"TAPPING INTO THE TWENTIES" On A Sunday Afternoon with The American Symphony Orchestra

I rarely get to Sunday afternoon concerts anymore, but it’s a lovely time to hear music. On the later side of Sunday afternoons, of course. 3:00pm is especially civilized.

I recently found myself at Geffen Hall for just such a concert at just such a time, almost to my own surprise. “Tapping into the Twenties” my ticket said— leading me to expect tap dancing. Instead, there was Leon Botstein, in soft-soled shoes, conducting the American Symphony Orchestra in a terrifically syncopated, tap-free afternoon of lesser-known classical pieces written during “The Jazz Age.”

I listened and learned.

First up was Skyscrapers (A Ballet of Modern Life) by John Alden Carpenter. I know Carpenter and his music a little, but more by reputation — an Illinois-born Brahmin who liked jazz and pursued a modernist musical muse to significant acclaim until George Gershwin came along and kind of supplanted him. Carpenter, it was said, had heard “King” Oliver and Louis Armstrong during their earliest Chicago days up from New Orleans, as well as Sidney Bechet, which just made me envious. Carpenter’s once-very popular Krazy Kat ballet, written in 1921, was subtitled: “A jazz pantomime” — which is exactly how it sounds to me: an anodyne pantomime of jazz.

Skyscrapers proved much more alluring. Commissioned by Serge Diaghilev himself for his Ballets Russes, Skyscrapers did not ultimately make the Diaghilev cut; instead the Metropolitan Opera produced it in 1926 on a triple-bill with Gianni Schicchi and Pagliacci, for heaven’s sake. There was a Black chorus — the first Black singers on a Metropolitan Opera House stage, I believe, — and one Black principal dancer, Frank H. Wilson, who the following year would play Porgy on Broadway in the Dubose and Dorothy Heyward play (preceding the Gershwin's 1934 opera, Porgy and Bess).

Mr. Botstein and the ASO captured Carpenter’s jazz-ish angularities and shiny, steely skyscraper tonalities with insouciance. The lush string sonorities and rhythmic asymmetries of the piece evoked Gershwin inescapably and quite charmingly. I liked it.

The next piece was anything but charming, by intent, and proved, by far, the most moving performance of the afternoon. Erwin Schulhoff was one of Europe’s hippest composers before and between the World Wars, an explorer of styles and visions, a master of modes both avant garde and neo-classical; an echoer, in the best possible sense, of Mahler. Born in Prague, he built his career in Dresden before Hitler’s rise forced him back to Prague, in flight from an antisemitism that finally ended him, just as he was attempting to flee Czechoslovakia and the Nazi occupation. He died in their Wülzburg prison camp in Bavaria from tuberculosis on August 18, 1942.

Schulhoff’s Concerto for Piano and Small Orchestra, as exquisitely essayed by guest pianist Orion Weiss, evoked, for me, every detail of what I have just told you about Erwin Schulhoff’s tragically attenuated life; though the Concerto was written in 1923. It is a vividly eclectic creation, wherein every eclectic musical note and gesture coalesce heartbreakingly and, in retrospect, almost prophetically. It is both virtuosic and laceratingly dramatic. I won’t forget it. Especially right now.

I get a kick out of Edgar Varèse, whose ruthlessly experimental Arcana was performed after Intermission. I think of him as a classical Thelonious Monk, an iconoclast and a rule breaker who, by the time he wrote Arcana in the 1920s, was composing with what he called “sound masses” — contrasting blocks of sound that defied conventional linear compositional form. On this anything but lazy Sunday afternoon, Mr. Botstein and the ASO rocked Arcana and Arcana rocked back, an explosive effusion of shifting and repeating dissonances blasted through with a rhythmic roar that transcended mere syncopation.

The afternoon’s finale was William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, subtitled his: “Afro-American Symphony.” I love Still’s music. (In 2012, I wrote a pretty extensive re-examination of his opera career for Opera News that you can read HERE.) Born in Mississippi, his arrival in New York in the early 1920s coincided with the efflorescence of the Harlem Renaissance. A brilliant reedist, Still played in the pit for Sissle and Blake’s ground-breaking Shuffle Along on Broadway. An ambitious and gifted composer and arranger, he also quickly broke through as the leading (and virtually lone) Black classical-music star of the era, taken up by Edgar Varèse, interestingly, who premiered two Still operas — From the Land of Dreams in 1925 and Levee Land in 1926 — via Varèse’s avant garde-promoting International Composers' Guild Orchestra.

Years ago, when I was prospecting on a daily basis in the Schomburg Center archives researching Black and Blue, my biography of the lyricist Andy Razaf, a denizen of the stacks there accosted me repeatedly to denounce George Gershwin as a thief who had stolen “everything” from William Grant Still. “The hell with Razaf,” he would holler at me, “write about that!”

I didn’t. But I did explore his accusations. William Grant Still, I concluded (as others before me have), influenced a great many composers with his wide-ranging compositional style and deeply musical Black roots. But George Gershwin sounded like nobody but George Gershwin.

Still’s Symphony No. 1 premiered in 1930. Its blues-drenched tapestry, gorgeously evoked by Mr. Botstein and the ASO, unabashedly deploys, not Gershwin, but rather W.C. Handy and his “Memphis Blues” as a central motif. Still’s first significant job in the music business was working for W.C. Handy in Memphis as house arranger at Handy’s music publishing firm. When Handy and Still both moved to New York, Still joined Handy’s new Black Swan Phonograph Company as music director and was involved in that label's many seminal blues and jazz recordings.

I do hear Gershwin in Still, and Still in Gershwin, including presages of “Porgy and Bess” in Still’s Symphony No. 1. Appropriation? Influence? Or mere confluence? In the afterglow of a swell Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t begin to say.

I have other things on my mind. My 96-year-old mother, who lived for her Sunday afternoon concerts and took me to many over our life together, is going to miss her final Philharmonic subscription Sunday afternoon date this month because of ill health. This piece is for her.