Attuned to the moon
Originally published in the TLS, January 21, 2005
In Modernism's heyday, when everyone needed a new bump -action, edge, colour field, aleatoric, total control, stream of consciousness, montage, bricolage, musique concrete -an innovative language was essential. It gave you your identity and established your style; it was what made your work challenging and provocative. Now it can seem boring and pretentious. The words "challenging" and "provocative" seem boring and pretentious.
For Clement Greenberg, innovative language was a marker of authenticity.
Rereading his famous and brilliant essay on Kitsch, what leaps out is the extraordinary purity of his vision, a vision that did not allow for Fred Astaire. I'm not sure if it even allowed for Martha Graham; perhaps it only allowed for Merce Cunningham. These days, we might pay more critical attention to Fred and Ginger than we do to Martha and Merce.
It is not just to Fred and Ginger that we pay attention, though; we are attentive to all manner of Kitsch, ancient and modern. I just had coffee with a colleague who is writing a paper on zombie movies. He is a professor of philosophy. This is fine. Zombie movies can be fertile ground for philosophers.
But although I certainly would not want to return to the days of Greenberg's puritanical vision, there was something to it: a distinction between art that exploits the most accessible elements of its past, and art that works to find its own irreducible voice. Most of the past century of Kitsch ultimately derives from a played-out Romantic style. Zombie movies are a perfect example.
The toying with the supernatural, the sick fascination with death: these are typically Romantic. There is also a figurative element at work: the dead wandering around as simulacra of the living -there is Kitsch in a nutshell.
Titanic is a zombie film, not waking life but walking death, Romanticism unaware of its own demise.
So these days, although Cole Porter hardly needs defending, he could use separation from his Kitsch-y brethren. When John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker, refers to "his melodies, written in haunting minor keys" -Porter never used minor keys -that "express a palpable sadness", he is trying to put Porter in the zombie camp. What separates Porter, what makes him modern though not Modernist, is his deliberate, crafted, self-conscious and explicit rejection of the Romantic style.
The second song of Mahler's magnificent Songs of a Wayfarer, "Ging heut morgen uber's feld" (written for piano and voice in 1884, the orchestrated version dating from 1897) is itself a far from unquestioning treatment of Romantic themes. The pathetic fallacy, in which the narrator finds nature responding to his mood, is teased out in a novel way. The chaffinch sings "Zink! Zink!", the bluebells ring "Kling! Kling!", but eventually the sheer weight of the singer's depression conquers both his and nature's buoyant energy as the orchestra slows and quietens, and tympani hint at thunder over the horizon: no, no, he says, my happiness will never bloom …
Porter begins the verse of his song "Let's Do It" with an echo straight from Mahler: "When the little Bluebird, / Who has never said a word, / Starts to sing: 'Spring, spring …'", and goes on: "When the little Bluebell, / In the bottom of the dell, / Starts to ring: 'Ding, ding!'". Almost but not quite straight, this version of the Romantic sentiment. The phrase "who has never said a word" introduces irony and helps us to hear something exaggerated in the nursery rhyme-like simplicity of the melody, and in the piano's little responses. And then with "When the little blue clerk, in the middle of his work, / Starts a tune to the moon up above", we get vernacular language, a mundane situation, and the sent-up cliche. The final line of the verse returns to the pathetic fallacy, but goes from poetic to literal -"it is nature, that's all, / Simply telling us to fall in love". All the way through, Porter's rhymes, like those of Ira Gershwin and Noel Coward, go overboard, so full of artifice that it's hard to take the lyrics seriously, although sometimes they are meant seriously.
I don't want to imply that Porter was taking on Mahler as his target. American popular song composers were in general less concerned with satirizing the grand European tradition than with its feebler American derivatives -that is, American composers who were still living, musically, in Europe, deaf to the local vernacular. "Love in May" (1894) by the American composer Horatio William Parker (he was Dean of the Music School at Yale while Porter was a student there) is a case in point. It opens with a major-third tremolo in the treble of the piano, a technique that was about to become a favourite of silent-movie pianists everywhere. The effect continues throughout the piece, suggesting, I suppose, birds twittering, as well as the "thrilling" of the narrator's heart.
The green is on the grass again,
The blue is on the sea,
And every lark is singing
To his mate in ecstasy,
And oh, my love, and oh, my love,
I sing to thee.
(Words by Ella Higginson)
(To get a feel for Parker's melody, imagine that the rhythm follows the iambs, the stressed syllables held longer, the weak ones shorter.) Once again, nature is mirror and articulator of the narrator's soul. The effect is leaden. Mahler seems full of comic irony in comparison. There is comedy, though, in the contrast between the song's passionate aims and its decorous means, especially when the lyrics resort to a kind of imagery that could only have been written in ignorance of Freud:
Wild Mary-buds are opening
Within the marshy lea,
And quickened saps are pulsing
Thro' the heart of every tree.
And oh, how thy love wakes and thrills
The heart of me.
Porter begins his chorus with "Birds do it, / Bees do it, / Even educated fleas do it, / Let's do it, / Let's fall in love".
(I am assuming here that most readers viewing these words can hear Porter's melody in their heads -which, if true, says something about the longevity of the song, written in 1928.) Thus is the old nature/love correspondence deflated. If it were a twentieth- century European art song, we might note the chromaticism of the melody, chromaticism being an indicator of advanced styles from Wagner to Schoenberg. We might even relate the music's syncopation to rhythmic experiments with primitivism, as in Stravinsky or Bartok. But the sources for Porter's chromaticism and syncopation are the vernacular of black music in America. The chromaticism is characteristic of the bent notes of blues and of the jazz instrumental styles it fostered; the syncopation is derived from jazz and ultimately African rhythms.
Chromaticism and syncopation are intimately coupled here: the note that syncopation pushes forth and accents is generally the chromatic note, the note not conventionally found in the scale: Birds (rest) do it, Bees (rest) do it, (rest) even educated fleas (rest) do it. The chromaticism meshes with the sexual suggestiveness of the words, and, significantly, disappears at just the moment when the words retreat from sexual suggestiveness to a more polite sentiment, on the "in love" of "Let's fall in love". I find myself arguing with Clement Greenberg's ghost: "This is innovation, too, Mr Greenberg! This musical language is fresher than Schoenberg's!".
I know that that isn't the point. Porter didn't invent this language, although he certainly contributed to its astonishingly rapid evolution in the years after the First World War. The point is in how he uses this new language to play games with meaning. He mocks Victorian prurience with direct sexual suggestion. Then he mocks his own sexual suggestiveness through the self-conscious artifice of his lyrics.
He is even capable of transcending his own mockery with a line which is just lovely language: "In shallow shoals, English soles do it" -which he then follows with the decidedly cruder "Goldfish in the privacy of bowls do it".
Ultimately, he is making it very hard for us to remember the importance of being earnest about nature, sex, and love. Which is why it should be a crime for anyone to be earnest about his nature, his sex life, or his loves. It may seem an odd thing to say about a man whose songs, forty years after his death, earn millions of dollars a year in royalties, but: Cole Porter is not a zombie.