Jazz and Black Elements in Art Music

Dvorák: “These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American... folk songs, and your composers must turn to them. All the great musicians have borrowed from the songs of the common people. ” And: “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music (Century magazine, February, 1895). Ravel: “[Jazz] is the important contribution of modern times to the art of music ” (Madeleine Goss: Bolero: The Life of Maurice Ravel, p. 225). And: “Jazz is a very rich and vital source of inspiration for modern composers and I am astonished that so few Americans are influenced by it ” (Robert Rogers: “Jazz Influence on French Music, ” p.64, quotes an interview with Ravel from Musical America). These quotes—nearly forty years apart—from two famous European composers point to an odd phenomenon that persisted in varying degrees in American music until well into the nineteen-forties. To the first statements Edward MacDowell, one of America's leading composers and musicologists, answered: “We have here been offered a pattern for an American national musical costume by the Czech Dvorák—though what Negro melodies have to do with Americanism in art still remains