Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music

Abstract

War, said Carl von Clausewitz ([1832] 1984, 87), is the continuation of politics by other means. My aim in this essay is to propose a pair of Clausewitzian theses about the encounter between a diversity of black American music--ragtime, blues, and jazz--and white modernist concert music in the United States and France, circa 1909-1931, with a later codicil from England. The encounter was both rich and strange, and it produced a large handful of now canonical or near-canonical concert works. During the interwar period, it was crucial to the definition of musical modernism itself, especially in the United States, though that is not the story usually told about it. It was also, and this virtually at every turn, haunted by ambivalence about the musics on which it drew, with which it mingled on terms compounded of pleasure, envy, condescension, anxiety, and celebration. Mention of this ambivalence leads me to my theses. The first is that the encounter in question was the continuation of race relations by other means. In this capacity, it addressed issues of subjectivity and cultural identity. The second thesis is that the same encounter was a continuation of blackface minstrelsy by other means. In this capacity, it addressed issues of pleasure as a socially and racially marked force. It is, of course, always possible to dismiss theses like these as tendentious. They can be discarded as attempts to impose social relations on the terrain of a purely stylistic problem, the reconciliation of high-art form and technique with an expressive vernacular. The high-low opposition that grounds this objection, however, is itself a vivid expression of social relations both real and imaginary. And it should surprise no one that those relations, which involve domination and desire, purity and danger, have a long history of racial encoding. My first thesis makes the simple, unpretentious assumption that whenever a dominant social group begins to appropriate the expressive idioms of the group it dominates, the process of appropriation bears traces of the social circumstances that ground it. This assumption becomes mischievous only when the messy, ambivalent process of social domination itself is misconstrued as a simple, unconflicted, unproblematic structure. My second thesis is admittedly more problematic. Blackface minstrelsy, after all, was crude, obscene, and egregiously racist, a carnivalesque debasement of the black male as other, the social site where the racial anxieties of nineteenth-century white Americans became (their) self-pleasuring. None of this can be said of black-inflected modernist concert music. On the contrary, the encounter of musical modernism with jazz and blues in particular might be said to have produced a site at which dominant white cultures were unusually hospitable to African-American cultural energies, and this well in advance of parallel encounters in popular music, which would not fully accomplish the same thing until the 1960s. My thesis, however, is concerned not with what minstrelsy signified but with what it did, not with its perpetuation of racist stereotypes but with its deployment of racial positions. Toni Morrison similarly abstracts the function from the content of minstrelsy in order to delineate a permanent racial subtext in American literature: In minstrelsy, a layer of blackness applied to a white face released it from law. Just as entertainers, through or by association with blackface, could render permissible topics that otherwise would have been taboo, so American writers were able to employ an imagined Africanist persona to articulate and imaginatively act out the forbidden in American culture. (Morrison 1992, 66) What Morrison presents as rhetoric also scans as history; to give the high-low formula one more turn of the screw, her analogy tacitly recognizes a kind of Africanist continuum running from the vernacular of minstrelsy to the high art of literary form. …

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