Parisian Cake Walks.pdf - ResearchSpace@Auckland

19TH
CENTURY
MUSIC
Exposition Universelle. 13 Afternoon concerts at
the Esplanade des Invalides, beginning on 5
May, drew huge crowds. According to Le Figaro,
“pas une chaise vacante autour du kiosque où
flottaient les drapeaux américains; et gros
succès, comme tous les jours” (not an empty
chair around the kiosk where American flags
were flying; and a great success, as every day). 14
These audiences had turned out for band performances
directed by John Philip Sousa. The
programs included transcriptions of classical
favorites—excerpts from Tannhäuser, Manon
Lescaut, and The Blue Danube—and American
marches such as The Washington Post, King
Cotton, and Stars and Stripes Forever. But the
band also introduced a new kind of music. Covering
the performances back home, the San
Francisco Call reported “the remarkable success
which [the band] has met with in introducing
‘Le Temps du chiffon,’ commonly
known in this country as ‘rag time’.” 15
Sousa’s performances at the Exposition gave
Parisians their first taste of a new type of vernacular
music: Kerry Mills’s At a Georgia
Campmeeting and Whistling Rufus, and Abe
Holzmann’s Smoky Mokes, Hunky Dory, and
Bunch o’ Blackberries, all arranged by Sousa
himself. Although Mills, Holzmann, and fellow
American popular-music composers at the
turn of the century dubbed these pieces “rag
time hits,” to the French they were known as
“cake walks.” 16 Across the Atlantic, “cake
walk” and “rag time” were virtually synonymous,
although the former was associated more
specifically with dance. This confusion might
have sprung from a shared musical attribute,
for both the cake walk and ragtime were characterized
by syncopated melodies set against
metrically regular accompaniments. It was these
13 Gaumont showed a film of Benoit Constant Coquelin
declaiming his well-known tirade des nez, from Edmond
Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, accompanied by a synchronized
recording.
14 Le Figaro, 10 May 1900.
15 San Francisco Call, 10 June 1900.
16 Nancy Perloff, Art and the Everyday: Popular Entertainment
and the Circle of Erik Satie (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991), notes that the American popular-song composer R.
M. Stults referred to Mills’s dance pieces as “rag-time hits”
in 1900, while Parisian newspapers dubbed the same pieces
“cake walks,” perhaps owing to Sousa’s use of the term
(see p. 48).
292
melodies, according to the San Francisco Call,
that prompted Sousa’s triumph. One—the principal
theme of Bunch o’ Blackberries, printed
alongside the San Francisco Call feature—was
reportedly “hummed, whistled, and played in
almost every nook and corner of the French
capital, seemingly having been accepted by the
natives as being far and away the best thing of
its kind ever heard there.” 17
But the cake walk was known not only for
its syncopated beat. According again to the San
Francisco Call, its “lively,” “peculiar” style—
the “vim and dash” of the musicians—was
thought “distinctly American.” The French
press offered similar remarks. Although the
music periodicals showed little interest in
Sousa’s concerts (preferring to focus instead on
the goings-on at the Premier Congrès International
de Musique, held at the Exposition from
14 to 18 June, and the Exposition’s own Concerts
Officiels), the dailies made frequent reference
to the band, describing their music as
“gaie,” “enlevée” (boisterous), and, above all,
“la musique américaine.” 18 L’Évènement, for
example, appearing to overlook the “classical”
arrangements, declared Sousa’s offerings “la
première musique militaire de l’Amérique”; Le
Cri de Paris, similarly neglectful of Tannhäuser
and co., followed suit, describing “les airs
populaires” and “les inimitables ragtimes sur
lesquels se dansent les cakewalks” performed
by “la plus illustre des fanfares américaines.” 19
Even Debussy, commenting on a later performance
of Sousa’s band, aligned the dance with
17 French bands, the San Francisco Call continued, even
started to syncopate (“to play in rag time”) the Marseillaise.
18 See Le Gaulois, 19 April 1903, p. 3 (a recollection of
Sousa’s performances at the Exposition); L’Évènement, 3
May 1900, p. 1; and Le Temps, 15 May 1900. Of all the
dailies, L’Évènement appears to devote the most attention
to Sousa and his musicians, going as far as to detail the
time and rail station at which they arrived in Paris (2 pm
on 3 May at Saint-Lazare), the embroidery on their military
caps (“Sousa” in gold lettering), their movements post-
Exposition (to Brussels, Berlin, and other major German
cities) and how the U.S. commissioner had arranged their
accommodation in hotels neighboring the Exposition site;
see L’Évènement, 3 May 1900, p. 1, 4 May 1900, p. 2, and
6 May 1900, p. 2. As far as I am aware, Le Monde musicale
was the only mainstream music periodical to mention
Sousa: see, in particular, the editions of 15 and 30 July
1900, pp. 215 and 227.
19 L’Évènement, 4 May 1900, p. 2; and Le Cri de Paris, 13
May 1900, p. 8.