Pops by Terry Teachout

Author:Terry Teachout
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2014-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

In 1947 America closed the books on World War II and plunged headlong into an era in which fear and promise were inseparably commingled. It was the year of the first transistor and the first supersonic flight—and the year in which the Cold War got under way. Jackson Pollock started work on his first drip painting in January, and Clement Greenberg dubbed him “the most powerful painter in contemporary America” in a widely discussed essay published that fall.* In Hollywood the style of moviemaking that a French critic had dubbed film noir reached its peak with the release of Out of the Past, in which Robert Mitchum tells Jane Greer to “build my gallows high, baby,” then escorts her to a rendezvous with death. Martha Graham might well have been thinking of a similar rendezvous when she gave titles to the two dances that she choreographed in 1947, Errand into the Maze and Night Journey.

All these works of art reflected the state of the American mind to which W. H. Auden gave a name in July when he published a book-length poem called The Age of Anxiety. So did many of the jazz recordings released that year. Though bebop was not yet widely known, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were putting out one classic record after another, all of them jarringly up to date by comparison with the big-band swing that had come before them. The big hits of the moment, however, were not Gillespie’s apocalyptic “Things to Come” or Parker’s “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” (named after the mental hospital in which the heroin-addicted saxophonist had been incarcerated for much of the preceding year) but such novelties as Perry Como’s “Chi-Baba, Chi-Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)” and Tex Williams’s “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette).” For all its interest in avant-garde art, Cold War America also longed for musical comfort food.

Those who picked up a copy of the New Yorker on May 17 and opened it to the “Goings On About Town” section would have found plenty of ways to amuse themselves that weekend. On Broadway Ingrid Bergman was starring in Maxwell Anderson’s Joan of Lorraine, John Gielgud in The Importance of Being Earnest, Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun. Those with more adventurous tastes could also have caught The Medium, Gian Carlo Menotti’s new opera, which had just opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, where it ran for 212 performances, twice as long as the original production of Porgy and Bess. Gallerygoers interested in abstraction were free to choose between exhibitions by Robert Motherwell and Aaron Siskind. Ballet Theatre was dancing a mixed bill of works by Frederick Ashton, Agnes de Mille, and Antony Tudor at City Center, and Norman Granz was presenting Coleman Hawkins and Buddy Rich in a “Jazz at the Philharmonic” concert at Carnegie Hall. It was, in other words, a typical Saturday night in New York City, which had emerged by default as the cultural capital of the West after the cities of Europe were bombed into rubble.

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