Just a song at midnight

GILBERT W. GABRIEL

They say that every possible combination of notes has long since been used up, and that there'll never again be a truly original tune in all the world. All music will have henceforth to be derived from other, older music, and it will all depend on how deftly or dumbly the new composer derives it. They say that especially about popular music. They have always been saying it about poor popular music.

No musical comedy comes along whose score is not immediately suspected of having been born of Beethoven, bred in Rimsky* Korsakoff and graduated from Tschaikowsky. The gentlemen and scholars who made haste to parse Yes, We Have No Bananas and discover in it unmistakable vestiges of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus and Balfe's The Bohemian Girl were only beginning the dirty work all over again. Long before their time a popular young composer named Sullivan was being similarly parsed and pulled apart and found guilty of deriving from ancient Italian churchmen.

Now the craze is at its height. Now every fondest theme-song and favourite of the radiocrooners has been traced to a Chopin nocturne, Chinese temple-bell trimmings or a counterrhythmic edition of the strawberry-picking song from Eugene Onegin. No popular song is safe from accusation. Perhaps, after all, none deserves to be.

Once, while still hot and damp from a ten years' soaking in the classics and grand operas, I used to rush feverishly home from every new musical comedy, pull out a dozen scores to prove my suspicions right, yell with righteous indignation when I knew for sure that Kiss Me, Cuddles was just a cheeky swipe from Ignace Immeresco's Adagio Funerale, or that Gimme Good V Plenty used the same whole-tone coloring as Olie Eilson's concerto grosso for two piccoli, snaredrum and orchestra, opus 118, number 4. Once, I confess, I used to feel like that and do such things.

I've long since degenerated into a more philosophic attitude about popular music. I can still grow a bit black-mouthed, of course, and cranky when I hear a particularly brazen steal, something badly lifted and shifted, something ungracefully and unapologetically redaubed. I can still go Berserk over one of those saxophonetic versions of the Lohengrin vorspiel which are supposed to be art for hoof's sake. But not as a rule. As a rule it is not worth the frown. As a rule—fatal effect of five or six years of musical-comedy-going— I like nothing better than popular music.

I don't think, for that matter, that our popular music could be so vastly much better. Popular music never has been, anywhere or when.

Yes, there was Arne and there was Mozart. And there were Offenbach and Sir Arthur Sullivan, ipse. And there was Johann Strauss, Jr., the waltz king of the not so blue Danube. All of these wrote charming and more or less original scores to merry librettos, and all of them were idols of their days' operettagoers.

But for every one of these glorious and ever memorable exceptions I shall not have to go to much trouble to pick out twenty-five of their contemporaries who composed equally light and popular commonplaces, equivalents of our most profitable musical comedies, whose music was—and, if you get it out and try it on your own piano, still is—fatally facile, unconscionably insincere; coirifortable plagiarism, fodder for the dance-floors, frankest and laziest truck for the bierstube and the seaside promenade.

Let's be done with the bathos of distance. Let's get over the superstitions that every old minuet is a masterpiece because it is a minuet, that every rund-und-rund Viennese valse has bluest Wienerblut in its veins, that every sarabande is a marvel of Eighteenth-Century exquisiteness, and that all is great aria which hits high-C. Let's not flee the fact that, long before jazz began, there was plenty of light music, unimportant music, uninspired and fearfully perishable music, music meant for nothing except song and dance, which is duller music than a great deal of our dullest jazz.

I hear the mighty voice of Ernest Newman, begging America to ship no more jazz abroad. I can sympathize. I hold no brief, I wave no flag. Jazz does grow monotonous. It screws into the ear and drives its hearers as mad as Heine writes he was driven when he heard all the butcher-boys and his best friends singing, humming, whistling a song from that new rage, Der Freischütz. But that song, you'll agree, was not jazz. Until ten years ago none of the maddeningly popular songs or ballets could have been jazz—or, at least, none could be called jazz.

I wonder, has the Unconscious Newman ever recollected what popular music there was before the jazz age? And how that music, too, was everywhere played and dinned and danced to and worn thin? And whether it was really any better music than today's?

Did he, let's say, ever have to hear all the operettes of Lehar besides The Merry Widow? Did he ever have to outlast a siege of Waldteufel and Strauss, senior, waltzes? Did he so infinitely prefer the pre-jazz beauties of Salut d'Amour and Tosti's Goodbye, and the shoeleather crunchings of John Philip Sousa? Would he still rather sit through an evening of Planchette than an evening of Gershwin?

The measure of importance of any frogpond is the size of the biggest bull-frog it contains. The measure of any popular musical movement is the size of the one or two composers grown big in it and strong enough to climb up out of mere popularity. We've all given George Gershwin the bull-frog's salute —some of us foolishly with air-rifles aimed in his direction—and all called our jazz days good because of his large, lively voice in them.

As for the littler fellows, they don't pretend to do much more than croak along. The littler fellows never have done much more in any such musical mass. But that is no reason for turning a classic ear against all jazz, only because all jazz composers can not raise it to concert pitch. And that is no reason for poisoning the whole pondful.

For all its blares and pranks and thick insistences, jazz happens to be a most essentially humble sort of music. It is a national inferiority complex doubling in brass. The efforts of Milhaud and Casella and other foreign professors to press its evils out of it and deliver it back to us studiously pure show how little they understand of the whole necessitous jollity, vulgarity, humility of jazz.

They tell me that jazz is dead, and that all it now needs is an epitaph. I doubt that. I don't think it has really died, but just suffered a rich C-minor change. It has quieted and softened and turned tender, reached its sentimental stage, its sere and sundown, its time of toothlessness and Rudy Vallee sighs and dear old stomachic rumbles. It is pensive where it once was mad. It is brooding where it once was altogether brash. It sits in the Amen Corner and remembers its flaming youth. But I'm sorry to report from seeing so many current musical comedies, it is still with us. So stop kicking grandpa around. Time enough when he is officially dead.

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There happens to be some perfectly good dance music embedded in some of the shows of this season; plenty of neatly fitted songs which, while they make no effort to start moral revolutions or musical schools, are twice as lively and quite as clever as the general run of popular music ever has been . . . and as most popular music ever can be.

For instance, every major song from Sweet Adeline; the marching song which gives Gershwin's Strike Up the Band its title; that heart-tossing thing called Soon from the same satirical jamboree; Cole Porter's Primitive Man from Fifty Million Frenchmen, and She's Such a Comfort to Me from Wake Up and Dream; Keys to Your Heart and International Rhythm from Lew Leslie's latest and most lavish mess. And, for instance—that very plain, crackling, inelegantly grinning tune from the popular musical show. Flying High called Thank Your Father.

There is precious little aristocracy about any of these examples. Sometimes there is less than little originality. But there is popularity—and my point is that it is popularity inevitable, popularity deserved.

Their manufacture is constant, their consumption massy. They are written to purse a huge public's lips, shake a nation's ankles. The marvel is that they can continue to be, year in and out, as lusty and juicy and cleverly simple as they are.

Popular music has never needed or bothered to set up any elaborate defense. I am only contending that, good, bad or unbearable as the popular music of our jazz age has been, it could never be worse than the large run of popular music of any other age. And, for all its swipes, its crude raids on folk-song, on synagogue and Jimtown, on Tosca and Sadko and God knows what other obvious treasure-houses for its themes, not a single bit less original than popular music has ever claimed to be.