Pamphlet Nr. 82 for 09.06. / 10.06.2010
by Lydia Rilling (Translation: Richard Evidon)
It would make a good film scene: on an afternoon in February, trumpeter/composer Wynton Marsalis sits on the sofa of his living room - with its superb view across New York - and sings me half the history of jazz with infectious enthusiasm while outside a blizzard whirls through the city. Marsalis happily shifts from one style to the next, bobbing in time and pleased by my enjoyment of this little journey through the jazz story. In fact, it's only a little foretaste of his new composition, which he has written for the Berliner Philharmoniker and his own Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Here the composer retells the story from his personal perspective. Its title, Swing Symphony, is descriptive - for Marsalis, the history of jazz essentially coincides with that of swing, in the spirit of the Duke Ellington standard "It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing".
In his new musical epic, Marsalis draws upon the richness and variety of styles and trends he sees as part of the swing tradition. The mambo, bebop, Charleston, slow tango and Kansas City swing are only some of the many dance types that reverberate through Swing Symphony. In Marsalis's view, featuring the various stages of its history in a composition from the year 2010 corresponds exactly to the nature of swing itself: "My piece follows the evolution of swing to the modern, to the current time. And the attitude of the piece is that all the eras of swing are always present. Every moment of it is a modern moment. It is perpetually new; it revives itself; it's a timeless rhythm. A swing rhythm doesn't age."
The title Swing Symphony and the scoring already indicate the impressive challenge that Marsalis set himself with this journey through the history of jazz. It is, in the end, a meeting of two extremely different formations when the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra play together, even though Marsalis initially emphasises what they have in common. He views the fundamentals of jazz such as harmony and form within the European classical tradition. Nonetheless the two orchestras embody western European classical art music on one hand and North American jazz on the other. Only with "great caution" can such diverse ensembles meld, as Marsalis well knows: "The division of labor: That's the issue. When you have large forces like two orchestras you have to be very clear. Otherwise it's too chaotic and complex. The reason why things normally don't work with jazz orchestras and classical orchestras is that the different groups of instruments don't fit together." It is indeed easy for the sections to collide. Whereas in jazz there is a rhythm section, often in the classical orchestra this role can even be taken over by the strings. "The identity of our music is in the rhythm section," Marsalis continues. "When they're not playing, it doesn't sound like jazz. So we have to play in a groove, in a swing. The classical orchestra doesn't do that." The American composer admits that no one has yet worked out how to unite a jazz orchestra and a classical orchestra so that both maintain their identity in the creation of an artistically convincing work. But that is precisely what appeals to him about his new composition: "As another attempt, I want to try to figure some other ways how they can work together. The challenge for me it to make it sound like it's swinging. That is my objective."
The remarkable musical advances in the ballet genre that came about in Paris after 1910 owe much to a unique constellation of artists and circumstances. At the heart of this development was the founder and impresario of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, who possessed an extraordinary knack for stimulating the creation of significant works and initiating artistic collaborations. In 1909, his first commission to Igor Stravinsky, then only 27, laid the foundation not only for the composer's long connection with Diaghilev's company, which lasted until the impresario's death in 1929, but also, and more importantly, for his subsequent fame. His ballet The Firebird made the young composer famous overnight in 1910 and provided him with an entrée into Paris's most stimulating intellectual and artistic circles.
Immediately following this triumph, Stravinsky began work on a concertante piece for piano and orchestra, which would eventually turn into his second ballet. "In composing the music," he recalled, "I had in my mind a distinct picture of a puppet, suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet-blasts. The outcome is a terrific noise which reaches its climax and ends in the sorrowful and querulous collapse of the poor puppet." Stravinsky named him after Petrushka, "the immortal and unhappy hero of every fair in all countries".
Although composed as music for a ballet, Petrushka is no less effective in the concert hall. In works like Stravinsky's for the Ballets Russes, categories became interchangeable - there were no distinct boundaries between them. When Stravinsky increasingly mixed genres, styles and traditions, he was developing one of the most important principles of his aesthetic. Petrushka was, in fact, the work in which he found himself as a composer and discovered his own, unmistakable language. For the first time he made significant use of a technique that would become characteristic of his subsequent music, a principle that can best be described as modular. He created little cells and motifs, which are expanded, truncated, reaccentuated, combined and layered. Instead of the traditional development or extension of themes, he employed the experimental approach of assembling them mechanically into a mosaic, working as though "wielding scissors" and juxtaposing motifs with cuts - as in film editing. The prototype of this process is found in Russian folk music, which - in addition to ballet - had a decisive influence on Stravinsky's compositional process.
Petruskha owes its powerful impact not least to Stravinsky's extraordinary richness of invention, which he fully displayed in the ballet's four tableaux. His originality is by no means diminished by the incorporation, at times literal, of Russian folksongs, waltzes and popular tunes. On the contrary, the radical modernity of Stravinsky's music also derives from his appropriation and interpretation of this utterly heterogeneous foreign material from the past. Other major works would follow Petrushka in Stravinsky's long career and exceptionally varied oeuvre, yet as early as 13 April 1912, his friend and colleague Claude Debussy would write: "You may well surpass Petrushka, but you can already be proud of what you've achieved with this work."
