I hear the violincello or man's hearts complaint, And hear the keyed comet or else the echo of sunset.
I hear the chorus.... it is a grand opera.... this indeed is music! (11. 597-99)
Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"
"In those days it was either live with music or die with noise," author Ralph Ellison remarked in a 1955 essay originally published for High Fidelity magazine, "and we chose rather desperately to live" (187). When Ellison, a trained musician, reflected on his 1949 choice to convert his New York apartment into an "audio booby trap" so that he could find the "calm" to write, he was still surrounded by an incredible mix of restaurant juke boxes, classical radio programs, howling cats and dogs, preaching drunks, rehearsing opera singers, jazz's legacy of Armstrong, Ellington, Goodman, and Holiday, jam sessions at Minton's, and the emerging bebop mythology of Parker, Gillespie, Blakey, and Monk. Despite a lifetime of musical devotion, Ellison could not continue his transition from the trumpet to the typewriter without entering the "new electronic world," buying, piece-by-piece, "a first-rate AM-FM tuner, a transcription turntable and a speaker cabinet" (193). This audio equipment enabled the aspiring artist to live with music, to hear what he wanted to hear--and what he wanted his neighbors to hear--when he wanted to hear it, and to write. At issue for Ellison was the distinction between noise and music; once he had control over the music, it was not noise, and he could live. Music's power, he explains, is in the ways it informs our cultural and historical cartographies: "One of the chief values of living with music lies in its power to give an orientation in time. In doing so, it gives significance to all those indefinable aspects of experience which nevertheless help to make us what we are. In the swift whirl of time music is a constant, reminding us of what we were and of that toward which we aspired" (197). And in America, where issues of what we were and what we aspire to be are always in question, music has played a particularly crucial role in orienting us to our time and providing a sense of definition.
Whether we choose to or not, we all live with music, perhaps more today than ever. With technological advances in the global economy of our postmodern world, it is almost too easy to locate, purchase, listen to, and perhaps sample any written musical reference from anywhere in the world. In an electronic culture in which theme songs and soundtracks often prove more memorable--and profitable--than the visual narratives they supposedly enhance, and music videos and multimedia concert screens circulate images more resonant than the trendy songs supposedly at their creative core, it is sometimes hard to know what a song actually is anymore. Perhaps we have never known; perhaps music, as Walter Pater romantically theorized in the 1870s, exists in a "condition which music alone completely realizes" (47). One could argue, to borrow from Krin Gabbard and Lawrence Grossberg's studies of music and representation, that as contemporary subjects we function as part of what Foucault would call an apparatus, a musical and extra-musical network of technological innovations (from the annoying jingle of a cell phone to the DVD of a Charles Mingus documentary), stylistic shifts in language and fashion (from the rhythmic discourse of hip-hop to the retro-chic of Jimi Hendrix), and corporate media practices (from radio ads to the audio clips of a music seller's Internet site). A cartographer of any sort would be hard-pressed to map a space in which music--music heard--is not a part of our "sound system." Indeed, with America's overcongested communities growing in direct correlation to an over-dependence on inferior building materials, an often overtly rude blurring of public and private discourse, and the automobile becoming more like a set of overgrown woofers on wheels, many citizens often can not find the dividing line between living with music and dying with noise. Arguably, though, it has been the innovation and mass production of sound technology over the past century that has "swiftly whirled" a unified citizenry and enabled the United States to become the world's dominant superpower. In other words, we are so much louder than everyone else, we often can not hear their music--or our own. Just watch an American network's broadcast of an Olympics medal ceremony.
But long before our technology-saturated world of commercialized leisure, long before the near universal ownership of boomboxes, televisions, VCRs, car stereos, tape recorders, MP3 files, and computers, music could be encountered in relatively few unrepeatable, almost unimaginable from today's view, ways. Prior to 1920, most Americans could not imagine hearing music and voices entering their homes "over the air." But with the roar of the jazz age and the boom of the post-World War I economy, the radio industry would grow from 5000 home sets to over 2.5 million in 1924. A few years later, audiences would not only hear and see a celluloid A1 Jolson singing "Blue Skies" but be told by him that they "ain't heard nothing yet." The audio text and the mass production of music had come a long way from Thomas Edison's 1877 tin cylinder recording of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and his 1880s competition with Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner, the inventor of the disc record, over control of the recording industry. By the mid-1890s, arcades of coin-operated music machines became extremely profitable, requiring a steady supply of musical records, and the selling price of the spring motor phonograph dropped below $40, making it a stable instrument of mass popular culture. Mix in more industrial and corporate competition shaping the arts and consumer culture of the fin de siecle, plus the publication of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899, and music--its reproduction and listeners' expectations--would never sound the same. (See Fig. 1 and 2.)
[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]
But how did Americans live with music before machines challenged sheet music, live performances, and the piano parlor as major sources of popular entertainment? How was music represented, communicated, and discussed prior to the mass production of recording technology? What, for example, did music mean to the poet Emily Dickinson, who as a pianist certainly lived with music? And what does she mean by "music" in these "bolts of melody" (c. 1863)?
The Love a Life can show Below Is but a filament, I know, Of that diviner thing That faints upon the face of Noon--And smites the Tinder in the Sun--And hinders Gabriel's Wing--`Tis this--in Music--hints and sways--And far abroad on Summer days--Distils uncertain pain--'Tis this enamors in the East-And tints the Transit in the West With harrowing Iodine-- 'Tis this--invites--appalls--endows--Flits--glimmers--proves--dissolves-- Returns--suggests--convicts--enchants--Then--flings in Paradise--(2898)
Certainly, the emotional power of music, its "hints and sways," its "flings," is still very much a factor in the listening and referencing of contemporary sound. Dickinson's poem, though, with its syncopation, staccato, crescendo, and decrescendo, is almost a song itself, a song easier to "record" for Dickinson than would have been one of her piano improvisations. Living with music, after all, was unimaginably different for a nineteenth-century writer. It had to be because as an apparatus music lives differently today, and we live differently with it.
Still, in that pre-audio leisure apparatus of the nineteenth century, the multiple meanings, practices, purposes, locations, and representations of music circulated throughout American literature and culture. But what did music mean? Why was music meaningful, and how would those meanings change in the changing nation? Where did "American" music come from? What made it American? Who made it American? What did the sounds of and responses to music say about the surrounding culture? How was music represented? Who represented it? What shaped the politics of musical representation in nineteenth-century America? What were the effects of such representations? Do such representations still impact us today in our multimedia-heavy culture of commercialized leisure?
In other words, what do our "notes" mean?
At the end of chapter one of his 1845 Narrative, Frederick Douglass takes note of the sound and silence shaping his chilling childhood memories of Aunt Hester stripped, tied, and whipped. In response to the "heart-rending shrieks from her," young Douglass, "horror-stricken," hides in a closet, blanketing himself in darkness and his own silence "till long after the bloody transaction was over" (1765). Ironically, it is this silence, this protective resistance to sound, that forces readers to "listen" more closely to his ensuing printed words. And what brings readers a bit closer is music, in which Douglass hears something profoundly political, yet personal. At the end of chapter two, in fact, Douglass segues from the sound of silence to the sound of song, offering a brilliant commentary on the power of music to materialize what would maybe otherwise be silent. Perhaps more importantly, though, he presents a bold critique of the politics of music and the conflicting reception and roles of slave songs in America.
I have often been utterly astonished, since I came to the north, to find persons who could speak of the singing, among slaves, as evidence of their contentment and happiness. It is impossible to conceive of a greater mistake. Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slaves represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. At least, such is my experience. (1768)
For Douglass, living with sound, too, carried with it an apparatus of meanings. The notes meant something, and that meaning could not be disconnected from its historical context. Music meant enough to him that he used the spiritual blues wails of the haunted slave to help ground the foundation of his argument about literacy, race, communication, power, identity, and the nation. It would seem that Douglass saw music as a form of literacy, a compelling discourse very much connected to the soil and the material reality of its agents, not an abstract force floating above the fields waiting to be found. Representative and interpretative capital, however, could distort that reality and control the argumentative power of song.
One must remember that during Douglass's lifetime, opera and musical theater were certainly popular forms of music, but the most popular music among white Americans and African Americans emerged out of blackface entertainment. Blackface minstrelsy became a national craze in 1828 after the white minstrel Thomas "Daddy" Rice produced a stage routine based on his observations of a singing and dancing, crippled black slave named Jim Crow to music entitled "Jump Jim Crow." (See Fig. 3 and 4.) Although the sheet music for various "Jim Crow" and other nineteenth-century songs :is not terribly difficult to locate, especially with hundreds of digitalized copies housed on Internet servers, we cannot really know what was signified by a minstrel performance, despite Spike Lee's boldly disturbing work in the film Bamboozled (2001). As Winthrop Sargeant has argued in his studies of jazz's early "hot and hybrid" roots, representation and dissemination could play louder than the songs themselves:
The printed versions of the old minstrel songs offer, of course, a very dubious key to what was actually sung in the heat of performance. If the 1840s had had the benefit of the phonograph, we might have a very different and much more accurate idea of what early Afro-American entertainment and dance music sounded like. As it is, we must depend principally on conjecture and on second-hand reports. (20)
Thus the politics of music would play into the politics of literary representation.
[FIGURES 3-4 OMITTED]
Many musicians and composers of the nineteenth century were also very aware of the politics of music. Stephen Foster (1826-64), the composer of "Oh! Susanna" (1848), "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" (1854), and over 200 other songs, would die with 37 cents to his name after trying to live with music as a professional musician during the antebellum age of blackface minstrelsy. Far from "simple" folk songs, Foster's lyrics and melodies could be heard as an effect of America's collective consciousness of the time: an absorption of European opera; Scots-Irish song; his favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert Burns, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Moore; abolitionist speeches and publications by Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and childhood friend Charles Shiras of Pittsburgh; Civil War pain; and African-American slave songs. Foster's access to slavery's oral tradition of spirituals and work songs most likely began when hearing Olivia Pise, his family's black servant. Today's reader may frown upon the heavy use of dialect and caricature in minstrel songs--and its hybridized derivations labeled "Ethiopian Songs"--and rightly so, as there is an undeniable link to the overall exploitation of America's African descendants. But one must also take note of Foster's efforts to reform blackface minstrelsy by resisting dialect and old South nostalgia, forbidding racist caricatures on his sheet music covers, instructing white performers not to mock the slaves in his songs and trivialize their hardships, and humanizing such represented slaves as universal figures in search of compassion and spiritual peace in America.
Considered by many scholars to be the most American of American composers, Charles Ives (1874-1954), like Foster, began composing his uniquely "grand and glorious noise" upon a range of democratic vistas. His most influential teacher was his father, George, a Civil War bandleader, who introduced young Charles to polytonality and multiple meters. George Ives's bands would often march up and down Danbury's Main Street in public display of his musical experiments. Such musical frontiers could be anything from band members marching in different directions while simultaneously playing songs in different keys and meters to "harmonizing" songs in quarter tones. But this musical freedom may never have unfolded had it not been for Charles's grandparents, George White Ives and Sarah Ives, staunch abolitionists and transcendentalists. Grandson Charles would later compose "The Anti-Abolitionist Riots," a piano piece, as a tribute to his grandmother's rescue of a fugitive slave in New Fairfield, Connecticut. She also helped found the Hampton Institute, a "colored school," in Virginia. By co-founding the Danbury & Norwalk Railroad, the Danbury Gas Light Company, and the Danbury Savings Bank, George White Ives helped make the Housatonic Valley into a thriving multi-ethnic community. Had it not been for the Ives's passion for Emerson, however, such ambition mixed with social awareness and visionary imagination may never have materialized. It is this transcendental ethic that was passed onto their bandleader son, George, and to his composer son Charles.
To produce his new American music, Charles Ives would pull from the multicultural sounds of Danbury's ethnic and industrial growth, the musical experimentation and eccentricities of his father, the patriotic music of post-bellum New England, the spiritual hymns and popular marches of his day, the literary works of Hawthorne and the Alcotts, and the transcendentalist works of Emerson and Thoreau, as seems evident in The Concord Sonata. Charles Ives's peculiar music, almost avant garde in its mix of conventional and unconventional sounds, would never acquire popularity in the United States until after his death. The dissonant harmonies and tone clusters of pieces such as "Putnam's Comers," which boldly features the sounds of a brass band, a march, and an out-of-tune piano in the song's first few minutes, would eventually establish Ives, an insurance innovator by profession, as a "discoverer" of America in music and a pioneer opening up new ways for twentieth-century composers--from Copland to Gershwin to Mingus--to rediscover the nation in notation.
While Ives and Foster drew upon a wide range of liberating American voices to create American music, other nineteenth-century artists and writers, such as Dickinson, Douglass, and Whitman, looked to the abstract yet tactile power of music to give shape, direction, and dimension to their craft. The great Long Island painter William Sidney Mount (1807-68) is perhaps best known for his musical portraits The Banjo Player, The Bones Player, and The Power of Music. (See Fig. 5.) Not unlike the subject of his Right and Left, Mount played the fiddle; additionally, his uncle composed musical comedies and his brother was a dance master. Often, Mount would rely on his subjects to play while he sketched them, for in the act of music he could bring them to life on canvas and express the transcendental force of individual worth.
[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]
One wonders if another of Mount's contemporaries, Edgar Allan Poe, who as an urban journalist reviewed musical performances, may have sensed something similar, although perhaps less gentle, in the romantic resonance of a plucked string. In one of his most performative fictions, "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe uses music to make his narrative and its dying characters come alive. "We painted and read together, or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit ..." (1466). The synesthesia of Poe's portrait of Usher, "the fervid facility of his impromptus ... in the notes, as well as in the words" (1466), not only add depth and resonance to his written words but reinforce a romantic notion of music popular at the time--that in music lies the power to transcend one's conditions and to elevate one's artistic expression. To paraphrase Pater, music is not simply something with which we live but the condition toward which all art, literature, and philosophy aspires (45). Nevertheless, the Ushers die with noise under the crushing weight of their collapsing family home.
This special issue of ATQ, "Noting the Nation: Words and Music in Nineteenth-Century America," looks at various ways in which the writers and citizens of America lived and died with, understood and misunderstood, and represented and reproduced music. In the opening essay, "The Eternal Symphony Afloat: The Transcendentalists' Quest for a National Culture," Scott Gac examines the development of culture as a new frontier in the 1830s and 1840s, an artistic space in which Fuller, Emerson, and others believed America could correct its inequalities and reach harmony. As Gac argues, the Transcendentalists, suspicious of language, believed that music's ability to communicate made it a "true" art, a "living" art--alive, in part, because music at the time did not exist unless it was heard live. By showing us the dialogue among antebellum music writers such as Elizabeth Peabody, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and John Sullivan Dwight, and the philosophers looking to improve society, Gac provides an overview of music's presence in the debate over music's role in America's future (over)soul. At around the time that Fuller wrote "music" as a way to reform American life, the sheet music industry was beginning to grow, as was the popular culture of blackface minstrelsy.
Nick Evans takes readers into another aspect of nineteenth-century minstrelsy and American identity in his "Ira Aldridge: Shakespeare Meets Blackface Minstrelsy." Little known to this day in the United States, the New York-bom Aldridge was one of the first African-American actors to achieve fame on British and other European stages. Building upon Eric Lott's references to United States minstrel precursor Charles Mathews's parody of Aldridge's Hamlet, Evans looks at the "black Atlantic" formation of "American" culture and musical theater and Aldridge's use of Shakespeare and comic minstrel song to work the Du Boisian double-space between "anti-racist hero" and "hapless victim of dominant racial discourses."
In his essay "'An Inestimable Blessing': The American Gospel Invasion of 1873," David W. Stowe also looks at the "transatlantic accents" of American song. Specifically, Stowe takes issue with Du Bois's claims in The Souls of Black Folk that the swell of gospel music in the post-bellum era was primarily "debased imitations of Negro melodies." By analyzing the crossed paths of the Jubilee Singers, touring Britain to raise money for their newly formed college for freed slaves, and the evangelical musical team of Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey, Stowe presents an ethnomusicological view of surprising similarities between these seemingly very different musical performers.
Cory Lock also looks at audience reception to music but with an emphasis on dance, not just listening, as the key mode of connection at the end of the nineteenth century. As shown in her essay, "`Especial Attention Paid to Deportment': The Round Dance, Social Identity, and Mollie Davis's Under the Man-Fig," dance was a vital component of the late nineteenth-century American West, "a particularly democratic form of cultural representation" that tells us much about how people understood their position in society. The fiction of Texas author Mollie Evelyn Moore Davis, Lock argues, is of particular significance due to her use of round dancing as a cultural marker of class, race, and gender.
Stephanie Dunson's study of blackface minstrelsy will appear in ATQ's December issue (Volume 16, No. 4). She explores the cultural capital of sheet music, its often disturbing illustrations and conveyance of popular assumptions, in her essay "The Minstrel in the Parlor: Nineteenth-Century Sheet Music and the Domestication of Blackface Minstrelsy." By analyzing a representative sampling of sheet music covers, Dunson argues that the music was not just music but an interdisciplinary discourse enabling a negotiation "between public entertainments and the evolving boundaries of the American home.' Tracing shifts in sheet music production and dissemination, plus its predominantly racist images and themes, Dunson shows that even an American culture undergoing major shifts in public and domestic spheres learned from music that the white family represents the "normal" American bond.
This, indeed, is music. Listen.
Craig Kleinman State University of New York at Ulster Stone Ridge, New York
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. "The Love a Life can show Below." Lauter 2898.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Lauter 1754-1818.
Ellison, Ralph. "Living With Music." Shadow and Act. New York: Signet, 1966. 187-97.
Gabbard, Kiln. "Introduction: Writing the Other History." Representing Jazz. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 1-8.
Lauter, Paul, et al. eds. The Heath Anthology o/American Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton, 1998.
Pater, Walter. "The School of Giorgione." 1877. Walter Pater: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Jennifer Uglow. London: Dent, 1973. 43-47.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Fall of the House of Usher." Lauter 1461-74.
Sargeant, Winthrop. Jazz: A History. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Whitman, Walt. "Song of Myself." Lauter 2743-94.
CRAIG KLEINMAN is an assistant professor of English at the State University of New York at Ulster. His publishing and teaching projects center around Jewishness, jazz, and American culture. Craig enjoys playing the oboe and shooting skeet.
