6 - Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45

Summary

What composer hasn’t flirted with this seductive temptress?

Louis Gruenberg, ‘Der Jazz als Ausgangspunkt’, Anbruch 7 (April 1925).

The remarks of Louis Gruenberg (1884–1964) quoted above appeared in a Sonderheft of the Musikblätter des Anbruch, the in-house organ of Universal Edition, widely known for its publications of new music. Devoted entirely to jazz, the issue included articles by critics and composers including Gruenberg, Darius Milhaud, and Percy Grainger, representing Germany and the United States (through Gruenberg’s German–American residence and training), as well as France and Britain. While the authors did not agree on the extent of jazz’s influence on their compositions or the works of others, they all acknowledged a fascination with and desire to utilize this kind of popular music as a transnational aspect of 1920s musical modernity.

In identifying jazz ‘as a point of departure’ for the composition of new music, Gruenberg drew upon long-standing views of popular culture and its music as accessible, irresistible, and personified as female. Coming into its own in the 1920s, jazz was thus not unlike another social phenomenon of the time, the New Woman. Both were perceived as youthful, urban, and free from past conventions of propriety and morality. While more women did enter the public workplace during the 1920s, and often in ways that utilized modern technology, the new woman of the modern city was in many respects an overdrawn fiction. Similarly jazz and its seductive temptations were also potent fantasies of modernism, fantasies that originated in the dichotomies of mind and body, classical and popular, cultural insiders and outsiders.