Debussy and American Minstrelsy

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Debussy and American Minstrelsy Author(s): Ann McKinley Source: The Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 249-258Published by: Foundation for Research in the Afro-American Creative ArtsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1215065Accessed: 01-09-2015 12:45 UTC

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Debussy and American Minstrelsy BY ANN McKINLEY

LAUDE DEBUSSY was in his thirties when he first heard music from the New World. That it made an impression on him is clear from the titles and performance directions of his

four piano pieces that bear the stamp of the cakewalk and Amer- ican minstrelsy.

The earliest of the four pieces is Golliwog's cake walk from The Children's Corner, published in 1908 when Debussy's little daughter, Claude-Emma, for whom the set was written, was only three years old. It is proper to give these titles in English, for that is what Debussy did. It seems that he, like many Frenchmen of his time, suffered from "anglomania": he traveled to London; he read En- glish novels-Dickens was a special favorite; he hired an English nanny for his daughter.

The Golliwog doll became enormously popular in the early years of this century, both as an actual toy and as hero of thirteen books written by Florence and Bertha Upton. The Golliwog is a little minstrel, dressed in a swallow-tail coat, vest, and bow tie. He continues to be a cherished doll in English households, but his memory lives on rather uncomfortably in our country because of what he symbolizes.1

Debussy, in Golliwog's cake walk, takes the familiar cakewalk elements-the rhythmic pattern ( fj J~ ), vamping in the left hand, and traditional chord progressions-and filters them through his French and highly individual musical imagination. The form is A B A. After a short introduction-using the cakewalk motive, followed by a pause and a four-bar vamp-the main tune steps out over a reiterated E-flat pedal (see Ex. 1). Soon the E-flat gives way, first to unisons, later to chords on G-flat for the modula- tion to the dominant. Following this, Debussy plays with the characteristic rhythmic pattern over static dissonant seconds, then thirds, these repeated, and he closes with a fade-out based on the introduction.

The B section is sly and very funny, providing the listener gets the joke. In the midst of some sassy business in G-flat, Debussy inserts a quotation which tells much about his changed attitude toward that most overwhelming of German composers, Wagner. In a phrase marked avec une grande emotion, Debussy quotes the opening motive from Tristan und Isolde, and then gives the musical equivalent of a "hee-haw" with grace notes (see Ex. 2). The Tristan quote is sounded thrice, the third time with an upward stretch that


250 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC

snaps back in place to the characteristic rhythmic pattern. The three quotes are then repeated, leading into a bridge that prepares the listener for the return of the A section, which is repeated without change, except for the more piquant cadence in meas. 110-113 and the emphatic descending sweep to the tonic at the very end.

Example 1. Golliwog's cake walk, meas. 10-13

tres 7neC et t-r5 Sec,

$j bk i fi . 6 >r | i

Example 2. Golliwog's cake walk, meas. 61-64

Cede , ?e,,o rp avc a rne _r'rde1 rnoMor, 1

S '' We "F-" Te

A companion to the Golliwog's music is the piece originally called by Debussy himself The Little Nigar (incorrectly spelling the noun as N-i-g-a-r). In subsequent editions this title has been soft- ened to "The Little Negro" or even, mistakenly, Le Petit Negre, which is, of course, literally correct but dilutes what Debussy meant.

The cakewalk tune begins immediately, at first alone, then accompanied by a series of chromatically ascending, then descending, minor thirds (see Ex. 3). When the dominant is reached, the thirds yield to a strong diatonically descending bass. The over-all form of this piece is A B A B A. The B section offers a fairly straightforward melody, stated twice, which blends into the return of the A section.

The Little Nigar, known to most piano teachers but not men- tioned in some of the sources on Debussy's piano music, was com- missioned by Theodore Lack, a member of the piano faculty at the Paris Conservatoire, for inclusion in his Methode de piano published in 1909.


DEBUSSY AND MINSTRELSY

Example 3. The Little Nigar, meas. 1-4

A4,Ur'o g u s. ^ o

*) AL r j ,\ 3C t?'S

-,y^ & J ' _

______

_

Four years later, in 1913, Debussy used the cakewalk tune of The Little Nigar in his children's ballet, Le Boite a joujoux ("The Toys' Box"). Nineteen-thirteen! The year of Le sacre du printemps! Paris was in the thrall of the Russians, especially Nijinsky, who not only starred in Stravinsky's ballets but also in Debussy's L'apres midi d'un

faune and Jeux. We might call The Toys' Box a kind of "Petrushka for children,"

with its love triangle of three main characters: a Polichinelle, a soldier, and a lady over whom they fight. Here the Polichinelle is the unsympathetic character but, as in Petrushka, he loses the girl, this time to an ordinary soldier, not a glamorous Moor. The First World War and Debussy's failing health caused him to set aside The Toys' Box. Only after his death in 1918 was it performed, in an orchestral transcription made by his friend Andre Caplet.

The piano score of Le Boite a joujoux was designed with charm- ing, colorful illustrations by Andre Helle, and there among the toys is a little black doll, labeled le Negre. However, the music of The Little Nigar is not for him-he doesn't have a solo in the ballet; rather, the music is quoted to introduce the soldier doll.

Why a cakewalk for a soldier doll? A likely explanation can be deduced from the letter Debussy wrote to a friend during a trip to England in August 1905, where he complains of "several days spent in London without much joy except for the music of the grenadiers who used to pass every morning, playing marches in which the Scotch song seemed to melt into the cakewalk."2 Debussy's "Scotch song" is surely the inverted dotted pattern we call the Scotch snap.

Still more telling evidence for the syncopated march/cakewalk connection is something Debussy, as music critic, had written for the journal Gil Bias two years before: At last ... the king of American music is in town. By that I mean that M. J. P. Sousa and his band have come for a whole week to reveal to us the beauties of American music as it is performed in the best society. One really has to be exceedingly gifted to conduct this music. M. Sousa beats time in circles or tosses an imaginary salad or sweeps away some invisible dust. Or else he catches a butterfly that has flown out of a bass tuba.3

251


THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC

This was not Sousa's first visit to Paris. He and his band had performed there before, to much acclaim, for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Sousa early on recognized the strong appeal of popular tunes like "Smoky Mokes" and "Whistling Rufus," and it was he, probably more than anyone else, who made syncopated music widely known in Europe through open-air concerts played to huge audiences.4

Let us leave the world of childhood now and join the adults, amusing themselves at the cafe concerts (Le Chat Noir), the music halls (Le Moulin Rouge, Les Follies-Bergere), the circus (Le Nouveau Cirque), any place where the pleasures of popular entertainment were enhanced by the pleasures of the palate. Even today the performers and habitues of this French night-life come readily to mind, thanks to drawings and paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec and Seurat and stories by Colette.

What has this to do with American minstrelsy? A good deal. To start with, let us recall the accepted conventions of the minstrel show, where everyone, except for the interlocutor, was in blackface; where the featured instruments were, by cultivated standards, primitive (the banjo, the bones, the tambourine); where perky, snappy, sometimes syncopated music alternated with plain- tive ballads or plantation melodies, which often were sung very well indeed; where awful jokes were much appreciated; where Irish clog dancing gave way to the more elegant soft-shoe dancing of the Virginia Essence.

At first Ethiopian minstrels were white men in blackface; after the Civil War black men, too, sought to make names for themselves, often in blackface. Thus they reluctantly reinforced what was a degrading racial stereotype that cruelly perpetuated the illusion that blacks were inferior to whites.

American minstrels, white or black, enjoyed not only extraordi- nary popularity in this country but also in England. England, however, soon made minstrelsy her own, for in no time born-and- bred Englishmen blackened their faces (though not as many as in the American shows-they wanted to look nice) and accepted the conventions of minstrelsy's format (though they down-played the humor). In 1893 Gilbert and Sullivan could safely incltlde a parody of a minstrel show in their operetta Utopia Unlimited and count on the shaft striking home.

In that same year, 1893, at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, two, young black men first met; shortly thereafter, they joined forces for a successful ten-year collaboration. Their names-Will Marion Cook, composer; Paul Lawrence Dunbar, poet. Their partnership produced what is identified by Eileen Southern as "the first Negro musical-comedy sketch [on Broad- way]," Clorindy, the Origin of the Cakewalk.5 A few years later Cook

252



and Dunbar created the satire In Dahomey, a full-fledged Broadway musical with an all-black cast and starring George Walker and Bert Williams. According to Eileen Southern,

In May 1903 Walker and Williams took In Dahomey to England, where the company played in London, including a command performance for King Edward VII, and toured in the provinces for eight months. By the time they were ready to return home, the cakewalk had become the fad in England and France that it was in the United States.6

"Fad," indeed! The year 1903, when In Dahomey was such a hit in England, was the very year that Debussy, in his Gil Bias column, welcomed Sousa and the cakewalk back to Paris.

Did Debussy hear American minstrels in Paris-or, if not "minstrels", somebody performing Afro-American music? Yes, but such references are hard to come by. One of which I am certain is found in Le Pavilion desfantomes (The Pavilion of Illusions) by Gabriel Astruc, a French impresario who came to the United States in the summer of 1893 to attend the World's Columbian Exposition.7

Years later, in Le Pavillon des fantomes, Astruc explained how impressed he was that summer by a show put on by black-American performers, not a minstrel show, but a plantation show; that is, an entertainment purporting to give the audience a real taste of the music cultivated by slaves on an idealized plantation. Apparently what he saw and heard in Chicago was a show advertised in The Chicago Tribune as "Songs and Scenes of Slavery . . . spectacular scenes and tablaux," and in The Inter-Ocean as "The Only Colored Vocal Spectacular Company before the People of Chicago." Astruc also was exposed to such music-making in New York City, and his enthusiasm for this new sound prompted him to take some group or another with him back to Paris.

In Le Pavilion des fantomes Astruc recalls, perhaps somewhat ruefully, that C'est moi qui suis coupable, a l'origine, de l'entree en France de la musique negre. J'ai ma part de responsabilite dans 'epidemie du charleston.8 ("It is I, when you get right down to it, who am to blame for the entrance into France of black music. I accept my share of the responsibility for the epidemic of the Charleston.") He then goes on to name some of the qualities of the music-making in the plantation show that especially appealed to him: des melopees lan- goureuses ("the languorous chanting"), the coon songs (he uses the English), the psalmodies ("spirituals") sung par des voix tendres avec une ttonnante precision chorale ("by soft, moving, sensitive voices with an astonishing choral precision").9 Though Astruc does not say specifically that the performers he brought back to France were heard by Debussy, how could it be otherwise, since he and Debussy were friends and belonged to the same social/professional circle? One other form of Parisian entertainment deserves attention:

253



the circus, which Debussy loved. The French did not look upon the circus as entertainment largely for children; the circus offered not only funny-and dangerous-routines, but also witty ones, some subtle, some gross. The circus as entertainment developed in the United States and abroad concurrently with the minstrel show. The circus featured whiteface; the minstrel show, blackface. In each, color was used to put distance between the performer and the audience and for humorous effect. Debussy's idea of poking fun at Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in the middle section of Golliwog's cake walk may have been inspired by something that is known to have happened at the circus when a band played tunes from Tristan as a comic accompaniment to a clown's act.10 This is not to belittle Debussy's accomplishment; it just shows how timely was his music.

Now to make the circus and the minstrel show converge: in Paris there was a famous English clown known as Footit; his part- ner was a black man from Spain, called Chocolat. Chocolat's costume was a shabby, dress outfit with tails, the traditional uniform of the minstrel. Both clowns appear in the work of Toulouse-Lautrec. In one of Lautrec's most famous drawings, Chocolat is shown dancing, out of costume, in the English bar where it was their custom to refresh themselves after a hard night's work. Debussy, too, was an habitue of this English bar. There he met Footit and seriously discussed with him the similarities between their two kinds of artistry.11 One assumes that Debussy also watched Chocolat's dancing.

Now let us take up the other pair of the four piano pieces. One of them is actually entitled Minstrels (from Book I of the Preludes, written in 1910); the other is a portrait of "General Lavine"- eccentric (from Book II, written between 1910 and 1913). In these pieces the cakewalk elements are not so obvious; they have been more thoroughly filtered through Debussy's imagination so that what remains is music far more sophisticated and, of course, even more French than the first pair of pieces considered here.

The very title Minstrels proclaims that piece's minstrelsy connection. The tempo mark is Modere, then in parenthesis, nerveux et avec humour. Later on, when the little drum is imitated, Debussy writes quasi tambouro.

The minstrels in the piece Minstrels have been described vari- ously. E. Robert Schmitz, a Frenchman who eventually settled in the United States, places them in "the American scene" and evokes the familiar images, which he sums up as "the main features of minstrel groups which started appearing in Europe around 1900 in fairs, or on the boardwalks of the seaside resort at Deauville."12

Alfred Cortot, that finest of French pianists says: This is a witty and jocular picture of the atmosphere of the music-hall. English clowns appear and tumble on the stage in clumsy attitudes, and

254


DEBUSSY AND MINSTRELSY 255

./ '0f_ . /

1

Chocolat Dancing, 1896. Permission of Toulouse-Lautrec Museum, Albi, France

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f


256 THE BLACK PERSPECTIVE IN MUSIC

gusts of sensuous music suggest the idle pleasure of an evening's amuse- ment.13

Oscar Thompson's description takes into account both points of view: The atmosphere is that of a music hall. American commentators have assumed that Debussy had in mind a black-faced pair. There are other assumptions that Debussy, the circus lover, made minstrels of tumblers, gagsters, and clowns. Black or pasty white, they are no jauntier than Debussy's rhythms, as he converts them into oddities for the fingers. A suggestion of an old-time Broadway song, as well as a certain shuffling effect, are pointed to as corroboration of the notion that these droll fellows are of American antecedents.14

Whichever picture the reader prefers-Cortot's, Schmitz's, or Thompson's-in Minstrels, unquestionably, someone jolly (even tipsy?) is coming on stage. There are assorted bits of music to represent the iristruments (banjo, cornet, drums); the dancing itself; possibly a joke or two (told to the accompaniment of parallel augmented triads); a little drum by itself (ta-ta-ta-tum, ta-ta-ta-tum); and the sentimental melody Cortot describes as "gusts of sensuous music," Thompson's "old-time Broadway song" (see Ex. 4). At the very end, the opening few bars are reprised, the little drum follows with its ta-ta-ta-tumming an octave lower, the second phrase is rattled off, condensed, and-bang! BANG! It's over!

Example 4. Minstrels, meas. 64-71

_I --

In contrast to the anonymous minstrels, the eccentric "General Lavine" was a real person, a clown featured in the Follies-

woW -

I

i 1-



Bergere of 1912. To call him a "person" is to mislead; the Gen- eral looked like a man, but he wasn't-he was a man-sized puppet, an amiable, shambling grotesque. Debussy apparently gave some thought to providing music for his (its) act, but only this prelude speaks to their proposed partnership.

The tempo mark for "General Lavine"-eccentric is Dans le style et le Mouvement d'un cake-walk. Once again we hear drums and cornets-here in parallel triads-and a tune appropriate to a loose-jointed, clumsy puppet. Altogether, this is a much more difficult piece to play and stands the furthest removed from any American model. When comparing this piece to Minstrels, Schmitz says of "General Lavine"-eccentric:

Lavine is more discreet, more refined in his humor, albeit perhaps less direct. His is not a folk expression, but a highly sophisticated satire. The effects are more studied, polished, further from the feline pulse of the minstrel cakewalk, and also of his bawdy jokes.

With "General Lavine"-eccentric we take our leave of Debussy and his satirical view of Parisian night-life. The Great War is about to start. By the time it ends, Debussy's life will be over. American jazz will take minstrelsy's place. A new era begins. North Central College Naperville, Illinois

Golliwog (poster and doll)

257



NOTES

This article is a slightly revised version of a paper read at the annual meeting of the Sonneck Society at the University of Colorado (Boulder), on 18 April 1986.

1. The Golliwog can be purchased even today, in London and in Amer- ican specialty shops. For over fifty years his image has been used to advertise jams and jellies ("Golly, it's good") by James Robertson & Sons P. M. Ltd. For more on the Golliwog, with pictures of his various transforma- tions, see "Golliwog, the Teddy Bear's Friend" in The Teddy Bear 3/1 (Spring 1985), 52-55.

2. Letter to Louis Laloy, quoted by Oscar Thompson in Debussy, Man and Artist (1937. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1967), 154.

3. Francois Lesure, Debussy on Musit, translated and edited by Richard Langham Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 180-181. 4. Paul E. Bierley, John Philip Sousa: American Phenomenon (New York:

Prentice Hall, 1973), 18. 5. Eileen Southern, ed., Readings in Black American Music, 2d ed. (New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), 227. 6. Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History, 2d ed. (New

York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1983), 299. 7. Gabriel Astruc, Le Pavilion des fantomes (Paris: Bernard Grasset,

Editeur, 1937). 8. Astruc, 241. 9. Ibid.

10. Lesure, Debussy on Music, 71. 11. Rene Peter, Claude Debussy (Paris: Librarie Gallimard, 1931), 96-97. 12. E. Robert Schmitz, The Piano Works ofClaude Debussy (1950. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966), 160. 13. Alfred Cortot, French Piano Music, translated by Hilda Andrews (Lon- don: Oxford University Press, 1932), 26. 14. Thompson, Debussy Man and Artist, 267. 15. Schmitz, The Piano Works, 173.

258


Article Contentsp.[249]p.250p.251p.252p.253p.254p.255p.256p.257p.258

Issue Table of ContentsThe Black Perspective in Music, Vol. 14, No. 3, Autumn, 1986Volume Information [pp.332-334]Front MatterBooks on Black Music by Black Authors: A Bibliography [pp.215-232]The Influence of Black Vaudeville on Early Jazz [pp.233-248]Debussy and American Minstrelsy [pp.249-258]Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: A Postscript [pp.259-266]Conversation with: Art BlakeyThe Big Beat! [pp.267-289]

In RetrospectWill Garland and the Negro Operetta Company [pp.291-302]

New Books [pp.303-305]Correction: New Books [p.305]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp.306-309]untitled [pp.309-312]untitled [pp.312-314]untitled [pp.314-316]

Corrections: Jazz: America's Classical Music [p.316]Record Reviewsuntitled [pp.317-318]untitled [pp.318-319]untitled [pp.319-321]

ObituariesDorothy Jeanne Thompson Ashby [p.322]Clyde E. B. Bernhardt [p.322]Kenneth B. Billups [p.322]Arthur L. Boyd [pp.322-323]Rosa Louise Burge [pp.323-324]Connie Curtis ("Pee Wee") Crayton [p.324]John Henry ("Blind John") Davis [p.324]Helen Holiday [p.324]O'Kelly Isley [p.324]Caterina Jarboro [pp.324-325]John Pickens ("Bobo") Jenkins [p.325]Thaddeus Joseph ("Thad") Jones [p.325]Louis Keppard [p.325]Willie Mabon [p.325]Henry ("Hank") Mobley [p.325]Henry Sterling ("Benny") Morton [p.326]Bobby Nunn [p.326]Louise Parker [p.326]Lincoln Theodore (=Stepin Fetchit) Perry [p.326]Dillon ("Curly") Russell [p.327]John William ("Bubbles") Sublett [p.327]Saunders ("Sonny Terry") Terrell [p.327]Joseph ("Big Joe") Turner [p.327]Sippie (ne Beulah Thomas) Wallace [pp.327-328]William ("Dicky") Wells [p.328]Theodore ("Teddy") Wilson [pp.328-329]Estelle ("Mama") Yancey [p.329]James ("Trummy") Young [p.329]

Commentary [p.330]Back Matter [pp.331-331]

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Debussy and American Minstrelsy