»... very much reminiscent of improvisations in jazz«:
Zur kompositorischen Jazzrezeption in Werken Ernst Kreneks, Boris Blachers und Gottfried von Einems
Musikblätter des Anbruch the German musicologist Paul Stefan emphasized the role of Jazz in contemporary music as a reaction to the narrow-minded era of Emperor William II. and drew parallels to a new aesthetics of »chaos, noise, machine and the triumph of spirit«. Analyzing the position of Jazz during the Weimar period in Germany, one has to consider that aiming at a distinctive modern style of living became a focus of new social and cultural ideas. In fact »Americanism« caused a fundamental change of mentality. The USA was seen as an unreal ideal of social harmony, economic prosperity and cultural diversity. A passage from the 3rd act of Ernst Krenek’s opera »Jonny spielt auf« (»The glittering New World comes across the sea / And conquers old Europe through dance«) is more than a pure metaphor and reflects a dramatic change of society. In »Jonny« Jazz represents a music closely connected with the medium radio as a symbol for a new democratic society. Krenek himself resumed, »Music according to my new philosophy had to fit the well-defined demands of the community for which it was written, it has to be useful, entertaining, practical« (Krenek, Self Analysis, 1953). On the other hand, quite unspecific ideas about Jazz were typical for the Weimar period and Krenek said that in the late 1920s the name Jazz was given »to anything that came out of America«. Many »Jazz«-pieces in European compositions of the 1920s and 1930s thus were an amalgam of (European) models of dance- and popular music and an illusionary imagination of America. We find a different approach in some works by Boris Blacher. For him Jazz was a kind of »seconda prattica«, an alternative style of composition well applicable for metrical asymmetric groupings and polyrhythmic layers. Gottfried von Einem’s »Concerto for orchestra« op. 4 (1942/43) shows of course some Jazz idioms used by his teacher Blacher, but it is much more a synthesis of »classical« strategies of form and musical architecture with Jazz-inspired rhythmic and »thematic variations very much reminiscent of improvisations in jazz, which was of course a taboo« (Michael Kater, 1997) during the last years of the Nazi-period.