Word: jazzing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Nobody expects jazz musicians to play symphonies. But some high-brow concert audiences still think that symphonic musicians can play jazz. Symphonies are made to be played in concert halls for people who buy tickets to listen to them; the best jazz is made up on the spur of the moment, belongs in the jam session or the dance hall. Last week in Philadelphia's mid-Victorian Academy of Music, members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, under platinum-blond Maestro Leopold Stokowski, jiggled and swayed, did their best to lose their educated musician's sense of discipline, tried embarrassingly...
...transmuting spirit of America." Its four movements are labeled "Yearning," "Sorrow," "Humor" and "Aspiration." Pleasantly sentimental in the moments when it was not jazzy, the score was more impressive in its clear professional instrumentation (Composer Still once orchestrated for Paul Whiteman) than through its intrinsic musical qualities. Minus its jazz content it might possibly have been a better symphony; minus its symphonic pretensions, its jazz moments would certainly have been better jazz...
...nationalist" composers have long sought to combine these two musical styles, to create a type of symphony that is peculiarly a U. S. product. Jazz, or "Afro-American" symphonists prominent in recent seasons have included: Negro Composer William L. Dawson, who conducts the Tuskegee Choir, and whose Negro Folk Symphony No. 1 was performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Conductor Stokowski three years ago; Otto Cesana, onetime staff composer at Manhattan's Radio City, whose two jazz-inspired symphonies have been broadcast by Radio Maestro Erno Rapee; 23-year-old Radio Arranger Morton Gould, whose Swing Symphonette is scheduled...
Cadman believes that native composers have not yet struck the common denominator which constitutes the true American musical idiom, sees U. S. composition as too much swept by passing fancies (jazz, Indian idioms, Negro spirituals, et al.), finds extreme modernism merely "an interesting experiment." Says he: "There must be melodic line. The appeal must be to the heart as well as the head...
Last week in Harlem's dingy Lafayette Theatre, while a sophisticated audience squinted and chattered about esthetics, the von Grona blacks were officially presented as Art. In the pit an all-Negro "symphony" orchestra, sporting a single saxophone as a concession to racial idiom, played lukewarm jazz, the Star-Spangled Banner and Bach's Air for the G String. The evening's most pretentious item, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, was played on a phonograph...