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More Than One “Double Life”: Artistic Conceptions, Networks, and Negotiations in Benny Goodman's Commissions to Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2023
Abstract
Beginning around the mid-1930s, clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman engaged with classical music, adding standard solo pieces to his regular performance and record portfolio. He also stimulated the emergence of a modern clarinet repertoire by granting commissions to composers, such as Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Darius Milhaud, and others. In this article, I explore why and how these projects evolved and how the collaborations unfolded. My focus is on the commissions to Hindemith (1941/47) and Milhaud (1941). The newly found correspondence of Eric Simon, a Viennese-born clarinetist who advised Goodman and initiated contact with Hindemith and Milhaud, reveal Goodman's “double life” as a multilayered sphere for various actors, each with their own specific background and agenda. My analysis follows three topics that decisively shaped the investigated projects: Goodman's relationship with classical music, which I discuss in light of the intersectionally biased structures of U.S. musical life; the situation of European émigré artists experienced by Hindemith, Milhaud, and Simon; and the promotion of new music, which linked the lives, networks, and agendas of the aforementioned protagonists and even defined their relationships. By highlighting Goodman taking center stage as a performer-commissioner, I argue for more serious attention to performers’ impact on musical production and repertoire formation, given that they represent the ultimate gatekeepers to the living repertoire.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music
Footnotes
This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) (J4281-G2; V882-G). For the purpose of open access, a CC BY public copyright license is applied to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the American Musicological Society conference in 2020. I owe many thanks to my dear colleagues Alyssa Cottle, Elaine Fitz Gibbon, Maya Garcia, David H. Miller, Anne C. Shreffler, and John D. Wilson for feedback on drafts in various stages.
References
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Bartók, Béla. Contrasts, autograph manuscript. Misc.Ms.606. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron. Clarinet Concerto Sketches. Notated Music. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Accessed May 3, 2022. www.loc.gov/item/copland.sket0030/.Google Scholar
Eric Simon Correspondence, Collection PASC-M 128, Library Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Herbert and Trudl Zipper Archive. Box “Eric Simon.” The Colburn School Special Collections, The Colburn School, Los Angeles, CA.Google Scholar
Hindemith Institute, Frankfurt (Foundation Hindemith, Blonay).Google Scholar
Leon Levy Digital Archives. New York Philharmonic. New York, NY.Google Scholar
Mannes School of Music: Clippings and Scrapbook Collection. The New School Archives & Special Collections. New York, NY.Google Scholar
MSS 47 The Paul Hindemith Collection. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
MSS 53 The Benny Goodman Papers. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
MSS 84 The Eric Simon Papers. Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. Yale University, New Haven, CT.Google Scholar
Rudolf Kolisch Papers, 1886–1978 (MS Mus 195). Houghton Library. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Budelmann, Carrie Anne. “Symphony Concertante for Two Clarinets and Orchestra by Ingolf Dahl: A Critical Edition.” D.M.A. diss., Rice University, 2008.Google Scholar
Collier, James Lincoln. Benny Goodman and the Swing Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Connor, D.[onald] Russell. Benny Goodman: Listen to his Legacy. Studies in Jazz 6. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988.Google Scholar
Copland, Aaron and Perlis, Vivian. The Complete Copland. Hillsdale: Pendragon Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeNora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeVeaux, Scott. “The Emergence of the Jazz Concert, 1935–1945.” American Music 7, no. 1 (spring 1989): 6–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erenberg, Lewis A. Swingin’ the Dream. Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feisst, Sabine. Schoenberg's New World. The American Years. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fenlon, Iain. Music and Patronage in Sixteenth-Century Mantua. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Firestone, Ross. Swing, Swing, Swing. The Life & Times of Benny Goodman. London, Sydney, and Auckland: Hodder & Stoughton, 1994.Google Scholar
Foertsch, Jacqueline. American Culture in the 1940s. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gillies, Malcolm and Gombocz, Adrienne, eds. Bartok Letters: The Musical Mind. Unpublished typescript in the Budapest Bartók Archives.Google Scholar
Goodman, Benny and Kolodin, Irving. The Kingdom of Swing. New York: Stackpole Sons, 1939.Google Scholar
Harness, Kelley Ann. Echoes of Women's Voices: Music, Art, and Female Patronage in Early Modern Florence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Howland, John. “Ellington Uptown”: Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson and the Birth of Concert Jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurd, Maureen. “Benny Goodman—The Classical Clarinetist, Part I.” The Clarinet 34, no. 4 (September 2007): 32–38.Google Scholar
Hurd, Maureen. “Benny Goodman: Part 2—The Classical Clarinetist.” The Clarinet 35, no. 4 (September 2008): 46–48 and 60.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Gordon. Clarinet Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra. Reduction for Clarinet and Piano by the Composer. New York: Gordon Jenkins Music Inc. and Leeds Music Corporation, 1977.Google Scholar
Kerékfy, Márton. “‘Contrasts?’ Practical and Abstract Ideas in Bartók's Compositional Process.” Studia Musicologica 53, no. 1/3 (2012): 41–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kube, Michael. “Paul Hindemiths Jazz-Rezeption—Stationen einer Episode,” Musiktheorie 1, no. 10 (1995): 63–72.Google Scholar
Lampert, Vera. “Benny Goodman and Bartók's Contrasts: An Extraordinary Collaboration.” The Musical Quarterly 101, no. 1 (spring 2018): 6–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Locke, Ralph and Barr, Cyrilla, eds. Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.Google Scholar
Lockwood, Lewis. Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400–1505. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Magee, Jeffrey. The Uncrowned King of Swing: Fletcher Henderson and Big Band Jazz. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maher, Erin K. “Darius Milhaud in the United States, 1940–1971: Transatlantic Constructions of Musical Identity.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2016.Google Scholar
Neumeyer, David, ed. Paul Hindemith. Sämtliche Werke, vol. III/7: Bläserkonzerte I. Mainz: B. Schott's Söhne, 1983.Google Scholar
Noss, Luther. Paul Hindemith in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Oja, Carol J. Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pass, Walter, Scheit, Gerhard, and Svoboda, Wilhelm. Orpheus im Exil. Die Vertreibung der österreichischen Musik von 1933 bis 1945 (Antifaschistische Literatur und Exilliteratur—Studien und Texte 13). Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1995.Google Scholar
Savran, David. Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schenker Documents Online. “Erich Simon.” Accessed May 3, 2022. https://schenkerdocumentsonline.org/profiles/person/entity-006148.html.Google Scholar
Schuller, Gunther. The Swing Era. The Development of Jazz 1930–1945. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
Schwartz, Manuela and Weber, Horst. Quellen zur Geschichte emigrierter Musiker. 1933–1950, I: Kalifornien. München: Saur, 2003.Google Scholar
Snavely, John. “Benny Goodman's Commissioning of New Works and their Significance for Twentieth-Century Clarinetists.” D.M.A. diss., University of Arizona, 1992.Google Scholar
Stowe, David. Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Tackley, Catherine. Benny Goodman's Famous 1938 Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Tallián, Tibor. Béla Bartók's Reception in the United States: 1940–1945. Budapest: Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for the Humanities, 2017.Google Scholar
Weber, William, ed. The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914. Managers, Charlatans and Idealists. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Wells, Christopher J. “‘Spinnin' the Webb:’ Representational Spaces, Mythic Narratives, and the 1937 Webb/Goodman Battle of Music.” Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 2 (May 2020): 176–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wriggle, John. “Jazzing the Classics: Race, Modernism, and the Career of Arranger Chappie Willet.” Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 2 (2012): 175–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wriggle, John. Blue Rhythm Phantasy: Big Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartók, Béla, Szigeti, Joseph, and Goodman, Benny. “Contrasts. Columbia WXCO 26819-A, 26820-A, 268121-A, 26822-A, May 12, 1940, 12”.Google Scholar
Goodman, Benny and the Budapest String Quartet. “Mozart Clarinet Quintet. RCA Victor BS 022903-8, April 4, 1938, 10”.Google Scholar
Reiner, Fritz, Goodman, Benny, and Kipnis, Alexander, NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Legendary Conductors: Fritz Reiner. AS 628, Legend LGD122, 1994, compact disc.Google Scholar