The Music King from New Orleans

BAMBOULA! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau. Gottschalk. By S. Frederick Starr. Oxford. 564 pp. $35

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orld famous in the mid-19th cen- tury, the American piano vir- tuoso and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk is all but forgotten today. Is this ob-scurity deserved? Or is it an injustice for which we should blame a snobbish musical estab- lishment that has never fully appreciated America's distinctive musical legacy? In Bam- boula! the historian S. Frederick Starr goes a long way toward answering these ques- tions-and tells a colorful tale in the bargain.

Gottschalk (1829-69) was born in New Orleans to a mixed Jewish and French Cre- ole family. At the age of 12 the young prodigy went to study in Paris, where a few years later he won ac- claim for his Louisiana quartet. For these four pieces, including Bamboula, he drew upon the vernacu- lar music of his New Orleans child- hood, especially the Creole melodies that he picked up from the songs of his Haitian nurse and the syncopated rhythms that he heard in the music of the city's enslaved black population.

Gottschalk's borrowings were, to some extent, consistent with contem- porary European musical practice. Among the early romanticists, folk music was considered a fresh source of vitality, an antidote to the stale artifi- ciality of classicism. But Gottschalk did something far more radical than any early European romanticist imagined. He drew on Afro-American music. Half a century before ragtime and jazz even appeared, much less found their way into the work of such European modernists as Debussy, Milhaud, and Stravinsky, Gottschalk was writing complex pieces in which the songs and rhythms of African people in the New World played a significant part.

Indeed, Gottschalk hardly thought of his borrowings as borrowings at all. Unlike Eu- ropean music folklorists, he was not, Starr says, self-consciously seeking "an exotic alter- native to the world inwhich he moved." What were "noble savages" to European musical audiences were to him real people, and he was tapping "a living voice from deep within his own receding past." "Let his audience treat Bamboula and other Creole pieces as exotica," Starr writes. "For Moreau they bore the stamp of the viscerally familiar, of loss, of nostalgia."

Yet the very authenticity of Gottschalk's folk sources might have hurt his reputation. In the early 19th century, the Germans were

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among those who embraced folk music as a challenge to the universal claims and aes- thetic rigidity of French classicism. But by midcentury that challenge had been met, and the triumphant musical culture of Ger- many was beginning to make its own uni- versal claims and impose its own aesthetic rigidity. In the process, the Germans came to despise folk music as vastly inferior to their ideal of "absolute music" as the high- est art, accessible only to the cultivated elite.

Gottschalk fell short of the new Ger- man-fostered ideal, not least because he was a shameless entertainer. After his early trip to Paris, he never returned to Europe. In- stead, he lived out his days on the road, hustling a living as a musician from one end of the Americas to the other. Starr brings out the picaresque quality of Gottschalk's life, and many scenes in Bamboula! brim with de- tails and atmospheric qualities reminiscent of the works of Latin American magical re- alists. Gottschalk toured western Puerto Rico in 1857, for example, packing a pair of pistols to protect himself. After one concert, "live doves with gilded plumage and adorned with ribbons descended on the stage, and then the entire party proceeded to a huge banquet." With similar vividness, Starr portrays Gottschalk in the winter of 1864, crammed into cold, sooty trains with rowdy Union recruits; in 1865, making scan- dalous headlines in San Francisco; in 1866, being cheered by a huge Santiago crowd that included the president of Chile and the country's archbishop.

Throughout his career, whenever he could, Gottschalk would organize crowd- pleasing "monster" concerts featuring scores of pianos and hundreds of musicians. On such occasions/ as in today's stadium rock concerts, musical expression was sac- rificed to sheer spectacle and volume. It may be said, in Gottschalk's defense, that these excesses were committed in an era lacking electronic amplification. Nor was Gottschalk the only such culprit. "Monster" concerts were a staple of most 19th-century

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virtuosos, European as well as American.

The highbrow charge against Gott-schalk is that, over time, his romanticism degenerated into sentimentalism. His most popular compositions, selling millions of copies in sheet music, were songs such as 'The Last Hope" and "The Dying Poet," each of which he himself referred to as "un succes des lames" (a tear-jerking hit). Starr reminds us that these songs expressed the heartache of ordinary Americans aggrieved by the losses and hardships of the Civil War or by the uprooting effects of industrializa- tion. But the fact remains that, musically speaking, they are kitsch.

The best description of kitsch as a deca- dent form of romantic music comes from the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus:

When the noble simplicit6 of a classical style descends to the marketplace, the result is banality-the mere husks of classical forms-but hardly ever kitsch. Kitsch in music has hybrid ambitions which far outreach the ca- pabilities of its actual structures and sounds. . . . Instead of being content with modest achievements within its reach, musical kitsch has pretensions to big emotions, to "significance," and these are rooted in what are still rec- ognizably romantic preconceptions, however depraved.

Against the charge of kitsch, it is impos- sible to defend Gottschalk completely. With his contemporary Stephen Foster, he stands convicted of founding the maudlin "hearts and flowers" school of American popular song.

But one should not forget Gottschalk's other side, the side represented by his use of Afro-American music. For Gottschalk's actual playing did not just delight his upper- crust audiences; it won the admiration of his "sources," from the Afro-Cuban musicians who introduced him to contradanzas to the Puerto Rican drummers who taught him the difference between a tresillo and a cinquillo rhythm. In ragtime and jazz, Gottschalk (and the early European modernists after him) found wit, simplicity, and emotional restraint-qualities that amount to the very opposite of kitsch.

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ottschalk's attraction to Afro-American music raises a critical question. The exuberance of this sound comes, as we know, from that elusive but essential rhythmic quality known as "swing." Swing is made up, according to the French musicologist Andre Hodeir, of several ingredients, the most important be- ing "infrastructure," or a regular structural beat, often implied rather than played, and "superstructure," or other rhythmic pat- terns surrounding the structural beat, often given equal if not greater accentuation. The problem with most European composers' uses of Afro-American music is that they borrow the irregular patterns of the "super- structure" but fail to place them in proper tension with the structural beat. "By de- stroying the basic pulsation," Hodeir writes, "our composers killed the principle of at- traction on which the phenomenon of swing depends." This leads to the question: did Gottschalk know how to swing?

Alas, we will never know, because Gottschalk's playing, like that of his fel- low virtuosos, is lost to us. Recording had not yet been invented, and Gottschalk failed to notate many of his compositions. In part he feared having his work pur- loined, but Gottschalk also understood the difficulty, well known to 20th-century composers, of notating Afro-American rhythms. Though we may never know for sure, it is possible that Gottschalk was the Count Basie of his time.

Even if he was, that would have done little for his reputation among the guardians of "absolute music." Quoting Gottschalk's archenemy, the Boston music critic John Sullivan Dwight, Starr emphasizes how chilly the judgments of such guardians could be:

For Dwight, the ideal performer would

be an all-but-invisible person

who . . . would perform with no "show

or effect," so that "the composition is

before you, pure and clear, . .. as a

musician hears it in his mind in read-

ing it from notes." The inevitable next

step was for members of the audience

to bring the score into the concert

hall. In Dwight's Boston, score-read-

ing became a mark of culture.

Gottschalk loathed the practice.

The loathing was returned, expressed in endless gossip about Gottschalk as a merce- nary and rake. Remarkably, this prudish tone persists even today. In the liner notes to a re- cent recording of Gottschalk piano pieces, the German writer Klaus Geitel sneers at Gottschalk's "love of money," which "rained down upon him copiously," and sniggers about the composer's reputation as being "a Don Juan who delighted in creating havoc among the crowds of enchanted ladies who formed his continual entourage."

True, Gottschalk did spend most of his adult life trying to make money. And, yes, he was a handsome fellow whose music thrilled men and women alike. But as Starr's biogra- phy makes clear, the gossips rarely stopped to consider how hard Gottschalk's life truly was. A sensualist and an aesthete, Gottschalk enjoyed flirting with innocent young girls. But he was also a near celibate. The lifelong bur- den of providing for his penniless and incom- petent relatives (mother and siblings both) kept him from developing lasting romantic re- lationships.

Implicit in Starr's narrative is a defense of Gottschalk on the grounds that art music can- not flourish long without a vital connection to the musical vernacular. Indeed, it was the loss of this connection that hastened the decline of German music, first into the self-indulgence of late romanticism and then into the sterility of serialism. Gottschalk himself was a Jack- sonian democrat who distinguished between refined "airs" and true refinement of mind. He had no patience with the European snob-

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bery that sees only money-grubbing com- merce in America. To the contrary, he saw a positive, enterprising spirit with the potential to apply America's wealth to the task of edu- cating America's taste.

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nyone familiar with Starr's superb

Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the

Soviet Union (1985) may expect Bamboula! to extend the earlier book's the- sis that a commercial culture provides a healthy environment for the arts. Red and Hot illustrates the difference between the deadly "people's cultures" designed for the masses by their totalitarian masters and the rich popular culture that developed in the more-or-less free marketplace of America, giving rise to jazz among other musical glo- ries.

Yet Starr's sympathy for commerce re- mains strangely muted in Bamboula!, possi-bly out of reluctance to pass final judgment on Gottschalk the composer. Unfortunately, this reluctance means that Starr stops short of assessing Gottschalk's proper place in the history of Western music. But Starr does make it clear that even if the greatest strength of Gottschalk's music was a rhyth- mic force lost with live performance, his place should not be forgotten. Indeed, now that young musicians routinely gain fluency in both the European and the Afro-Ameri- can idioms, a swinging revival of Gott- schalk's music may be in store. Beyond that possibility, the life of this forgotten eccen- tric, this failed aesthete, sheds real light on how the music and culture of the last cen- tury gave rise to the perplexities of our own.

-Martha Bayles, formerly the television and arts critic for the Wall Street Jour- nal, is the author of Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music (1994).

How Beastlv Our Beatitudes?

THE MORAL ANIMAL: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. By Robert Wright. Pantheon. 467 pp. $27.50 THE HUNGRY SOUL: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature. By Leon Kass. Free Press. 248 pp. $24.95

'hat can the study of nature, and, above all, of human nature, teach us about how we ought to live? According to both Robert Wright and Leon Kass, the answer is clear: a great deal. Such an answer marks a valuable turning away from the dominant assumptions of an age that, believing in the moral silence of an in- different nature and the moral neutrality of objective science, sees human nature as nearly infinitely malleable and solely shaped by social forces. Both Wright and

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Kass are convinced that such a mistaken view of human nature, fostered by our so- cial and natural sciences, is in part respon- sible for the moral confusions from which we suffer today. By their willingness to ex- amine human nature, both authors return us to the originating Socratic question of our philosophical tradition.

Yet, beyond that common purpose, Wright and Kass can agree on very little because they look for human nature in op- posite directions. Wright, gazing backward at our evolutionary past, constructs just-so stories of how our natural tendencies may have come into being; Kass, "taking human nature as we find it,' explores its current meaning and its possible improvement through custom and culture. Which ap- proach, then, is the correct one? Which ac-