Fam est aux écoutes*
Formative-album replay: Milhaud: Creation du Monde & Other Works by Ian Hobson. We know well the story of the white American theft of the blues from its Black originators, a story that continues to this day (hello, Justin Timberlake). But with Europe—a colonial culture, or cluster of cultures, that predates and in many senses contains the seeds of ours—the story is more complicated, if no less thorny. I have always had a soft spot for the arm’s-length embrace by early and mid-20th-century European composers of American jazz and blues: Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat, Ravel’s piano concerto in G and “Blues” movement of his violin sonata, not to mention various works by my musical North Star, Kurt Weill. And while their use of this material was inarguably a kind of appropriation, no less than the Asian, Spanish, Latin American, and other folk influences they and many others incorporated into their work, for what it’s worth I don’t hear these as cases of jazz or folk sources rendered “civilized” by the concert hall but quite the reverse: as so-called “classical” music expanded, elevated, revivified, made whole.
The greatest of the Euro-jazz hybrid works is Milhaud’s 1923 masterpiece La Création du Monde, a 15-or-so-minute ballet for a 17-piece chamber orchestra that took its narrative not from Genesis but from African legend and its musical inspiration from the young composer’s transfixing experiences hearing American jazz bands in London and Harlem. The ballet scenario was by a Swiss anthologist of African folklore, Blaise Cendrars, whose work in this field has since been unsurprisingly and rightly interrogated; design was by Ferdinand Léger and choreography by a Swede, Jean Börlin. But apart from the occasional reinterpretation—the most bracing being one by the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula in 2012, which keyed in not only on the work’s postcolonial dimensions but on its historical position as a response to the devastation of WWI—this “ballet nègre” is seldom staged but instead has migrated, like many great 20th-century ballets, to the concert repertory.
Even without reference to its programmatic inspiration, La Création makes a strong, even haunting impression, as it captures a duality that is very French but also distinctly Milhaud-ian: It is both impish and yearning, at once bitingly ironic and open-heartedly sincere. This has a bit to do with the way Milhaud, like many of his European compatriots, writes for the saxophone, as if it’s a violin or a human voice; there’s something about hearing this distinctly jazz/pop instrument in a “classical” context that gives both its sound and the music it’s part of a vivid poignance, an anomalous beauty with a tinge of droll humor.
The greatest of the Euro-jazz hybrid works is Milhaud’s 1923 masterpiece La Création du Monde, a 15-or-so-minute ballet for a 17-piece chamber orchestra that took its narrative not from Genesis but from African legend and its musical inspiration from the young composer’s transfixing experiences hearing American jazz bands in London and Harlem. The ballet scenario was by a Swiss anthologist of African folklore, Blaise Cendrars, whose work in this field has since been unsurprisingly and rightly interrogated; design was by Ferdinand Léger and choreography by a Swede, Jean Börlin. But apart from the occasional reinterpretation—the most bracing being one by the Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula in 2012, which keyed in not only on the work’s postcolonial dimensions but on its historical position as a response to the devastation of WWI—this “ballet nègre” is seldom staged but instead has migrated, like many great 20th-century ballets, to the concert repertory.
Even without reference to its programmatic inspiration, La Création makes a strong, even haunting impression, as it captures a duality that is very French but also distinctly Milhaud-ian: It is both impish and yearning, at once bitingly ironic and open-heartedly sincere. This has a bit to do with the way Milhaud, like many of his European compatriots, writes for the saxophone, as if it’s a violin or a human voice; there’s something about hearing this distinctly jazz/pop instrument in a “classical” context that gives both its sound and the music it’s part of a vivid poignance, an anomalous beauty with a tinge of droll humor.
This laughing-crying quality is also in Milhaud’s composition. The contrast is epitomized in the great moment, about 12 minutes in (it's at 6:30 in the video above), when the piece’s dominant sad-and-slow wind procession—the churning pre-creation miasma that opens the piece and keeps recurring throughout it—is underlaid with a series of chord-changing outbursts from brass and drums.
Like the occasional farting trombone slide or irritable flute tremolo, this has the effect of a piss-taking joke, of rude raspberries puncturing the overhanging solemnity. But the key to its success is that it is as deeply felt and thoroughly realized as anything else in La Création. Ultimately the piece’s power is that it doesn’t just sample blues notes and jazz arrangements (as well as some Hebraic chants Milhaud may have recalled from his Jewish upbringing); it manages also to achieve the rich range of emotions, from joy to desolation, that those musics contain.
The 1993 recording from the English conductor Ian Hobson that introduced me to the work retains Milhaud’s original chamber orchestration (there are full orchestra and string-quartet-and-piano versions as well) and adds some delightful bon-bons to fill out the running time, the high point of which is the two-piano ragtime torrent of Scaramouche. You can find that recording here on Spotify; the video I've embedded above is a fragment of a bearded Leonard Bernstein conducting it with a French orchestra (the score I've screencapped above also contains Bernstein's markings). This post from my colleague Terry Teachout is also worth a visit—he uncovered a video of Milhaud talking about jazz in the 1920s as a preamble to a bumptious performance of his “shimmy” Caramel Mou.
*This title is from Cendrars’s Anthologie Nègre, which by some accounts was read from at the ballet’s first performance.
The 1993 recording from the English conductor Ian Hobson that introduced me to the work retains Milhaud’s original chamber orchestration (there are full orchestra and string-quartet-and-piano versions as well) and adds some delightful bon-bons to fill out the running time, the high point of which is the two-piano ragtime torrent of Scaramouche. You can find that recording here on Spotify; the video I've embedded above is a fragment of a bearded Leonard Bernstein conducting it with a French orchestra (the score I've screencapped above also contains Bernstein's markings). This post from my colleague Terry Teachout is also worth a visit—he uncovered a video of Milhaud talking about jazz in the 1920s as a preamble to a bumptious performance of his “shimmy” Caramel Mou.
*This title is from Cendrars’s Anthologie Nègre, which by some accounts was read from at the ballet’s first performance.
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