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Jazzing the Classics: Race, Modernism, and the Career of Arranger Chappie Willet

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Abstract

The American popular music tradition of “jazzing the classics” has long stood at the intersection of discourses on high and low culture, commercialism, and jazz authenticity. Dance band arrangers during the 1930s and 1940s frequently evoked, parodied, or straddled these cultural debates through their manipulations of European classical repertoire. This article examines Swing Era arranging strategies in the context of prevailing racial essentialisms, conceptions of modernism, and notions of technical virtuosity. The legacy of African American freelance arranger Chappie Willet, and his arrangement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata, op. 13 (“Pathétique”) for the black dance band of Jimmie Lunceford, suggests that an account of the biography and artistic voice of the arranger is critical to understanding the motivations behind these hybrid musical works.

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Beginning around the mid-1930s, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman engaged with classical music, adding standard solo pieces to his regular performance and record portfolio. He also stimulated the emergence of a modern clarinet repertoire by granting commissions to composers, such as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others. In this article, I explore why and how these projects evolved and how the collaborations unfolded. My focus is on the commissions to Hindemith (1941/47) and Milhaud (1941). The newly found correspondence of Eric Simon, a Viennese-born clarinetist who advised Goodman and initiated contact with Hindemith and Milhaud, reveal Goodman's “double life” as a multilayered sphere for various actors, each with their own specific background and agenda. My analysis follows three topics that decisively shaped the investigated projects: Goodman's relationship with classical music, which I discuss in light of the intersectionally biased structures of U.S. musical life; the situation of European émigré artists experienced by Hindemith, Milhaud, and Simon; and the promotion of new music, which linked the lives, networks, and agendas of the aforementioned protagonists and even defined their relationships. By highlighting Goodman taking center stage as a performer-commissioner, I argue for more serious attention to performers’ impact on musical production and repertoire formation, given that they represent the ultimate gatekeepers to the living repertoire.
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The birth of jazzing the classics – the practice of jazz transcriptions of classical music – dates back to the Swing Era (from the second half of the 1920s to the first half of the 1940s). The most pronounced trend in jazzing the classics of the era of Swing was the transformation of themes from classical musical compositions (mostly, of a song-like romantic nature) into pop song and dance compositions. The high classics were losing their status of music for serious performance and listening, turning into “foot music” and a commodity for the music business. At the same time, some of the musical samples from the era from the 1920s to the 1940s anticipated such fundamental features of the practice of jazzing as a new stage in the history of jazz, which began at the turn of the 1950s and the 1960s, namely: the involvement of baroque and classicist music, concert types of performance, and the preservation of the entire music of the original composition in the resultant music. Despite its widespread distribution, jazzing the classics has long remained in the shadow of research attention. Meanwhile, it can become the subject of a multi-vector study – from techniques of transcription to major issues of a socio-cultural nature. The present article focuses its attention on expanding the documentary and historical base. An analysis of materials from the American periodicals from the 1920s to the 1940s makes it possible to recreate the pro et contra situation of the Swing Era in relation to jazzing the classics. The scholarly originality of the article lies in the expansion of the factual base associated with the history of jazzing the classics, the introduction of previously unknown names, compositions, and other materials of the American periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s into Russian musicology, and the identification of the influence of the jazzing practice of Swing Era on its subsequent stages.
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The American tours of five visiting virtuoso pianists - Leopold de Meyer (1845-7), Henri Herz (1846-50), Sigismund Thalberg (1856-8), Anton Rubinstein (1872-3), and Hans von Bülow (1875-6) - are examined in this book in regard to their management, itinerary, repertoire, performance style, and reception. The transformation of audiences from boisterous to reverent, the gradual acceptance of the piano recital, the establishment of a canon of masterworks for the piano, and the evolution of concert-giving into a highly organized commercial enterprise are documented. Appendices include the itineraries of these five pianists, totaling almost one thousand concerts in more than one hundred cities, and the repertoire of Rubinstein and Bülow.
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Both improvisation and composition (traditional notation, alternative forms of writing out music, or "head" arrangements) are integral to jazz, but they have frequently been seen as discrete modes of artistic expression that correspond to the division between jazz and classical music as separate realms of black and white artistic achievement. The study of jazz has always been beset by problems concerning the division between improvisation and composition. While it is generally accepted that jazz by definition must have some improvisational elements, many scholars and aficionados have been much slower to accept the importance of written materials, especially in regard to jazz of the 1920s and 1930s.1 This perception often has racial divisions, with the idea being that black bands relied more on improvisation and collective arrangements, while white groups depended more on printed music. Often during those decades, the written materials in question were commercially produced "stock arrangements" printed by music publishers to tie in with the issue of new songs. But regardless of stereotypical perceptions, these arrangements were liberally used by both black and white bands to fulfill a dual purpose: allowing writers and publishers to disseminate new songs and dance bands to acquire and perform with relative ease new jazz material. Numerous white arrangers produced jazz-inflected stocks during the pre–swing era (prior to 1935), but a few stand out both for quality and quantity. In Chicago Elmer Schoebel and Mel Stitzel wrote dozens (perhaps hundreds)2 of arrangements for the Melrose Brothers Publishing Company, including many tunes valued for their jazz and "hot" content. In New York, the field was dominated in the late 1920s and shortly thereafter by Jimmy Dale, Frank Skinner, Jack Mason and, for a short period, Archie Bleyer. Among the latter group, it was Bleyer whose name was remembered most often in later years by both black and white musicians recalling the era's finest (and most demanding) stocks. The testimony of his contemporaries, the frequent appearance of his name in the print media during the early 1930s, and the regularity with which bands used his stocks (or elements thereof) on commercial recordings—all attest to Bleyer's emergence as a force in the music publishing world and in its relation to jazz.3 Born to an upper-middle-class white family on June 12, 1909, in Corona, Long Island, New York, Archie Bleyer showed musical talent at an early age and began piano studies at age seven.4 His father was a professional trumpeter who had extensive orchestral experience in Germany, playing under the batons of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Anton Rubinstein. 5 Immigrating to the United States around 1900, Max Bleyer was engaged to play with the Philadelphia Symphony and later joined the New York Philharmonic, as well as performing with numerous other New York groups. Despite this pedigree and a willingness to allow his son to learn piano, trumpet, and music theory, the father actively discouraged the son from pursuing a musical career. Nevertheless, young Archie became proficient enough on piano to find occasional work in dance bands while still in high school. Entering Columbia College in 1926 as an electrical engineering major, Bleyer soon began visiting Harlem and the uptown nightspots that featured the music of great black bands such as those led by Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and others. By his sophomore year, Bleyer had made the switch to a music major and even began copyrighting his own songs.6 Bleyer took part in school music ensembles, playing trumpet in the band and orchestra and piano in various student dance groups. By December of his sophomore year (1927), he was active enough to make extra money playing piano in local professional groups as well. Christmas break of that year found him playing in a dance band led by Harold Oxley, who later managed the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra.7 During this short tour, Bleyer roomed with trombonist Sunny Clapp, who was well known at the time as the composer of the hit song "Girl of My Dreams." It was Clapp who encouraged Bleyer to begin his career as an arranger, based on some informal work he had...
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Bill Finegan's arrangements of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue for the Glenn Miller Orchestra in 1942 and of Concerto in F for the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra in 1952 provide a basis for interpreting Gershwin's compositions. Finegan's treatments suggest that techniques central to popular forms were foundational to Gershwin's style in these pieces. Furthermore, Gershwin's and Finegan's works shed light on the concept of hybridity in the United States, especially as it concerns the label of “symphonic jazz” or “concert jazz” and ideas about race. Hybrid terms such as “symphonic jazz” manage to challenge musical and social categories while simultaneously reinforcing them.
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The Casino Ballroom of Avalon, Catalina Island, is located about twenty miles off the coast of the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Completed in 1929 under the direction of chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr., the ballroom became a significant venue for dance bands of the 1930s and early 1940s. The Casino did not, however, feature any of the most familiar names of the era. Instead, it was designed as a state-of-the-art dance hall for the presentation of exclusively white dance bands playing “sweet” jazz, a style that avoided the most obvious musical signifiers of “hot” popular music. Through a comparison of three commercial recordings of “Avalon,” I detail how the music of Jan Garber's sweet jazz orchestra—a group immensely popular at the Casino—differed from the music of hotter jazz dance bands, such as the Jimmie Lunceford and Casa Loma Orchestras. Garber's sweet “Avalon” established a sonic place characterized by specific musical relationships and values that were easily fused to the ideology of the island's promoters. For the owners and managers of the Casino Ballroom, jazz was to be the sound of modernity suffused with nostalgia for a threatened, racialized social order.
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