Introduction

Nationalism used to be portrayed, mistakenly, as an offshoot of nineteenth-century Romanticism, portrayed, moreover, almost exclusively as an eastern European phenomenon. We can see now that Weber's Der Freischütz and Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen are German nationalist in concept in much the same way that Mikhail Glinka's (1804–57) A life for the Tsar and Modest Musorgsky's (1839–81) Boris Godunov are Russian nationalist works. However, it is true that musical nationalism seems most apparent in those countries where there had been virtually no previous traditions of art music, such as one can point to in France, Italy or the German-speaking areas of western Europe. This is, of course, not to say that music was uncultivated in eastern Europe. Far from it: the Slavonic peoples have for the most part been intensely musical. Bohemian instrumentalists were justly celebrated in the second half of the eighteenth century and, as in most countries, eastern Europe enjoyed a rich cultural heritage of folk song and dance. Nor should we ignore the importance of church music, which had a strong impact on nineteenth-century Russian music. Since eastern European folk music and church music are much less familiar to western ears they seem to have acquired an exoticism and mystique that formerly contributed to the myth of musical nationalism as a purely eastern phenomenon. And one might add that in the nineteenth century social and political forces were strong factors in the emergence of nationalist sentiments: political unrest was endemic throughout Europe, particularly between about 1830 and 1870.

Throughout the multifarious developments in the field of composition during the twentieth century, the piano has clearly retained its high profile, and its central role in European-style music making. The divide between broadly ‘popular’ and so-called ‘serious’ music, however, has widened irrevocably and, even though the boundaries may fluctuate from time to time, this has come about through changes in Western society.

It is undeniable that the distinct personality of twentieth-century popular music reflects the stylistic contribution of African–American idioms. While such idioms originally developed unhindered, the last one hundred years have seen a gradual but remarkable takeover of the popular field. The arrival of a powerful sheet-music publishing industry was followed (in chronological order of their greatest impact) by radio, sound films, commercial recording and television. Although in each medium the powers that be initially resisted black composers and performers, they eventually capitulated and thereafter played a crucial role in spreading previous minority preferences among the mainstream.

Further consideration of this fascinating process lies outside the scope of the present volume, but two other factors must be borne in mind. Firstly, those responsible for each musical innovation were not merely the elite who form the breeding ground for innovation in any artistic sphere, but a performing minority within a racial minority. Thus, despite the accelerated rate of change brought about by technological developments, the dissemination of musical innovation was a three-stage process.

Anatomy

It is a perfect, warm spring day in Denver, Colorado. The tops of the city buildings trace sharp edges against the infinite, cloudless blue of the sky, and boulevards speed across the plains until stopped by the glittering snow-peaks of the Continental Divide. I take the bus from downtown to Cherry Creek. There, at the huge shopping mall, a more all-American crowd you could not find – healthy, young, handsome, casual, and easy in their clothes and with their bodies. Heady with purchase, pizza, and wine, I modulate into an epiphany of recognition that the American dream has somehow survived the latter-day depredations of media, technology, politics, and environment after all and, on a day like this, can suddenly glow with the splendor of all its old tangibility. A wave of satisfaction sweeps over me, and I find myself humming The Trolley Song.

It is, perhaps, rather touching that the desiccated soul of a musicologist can yet respond to the blandishments of sentiment, wit, association, and presentation that Tin Pan Alley forever traded in: for it is obvious that The Trolley Song still fits the experience. (The song, from the musical film Meet Me in St. Louis [1944] was written by Hugh Martin [born 1914] and Ralph Blane [1914–1995] and presumably “routined” and orchestrated by Roger Edens [1905–1970] and Conrad Salinger [?1900–1962].) The “ideal motion” of a ride to the consumer’s paradise in the suburbs remains, even if for shops rather than Louisiana Purchase Exposition stands and on a bus rather than a trolley.

At heart, this is a chapter about the early development of what musicologist Richard Crawford calls the music of “accessibility”, a music which seeks “most of all to find and please audiences and to increase their size” (Crawford 1993, pp. 86–88). To judge by events and developments in the nineteenth century, popular music pleased its audience by speaking directly to its needs and wishes. This chapter, then, will attempt likewise to discover and analyze audience and its concerns, in the belief that such a method leads most directly to understanding. By concentrating on reception and audience, instead of production (i.e. the performers, composers, and publishers), one hopes with Walt Whitman to find Americans – his mechanics, carpenters, masons, boatmen, shoemakers, hatters, woodcutters, ploughboys, mothers, wives, girls, young fellows – again “Singing, with open mouths, their strong melodious songs,” all “singing what belongs to [them], to none else” (from I Hear America Singing, 1860).

The range of popular music available to nineteenth-century Americans followed from developing notions of public and private spheres. Until this period, “privacy” in Western society was something unique to the few, generally those of exceptional wealth or special status. Most white Americans and their cousin Europeans of the previous centuries lived in a public world, where the individual’s primary role was the sustenance of the community. Accordingly, the music of this earlier period was almost always for public venues, whether theatres, churches, streets, or byways, for audiences that were often in some way participants as well. Communities sanctioned, varied, and sustained folk ballads; operas were social occasions; church music served to unite a congregation and bind it through ritual.

In 1830 Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1785–1849) wrote:

His remarks could easily have been made twenty or thirty years previously, since his description summarises – albeit in a highly generalised fashion – so many of the essentials of piano making and playing for much of the period covered by this chapter.

‘Viennese’ and English grand pianos

Most English grand pianos of the late eighteenth century look much like the Backers grand of 1772, illustrated in Fig. 1.5. The anonymous and undated grand of Fig. 2.1 is typical of instruments made in the last two decades of the eighteenth century in southern Germany and Austria (generally referred to as ‘Viennese’ pianos). These two instruments therefore illustrate the essential differences in appearance of pianos by members of the English and ‘Viennese’ schools.

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.