Further to yesterday's post on the Cherry Hill Hotel, here is further material we are making use of in our present researches. Ellington's alleged antipathy to the works of George Gershwin ... has long been going on... and here is a posting which perhaps references the origins of that animus towards Porgy and Bess in particular.
‘Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s “Porgy”‘ by Edward Morrow from New Theatre. Vol. 2 No. 12. December, 1935.
A much quoted article by music historians, Duke Ellington’s guarded, but honest opinion of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess for the Communist Party-supported New Theatre magazine.
‘Duke Ellington on Gershwin’s “Porgy”‘ by Edward Morrow from New Theatre. Vol. 2 No. 12. December, 1935.
When the Theatre Guild launched the George Gershwin musical version of Du Bose and Dorothy Heyward’s play Porgy recently, and rechristened it Porgy and Bess, the cult of critical Negrophiles went into journalistic rhapsodies, hailed it as a “native American opera”, avowed it “typical” of a “child-like, quaint” Negro people and declared it “caught the spirit” of a “primitive” group. The huzza filled the columns, were quoted by second-hand intelligentsia, and echoed in the banalities of the subscribers. No one, however, thought to ask Negro musicians, composers and singer their opinions of the Gershwin masterpiece.
Accordingly I sought out Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington, Negro orchestra leader and composer. He has neither axes to grind nor pretensions to support, but busies him elf reproducing and creating the most genuine Negro jazz music in the world. Objective critics have likened his work to Sibelius; his band is distinctive. Unfettered by hot-cha exploitation, his energies might be released to the serious efforts his genius warrants.
“Well Duke,” I began, “now that you have seen Porgy and Bess, what do you think of it?”
“Grand music and a swell play, I guess, but the two don’t go together-I mean that the music did not hitch with the mood and spirit of the story.” Then he added: “Maybe I’m wrong or perhaps there is something wrong with me, but I have noted this in other things lately too. So I am not singling out Porgy and Bess.”
“But sticking to Porgy and Bess, Duke, just what ails it?”
“The first thing that gives it away is that it does not use the Negro musical idiom ” replied Ellington. “It was not the music of Catfish Row or any other kind of Negroes.”
“Then I don’t suppose it could be very true to the spirit, scene or setting of impoverished Charleston Negroes if the musical expression failed to consider the underlying emotions and social forces of the Gullah Negroes,” I suggested.
“That might be it at that,” agreed Ellington, “but I can say it better in my own way. For instance, how could you possibly express in decent English the same thing I express when I tell my band, ‘Now you cats swing the verse, then go to town on the gutbucket chorus’!”
“You would intend for the boys to play the verse in rhythm, and finish the final chorus with improvisations accented heats and a crescendo,” I laughed.
“Sure, but for all your fifteen-dollar words you didn’t give the same impression did you?” he argued. “If you hadn’t been around the band, and if you did not know the background of the musician you couldn’t interpret them or use their idioms, could you?”
“I think I get your viewpoint,” I answered, “but why did you say the music was ‘grand’?”
“Why shouldn’t it be?” he smiled amiably, “It was taken from some of the best and a few of the worst. Gershwin surely didn’t discriminate: he borrowed from everyone from Liszt to Dickie Wells’ kazoo band.”
Ellington turned to the piano, and playing said: “Hear this? These are passages from Rhapsody in Blue. Well, here is where they came from- the Negro song Where Has My Easy Rider Gone? Now, listen to this- this is what I call a ‘gut-bucket waltz.’ See, it’s a waltz, but it still has the Negro idiom. I have taken the method but I have not stolen or borrowed.”
He played on, evidently pleased with his innovation.
“Will you ever write an opera or a symphony?” I asked.
“No,” Ellington declared positively. “I have to make a living and so I have to have an audience. I do not believe people honestly like, much less understand, things like Porgy and Bess. The critics and some of the people who are supposed to know have told them they should like the stuff. So they say it’s wonderful. I prefer to go right on putting down my ideas, moods and theme and letting the critics call them what they will. Furthermore, an opera would not express the kind of things I have in mind.”
“Where would you consider Porgy and Bess offered opportunities that you should have used that Gershwin missed?” I asked.
“Several places,” Ellington said, “he missed beautiful chances to really do something. There was one place, though, where he made the most of his music: the hurricane passages, when no one was on the stage. But when he tried to build up the characterizations he failed. What happened when the girl selling strawberries came on the stage? Did he get the rhythm, the speech, and the ‘swing’ of the streetvender? No, sir, he did not; he went dramatic! Gershwin had the girl stop cold, take her stance, and sing an aria in the Italian, would-be Negro manner.”
Ellington warmed up to his subject.
“Bubbles, who is a great dancer, built up the character of Sportin’ Life with his dance. The music did not do that. And other actors had to make their own characterizations too. There was a crap game such as no one has ever seen or heard. It might have been opera, but it wasn’t a crap game. The music went one way and the action another. If a singer had lost his place, he never would have found it in that score. Still, the audience gasped: ‘Don’t the people get right into their parts?’ and ‘Aren’t they emotional’!”
“Would you say that an honest Negro musical play would have to contain social criticism?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” declared Ellington. “That is, if it is expected to hold up. In one of my forthcoming movie ‘shorts’ I have an episode which concerns the death of a baby. That is the high spot and should have come last, but that would not have been ‘commercial,’ as the managers say. However, I put into the dirge all the misery, sorrow and undertones of the conditions that went with the baby’s death. It was true to and of the life of the people it depicted. The same thing can not be said for Porgy and Bess.”
It was very evident that here was one colored composer who realized the cramping forces of exploitation which handicap not only him and his colleagues, but the Negro masses as well. That is why their expression is filled with protest. He is also fully conscious that there are imitators and chiselers, always ready to capitalize on specious products purporting to “represent” the Negro. They are totally lacking in social vision, and their art is phony.
No Negro could possibly be fooled by Porgy and Bess. Mamoulian’s direction has added nothing to his old superficial tricks of animating inanimate objects, such as rocking chairs, with rhythmical motion to fit a song. (This business was used in Porgy which he directed in 1927.) His Negroes still wave their arms in shadowed frenzy during the wake. The production is cooked up, flavored and seasoned to be palmed off as “authentic” of the Charleston Gullah Negroes- who are, one supposes, “odd beasts.”
But the times are here to debunk such tripe as Gershwin’s lamp-black Negroisms, and the melodramatic trash of the script of Porgy. The Negro artists are becoming socially-conscious and class-conscious, and more courageous. Broadway will find it harder to keep them on the chain-gang of the hot-cha merchants. The Ellingtons and the Hughes’ will take their themes from their blood. There will he fewer generalized gin-guzzling, homicidal maniacs, and more understanding of rotten socio-economic conditions which give rise to neurotic escapists, compensating for overwrought nerves. There will be fewer wicked, hipswinging “yellow-gal hustler” stereotypes, but more economically isolated girls, forced into prostitution. These themes are universal. They will be particularized and vivified in ringing language, and charged with the truth of realities. The music will express terror and defiance in colorful Negro musical idioms which have remained melodious despite a life of injustices. They will compose and write these things because they feel the consequences of an existence which is a weird combination of brutality and beauty.
The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.
PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/workers-theatre/v2n12-dec-1935-New-Theatre.
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