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"Your Music Has Flung the Story of 'Hot Harlem' to the Four Corners of the Earth!": Race and Narrative in Black, Brown and Beige

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/musqtl/gdt009

1741-8399

Lisa Barg, Walter van de Leur,

Race, History, and American Society

From his early “jungle-style” and “mood” pieces to his later extended works and suites, the function and meaning of programmatic and narrative elements in Ellington's music has generated a wealth of critical commentary and debate among critics, scholars, and fans. To take a recent example, Brent Hayes Edwards has argued for the primacy of the “literary imperative in the Ellington oeuvre,” observing that Ellington was “consistently concerned with ‘telling tales’ in language, not only in sounds—or more precisely in both: spinning stories in ways that combined words and music.”1 While Ellington's oeuvre does have some pieces that are almost literally descriptive—such as the trains in “Daybreak Express” and “Happy-Go-Lucky-Local”—the correspondence between program and music does not move along direct or literal paths. Even in the most avowedly programmatic and literary-based works that Edwards examines, such as Black, Brown and Beige (1943) and Such Sweet Thunder (1957), the relation between program and music is seldom straightforward and often elusive. Indeed, the evidence for those supposedly programmatic works often runs contrary to the fanciful stories offered by the composer. For instance, Ellington introduced the three-movement The Tattooed Bride (1948) as a “musical striptease” about a man who during his honeymoon finds out that his bride is tattooed repeatedly with the letter W, “in different sizes and shapes and places.”2 The autograph scores, however, are curiously titled “Kitchen Stove,” “Omaha,” and “Aberdeen,” which leaves one to wonder what the composer truly had in mind while writing the music.3 Similarly, the 1944 Perfume Suite tries, in Ellington's words, “to capture the character usually taken on by a woman who wears different … blends of perfume. … We divided them into four categories: ‘Love,’ ‘Violence,’ ‘Naïveté’ and ‘Sophistication,’”4 but the four movements of this suite stem from such distinct and unrelated sources (partly composed, titled, and performed well before the suite's premiere) that the program rather than the music provides the continuity, if any.5 As would be customary in many of the later suites—such as The Deep South Suite, Such Sweet Thunder, The Far East Suite, and A Portrait of Ella Fitzgerald—the Perfume Suite contained movements composed by Billy Strayhorn, some written for quite different occasions. Ellington regularly titled and retitled such works once they were recorded, providing programmatic explanations afterward. Strayhorn's composition “Pretty Girl” received a new life as the “Star-Crossed Lovers,” now depicting Romeo and Juliet in the Shakespearean suite, Such Sweet Thunder. And his “Elf,” composed before he even set foot in the Middle East, was retitled “Isfahan” and included in the Far East Suite as a portrayal of the Persian city. In pointing such discrepancies out, however, we do not mean to suggest that Ellington's (and Strayhorn's) choices were somehow arbitrary; rather, these two examples rely upon generalized levels of associations: the title “Pretty Girl” and the romantic affect of Strayhorn's ballads for Johnny Hodges made it a good fit for “Star-Crossed Lovers,” and the shared programmatic terrain of “otherness” connected the supernatural, dreamy concept of “Elf” and exotic mise-en-scène of “Isfahan.”