The Music Box

What about "swing"? This is a question which musicians are repeatedly asked to comment upon. The answer--what the fate of "swing" itself will be and whether or not it will become the folk music of America--will be decided by time alone, but it is certain that the impression which the various forms of jazz have made on modern art-music will perpetuate its distinctive rhythmic and melodic types as important parts of the serious musical idiom of our time.

Of course, our musicians are by no means setting out on a new path when they borrow ideas from the music of the people. Art-music in all periods has taken many of its strong and lasting elements of form, rhythm, and melody from popular dances and songs. From the Paris motets of the thirteenth century to the music of our own generation we are indebted to the freshness and vitality of the dances of the people which have imparted new life to the works of serious musicians.

A random choice of almost any group of compositions, such as the program for the Sanders Theatre concert this week, is almost sure to reveal numerous influences of dance music, both direct and indirect. The last section of Debussy's "La Mer", for instance, employs the rhythms of jazz in an unmistakable fashion. But more interesting than this are the scherzo of the Beethoven Third Symphony and D'Indy's "Istar" Variations. These forms lead one to a consideration of an aspect of the relationship between popular art and "intellectual" music which bears on the whole development of the large conventional instrumental forms.

Both the scherzo, which is the offspring of the minuet, and the variation form can be traced back to the very origin of instrumental forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The combination of popular dances-minuets, sarabandes, allemandes,--represents the first attempt to write instrumental pieces involving more than one section, the germ of all later large forms.

The vital strength of the music of the people gave composers the solid foundations on which to build the great tonal structures of classical music. The influx of popular musical ideas has never stopped.. The countless other adaptations of the dance by all composers continually emphasize the persistent influence of dance rhythms and forms. The last century has seen an unprecedented exploitation of folk-song in the music of Tchaikowsky and the rest of the Russians as well as of the composers of most of the other European nations.

The ideas of popular music are products of the rough treatment of every-day use and of the intuitive taste common to all peoples. The process is a sort of musical "survival of the fittest." Our jazz is not different in this respect from the folk-music of other peoples, and the qualities which have made it a great popular art form will assure it a lasting place in the musical idiom of our era.