical reformers. The present chapter explores three other aspects: a counter-reform, the popular music industry, and the interlinked techniques of improvisation and experiment. I begin by returning to the reformers.

Counter-reform

The reformers sought to elevate America’s tastes by presenting artistic values in a musical language suited to ordinary citizens. They were most successful in cities, where their ideas both supported and rested on a rich concert life. The links between art music, reform, and patronage thereby grew steadily stronger, so that by the 1870s many reformers had effectively become upper-class conservatives.

By that time, however, America was becoming more self-critical about its social and economic polarities. The aesthetics of working-class citizens seemed less important than their economic position, and values derived from European art music seemed far removed from the affection citizens granted their folk and popular musics. Though reform methods still served to promote musical literacy and performance, they became increasingly irrelevant to the reformers’ original, broader objectives: mediation, reconciliation, acculturation. A counter-reform was needed.

This, like its predecessor, was grounded in religion – in particular, the unending succession of religious revivals that swept across nineteenth-century rural America. The music sung at these ranged from traditional psalms to remnants of the New England repertory to, eventually, reform hymns by Mason and his brethren.

‘Take it for granted from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so.’ So wrote Busoni two years before the beginning of the twentieth century, prophesying the extraordinary explosion of compositional innovation which the new epoch would bring, and in which the development of the piano's technical and sonorous capabilities would play a crucial role. Yet in spite of the apparent desire on the part of several composers at the turn of the century to break firmly with tradition and cultivate an almost avant-garde approach to pianoforte composition, with hindsight it now seems abundantly clear that the exciting new developments in piano music in the early years of the century were firmly rooted in nineteenth-century precedent.

By 1916 the piano's impact on compositional developments had become sufficiently evident for E. J. Dent to publish an article entitled ‘The pianoforte and its influence on modern music’, in which he expressed the opinion that Liszt had been the ‘foundation of modern pianoforte-playing and pianoforte composition’ in spite of his various ‘shortcomings as a composer of real music’. The influence of Liszt's technical virtuosity and harmonic experimentation is to be seen clearly enough in Ravel's Jeux d'eau (1901), which owed much to the water-figurations of Liszt's Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este (1877). The impressionistic application of virtuoso figurations to create atmospheric effects was adopted by Debussy in his piano music from the Estampes (1903) onwards, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit (1908) marked the apparent limits to which such technically demanding figurations could be stretched.

Introduction

Many factors shaped the piano music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a period of change during which keyboard instruments extended from five to seven octaves, and from the relatively light-framed instruments of the 1760s and 1770s to the much more robust concert pianos of the 1820s (see chapter 2). It was also a period which saw an increasing emphasis on virtuoso performance and technique. At the same time, amateur music making increased rapidly and publishing houses expanded to satisfy the ever-increasing demand for cheaper, popular music. These and other factors led composers to write in certain ways for certain audiences, and if we are to understand the piano music of this period we must first give some attention to the circumstances in which composers worked as well as the settings in which music was performed.

One of the most significant developments of the late eighteenth century was the establishment of the public concert. Concerts for a paying audience had existed prior to this time, but their popularity grew in importance at the end of the eighteenth century to such an extent that composers who might previously have devoted their energies to the service of a rich aristocratic patron now found themselves writing to satisfy the public taste. London was the most important centre for the public concert at the time, with its newly rich mercantile class, and concert promoters such as Johann Christian Bach and Johann Peter Salomon lost no time in engaging a wide variety of musicians for their series of subscription concerts.

These astonishing lines from a song written in 1898 may be read as a harbinger of key developments in twentieth-century American music. Behind the mask of racist, stereotyped black dialect that marked the popular genre known as coon song, the black composer Will Marion Cook (1869–1944) makes a sly and powerful assertion: that African American music would become a universal musical language, that everyone would soon be “singin’ coon.” At least two things made it possible for Cook to imagine that scenario. First, a new generation of African Americans, born in freedom, reached maturity in the 1890s, allowing for the unprecedented blossoming of black secular music styles. Second, the same decade witnessed the emergence of a business culture that created a “cult of the new” (Leach 1993, p. 3). New merchandising techniques stoked consumer desire for novel items produced in bulk, and among the hot new commercial products was black music on published sheets and, later, sound recordings. Between 1890 and 1930, then, the rise and spread of ragtime and jazz held out the promise of realizing Cook’s prediction.

Ragtime in American culture

The poetic diction that Cook adopted in Darktown Is Out Tonight and other songs – spiked with the derogatory word “coon” for African American – was common currency in ragtime songs dealing with black subjects at the turn of the century.

Prologue - “Americana” at century’s end

With little fanfare and without anyone really taking notice, a new type of music appeared during the early months of 1997 in the bins of record shops, the announcements of CD catalogues, and on radio folk-music shows: “Americana.” From the beginning it was hard to determine what Americana was, or rather, what it embraced. Americana surely embraced folk music, and, indeed, many singer-songwriters were quick to use the term to refer to the music they created and performed. Singer-songwriters are on the whole politically liberal, which by extension suggests that Americana does not have the more conservative overtones it might otherwise possess. The music of this “Americana,” moreover, is eclectic, multicultural, and multiracial; its styles embrace ethnic diversity, and its repertories self-consciously reflect racial diversity, notably the blues. Americana, so it seems at first glance, offers something to everyone. It’s a music that provides aesthetic and ideological identity to each individual and to a limitless range of cultural and political issues. If stylistic borders are blurred in Americana, the ability to use music to cross social and class borders is nonetheless crucial to the cultural agenda of those who perform and consume it, those who transfer its sense of engagement with America to their own lives.

Americana is taking shape as the twentieth century is coming to a close. Not only is it a product of a particular moment in American history, but it is a music that describes and ascribes the changing American identities that mark that moment. Through its wanton embrace of folk, ethnic, racial, regional, and class distinctions Americana lays claim to multiculturalism and postmodernism, that is to the aesthetic ideologies of inclusivity that characterized many sectors of American society in the post-Civil Rights and post-Vietnam era of the 1970s and 1980s. With its political agendas Americana strives to memorialize the folk-music revivals of the 1950s and 1960s, and before that of the 1930s.

In the fall of 1961 regular readers of the New York Times would have encountered a pair of brief articles published a day apart which, while unexceptional individually, are striking, at least in retrospect, in their juxtaposition. Thursday, September 7 of that year saw the publication of a short review (Salzman 1961) of a concert sponsored by the Fromm Music Foundation. Presented the previous evening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the aegis of the International Musicological Society, which was holding its eighth congress at Columbia University from September 5 to September 12 (with ancillary events at Yale and Princeton Universities and at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. [LaRue 1962]), the concert offered only three works. Of these the first two – Vision and Prayer for soprano and synthesized accompaniment, by Milton Babbitt (born 1916), and the Double Concerto, by Elliott Carter (born 1908) – were world premieres, both commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. The third – the Concerto for Violin, Cello, Ten Winds and Percussion by Leon Kirchner (born 1919) – was a New York premiere.

The following day the New York Times printed an unattributed piece (anon. 1961) announcing details of the New York Philharmonic’s new subscription season that was doubtless read with greater anticipation by the majority of readers. According to the article, Leonard Bernstein would frame the season with two special “cycles,” the “Gallic Approach” and the “Teutonic Approach,” occupying the first and last six weeks respectively of the orchestra’s calendar. The French cycle featured not only the works of French composers but also works of “French influenced American composers,” and similarly for the German cycle.

Italy and the Iberian peninsula

Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655–1732) is generally credited with the invention of the piano in Florence at the end of the seventeenth century. Although some earlier accounts of keyboard actions survive, it is only from Cristofori that a continuous line of development can be drawn.

Cristofori entered the service of Prince Ferdinando de'Medici in 1688 as curator and instrument maker. In this capacity he maintained harpsichords, spinets and organs and made a variety of keyboard (and possibly stringed) instruments. His work on the piano may have begun as early as 1698, certainly by 1700, and in 1709 or 1710 Scipione Maffei noted that Cristofori had ‘made three so far, two sold in Florence, one to Cardinal Ottoboni’. In 1711 Maffei published a detailed description of Cristofori's pianos, including a diagram of the action (Fig. 1.1).

The action in Maffei's diagram works in the following way: as the key (C) is depressed one end of the intermediate lever (E) – which pivots around the pin (F) – is raised. This causes the escapement (G) to push the hammer (O) towards the string (A). The escapement then ‘escapes’ from contact with the hammer and allows it to fall back to its resting position, on a silk thread (P). When the key is released, the escapement, which is hinged and attached to a spring (L), slides back into its resting position and the damper (R) – which had been lowered when the key was depressed – comes back into contact with the string in order to damp the sound.