Genius and Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht

Author:Norman Lebrecht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Jewish;Jews;Judaism;Social history;Cultural history;Civilisation;Ideas;Genius;Invention;Anti-Semitism;Racism;Einstein;Freud;Kafka;Marx;Levi;Disraeli;Trotsky;Mendelssohn
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Published: 2019-08-29T20:18:33+00:00

An elusive Jewish sound: George Gershwin paints Arnold Schoenberg, 1936.

‌Nine

1911

Blues ’n’ Jews

One sweltering summer’s afternoon on a brownstone stoop in the Bronx or Harlem, a bunch of kids is messing around with a guitar belonging to someone’s older brother when a light goes on in one kid’s head: they are speaking the same music. Half the kids are from African slave families freed in the aftermath of the American Civil War. The other half are fresh off the boat, refugees from Russian pogroms. The light is flicked on not so much by a catchy tune as by a common way of coping with heritage.

Blues, the morose music of ex-plantation slaves, strikes an intuitive chord with Jews, whose songs inhabit a dolorous minor key, steeped in past suffering. Blues are structured in twelve bars, broken into three groups: statement, obverse and resolution. A blues C-major scale has ten notes, with an additional E-flat and B-flat that augment and subvert the octave. To a European, these would count as ‘wrong’ notes.

Ashkenazi Jews take music from itinerant influences, Baltic to Balkan, and adapt it to available instruments – violin, clarinet, accordion – known as klei zemer or klezmer. The klezmer scale, involving at least two flats in excess of the western diatonic, is identified by a prayer name: Ahavah Rabbah or Mi Sheberach. Jews keep these names to themselves. They don’t want academics chewing up their music. They favour a chazanic sob at inappropriate intervals, a tear-jerk.

No one knows where or when the summer’s day stoop conversation takes place, or if it occurs at all. All we can see is the result: a musical connection made between Jews and African-Americans as the early twentieth century explodes into a 1911 firestorm of a million-selling song and the birth of the global music business. Jews are about to become the first American composers of world renown, and what they write is a fusion of African blues with their own minor-key temperament.

This is counter-intuitive. It flies straight in the face of where music appears to be going. In Europe the tendency has been to ‘civilise’ folk music, a tendency that has required Haydn and Beethoven to prettify Scottish and Irish folksongs for drawing-room use and which is now setting abstract poetry to the increasingly arcane melodic forms of Debussy, Schoenberg and Scriabin. The new American songbook does not belong in the drawing room. It throws a brick through a ground-floor window by coarsening the melody with ‘wrong’ notes and the language with get-down-and-dirty street talk. ‘That’s just the bestest band what am’, jives Irving Berlin’s ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, the mega-hit of 1911. No pure rhymes, no ‘g’s at the end of gerunds. This is music that uses notes the way immigrants use the vernacular; whatever comes to lips and mind, regardless of the rule book.

Berlin, son of a penniless chazan, who dies after Irving’s barmitzvah, gets work as a ‘boomer’ for publisher Harry von Tilzer, belting out new songs above the traffic on downtown street corners.

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