The record changer (Jan-Feb 1945)

patterns is so extraordinary a phenomenon that it would properly require more attention from the sociological point of view than from that of the musicologist. A common focal point for both views, however, might well be considered to centre around the social significance of syncopation. The history of all European music has been a striving for order and precision in all elements of music, but especially in that of meter and rhythm. The regular beat, therefore, has always been the symbol of order and discipline while the irregular beat and the displacement of accents has invariably been symptomatic of a sense of revolt and rebellion not only against the traditions of music but also against those of society. It was therefore highly appropriate that Beethoven would use syncopation in conjunction with clashing discords in that celebrated passage of the first movement of the Eroica where his republican hero seems to be contending against the slings and arrows of a determined opposition. So, too, he syncopates (more mildly this time) when in the third Leonora overture he is setting before us a theme typifying the courageous struggle of a devoted wife against a brutal tyranny which has imprisoned her husband. It is appropriate, also, that Schumann (the apostle of revolutionary Romanticism) should celebrate his great venture by defying the rigour of strict time in the opening of his Manfred overture, in several passages from the first Sy)nphony in B Flat, in many places throughout his music for pianoforte solo, and in the second subject of the finale of the concerto for piano and orchestral It is certainly no accident that those rebellious peoples, the Scots and the Magyars, should belong to the few that use syncopation in their folk-music. Wilder Hobson suggests a Freudian explanation to the effect that the eccentric accents of syncopation cater to a subconscious desire of getting out of the rut, of getting away from the tyranny of convention. It is only in jazz that this "eccentricity" becomes constant. The eccentric shifting of accent is continual. To quote the title of a jazz trumpet solo, it is "plenty off centre." Indeed, jazz can only be understood as a sign of the violent social rebellion that began with the first world war and led through the series of European revolutions to the second war and to the vast spiritual disturbance which was best summed up by Plekhanov : "All deep social changes are preceded and followed by disturbances of all the 'established' viewpoints in art, science, and philosophy." 6 Until the advent of Negro slavery in x\merica, the European tradition of music — unlike that of European literature, painting and architecture — had remained essentially free from the influence of other races. In Eastern Russia there was a meeting with Asiatic music but it never surmounted the Urals. In Southern Spain there was a meeting with Moorish music but this did not surmount the Pyrenees. Thus the African influence in America was the first revolutionary movement in music directed against the autocracy of the European tradition which had conquered American music. Considered in this manner, jazz is a more revolutionary development in music than any form of modernism, more unruly that the atonalism of Schoenberg, more ambitious than the experiments of Stravinsky and Bartok. Its revolutionary aspect can be found in the general democratisation of the orchestra — in the disappearance of the composer, of the conductor and, in the best of the collectively improvised jazz, even of the soloist; in the decisive break with the monopoly of academic education which had made a ruling class of those who could afford to pay for academic training ; in the general break with the necessity of an education in musical theory and in the re-introduction of something closely akin to the mediaeval guild system of education by practical example which re-appears in jazz training as the process of "sitting in." Thus jazz was a high explosive, loaded with the tension of two hundred years of suppressed Negro revolts. But at the same time it had all the potentialities of a cultural opiate — just because it was loaded with the spirit of unsuccessful revolt. Ellington, considering jazz as the Negroes' reaction in the plantation days to the tyranny they endured, says very pointedly, "What they dared not say openly they expressed in music." Thus jazz became music which was created as a substitute for action, an escape from action, and thus a singularly well suited soporific for the American citizen who saw that things were not quite what they ought to be, but who was too indolent to take action against the way things were developing. To sum up, jazz, at its best, became the American Negro's music of protest and assertion. Jazz, at its worst, became the white man's music of indolence and escape; more than even the movies, it has become the opium of the people. From (Continued on page \\) 8