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Asking Historical Questions: Wait, that’s Redundant

One of the history courses I took as an undergraduate at Santa Clara University was History of California with the late Father Jerry McKevitt, S.J.1 The class was very interesting, and I enjoyed doing my research paper on Helen Hunt Jackson, a 19th-century reformer whose novel Ramona became known as the “Indian Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”2 I didn’t go on to study California history in graduate school or to teach it in any of my classes. I do, however, frequently make use of something I learned in the class. One day Father McKevitt was returning graded papers to us, and they must have been pretty bad, because I remember him saying, “Listen, people. History answers two questions: ‘What happened?’ and ‘So what?’” (I assume that this particular set of papers had not done a good job of answering one or both of these questions.) I remember thinking to myself, “Whoa. That’s so true.” In just about every one of my history courses, at some time or other I quote Father McKevitt to the students.

Father Gerald McKevitt, S.J.

Approaching the study of our discipline by means of asking questions is particularly appropriate for historians. Of course, practitioners of any scholarly discipline might say that they begin by asking questions. But for us historians, it’s right in our name. The first writer to use the word “history” in the context of the study of the past was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, known as the “Father of History.” The English title of his work is Histories, a translation of the original ancient Greek Historie, meaning “inquiries” (from the verb historien, “to inquire”). This is his opening sentence:

“These are the researches [historie] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.” 3

Because what Herodotus inquired about was the events of the past (“the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians”), and because he presented the answers to his inquiries in book form (“These are the researches [historie] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus”), the word historie came to mean not just the act of inquiry but also the subject of the inquiry (the history of the Persian Wars) and the result of the inquiry (A History of the Persian Wars). But students of history should always keep in mind that doing history begins with asking questions. And make sure that your historical writing clearly and completely answers both the “what happened?” and the “so what?” Father McKevitt said so!

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Violists get no Respect

But Research is Delightful

Last week while driving to work I heard an unfamiliar piece on radio station WETA1 announced as a Concerto in E major for two mandolins, viola, and orchestra by Mauro Giuliani. This caught my attention not only because of the unusual instrumentation but also because as a violist, I’m always interested in hearing solo works for the instrument, which has much less available repertoire than the violin.

I was annoyed, but not surprised, to hear the radio announcer identify the orchestra (I Solisti Veneti)2, the conductor (Claudio Scimone), and the two mandolinists (Ugo Orlandi and Dorina Frati), but say not a word about the violist. Typical, I thought. Violists get no respect, as evidenced by the existence of viola jokes.

When I got to my office, I went to WETA’s website and checked the online playlist. The violist’s name wasn’t there either (which might explain why the announcer didn’t say it). The playlist includes a link labeled “Buy the CD,” which takes you to Archiv Music, but they didn’t have it. Next I turned to google and made several discoveries. First I found a youtube of the same recording I’d heard in the car, which informed me that the violist was Jodi Levitz. She’d commented on the youtube post, saying “Thanks for posting! This was my 1st recording with Claudio, done when I was 22.”  I then found her website, where I learned that at the time of the recording she was the principal violist of I Solisti Veneti and later taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She now teaches at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. I was delighted to discover that she has posted several videos of her solo playing, some of which I listened to while working that morning. I’m now a fan!

As I continued my research, I found images of the CD label, which clearly listed Jodi Levitz on both the front and the back. So WETA really had no excuse to omit her. As I said, no respect. Not only that, I also discovered that the composer of the mandolin-viola concerto was not in fact Mauro Giuliani, whose name I was familiar with as a composer of works for the guitar.3 It wasn’t Mauro Giuliani (1781-1829) but Antonio Maria Giuliani (ca. 1739-1831), no relation as far as I can tell. Antonio Maria is fairly obscure; unlike Mauro, he has no Wikipedia entry, no imslp entry4, no entry in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians. But he is clearly listed on the back of the CD label. Apparently somebody at WETA saw “Giuliani” and just assumed it was Mauro. Be more careful, WETA!

I’m still annoyed at WETA for dissing the violist, and I lost some respect for them because of their sloppiness. On the other hand, I loved listening to the concerto, and WETA’s omission and mistake did lead me to take delight in a fruitful research project that resulted in my discovery of a new artist and a new composer.

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Mercurial Connections

I teach a course called “Harry Potter and the Middle Ages.” It’s an approach to medieval culture that takes the Harry Potter books as a starting point; we learn about the medieval background to many of the elements JK Rowling used to construct the Harry Potter universe. The course is organized around the Hogwarts curriculum. For example, in conjunction with Care of Magical Creatures, we study medieval bestiaries and medieval map-making (both Fantastic Beasts AND where to find them). Transfiguration and Potions classes offer the opportunity to learn about medieval alchemy.

Alchemy is clearly an important theme in the Harry Potter books, starting with the title and plot of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. 1 It does not appear to be one of the courses offered at Hogwarts, however; perhaps Rowling wanted to save it for her underlying structure. In any case, learning more about alchemy enhances our understanding of both the Harry Potter books and of the Middle Ages.

The more I read about alchemy, the more I realized that mercury is a key substance in the alchemical worldview. Many medieval and early-modern alchemists hypothesized that the starting point for generating the Philosopher’s Stone was to mix mercury and sulfur (which may or may not refer to the physical substances that go by those names); this is known as the Mercury-Sulfur principle. I also realized that the meaning of Mercury is multivalent, with multiple connections to multiple things. Let’s trace some of those connections. The words in bold face are shown on the accompanying diagram.

Mercury was a Roman god, the Roman counterpart to the Greek messenger god Hermes. In late antiquity, Hermes also became identified with Hermes Trismegistus, or “thrice-blessed Hermes,” a figure to whom many early alchemical writings were attributed, known collectively as the Hermetic corpus and which were influenced by Neo-Platonist thought. This Hermetic tradition is evident in the term used by medieval alchemists to describe what they did to keep air out of a piece of equipment, a term we still use—“hermetically sealed.”

In addition to being the name of a god, Mercury is also the name of a planet. Ancient and medieval astrologers believed that the stars and planets influenced life on earth. Which planet a person was born under influences that person’s personality. Someone born under the influence of Jupiter might grow up to be jovial (jolly), while Saturn’s influence would make you saturnine (gloomy). The influence of Mercury, the fastest-moving planet, results in a personality that is mercurial (quick to change).

In ancient cosmology, each of the seven planets was associated with one of the seven metals. (“Planet,” from the Greek for “wanderer,” was the term for any heavenly body that “wandered” in relation to the fixed stars that form the constellations, which stay put. So the Sun and Moon were considered planets, but the stationary Earth was not.) Some of the associations are obvious—gold goes with the sun, silver with the moon. Mars is associated with iron, both because of the planet’s rusty-red color and because the god of war would have used iron weapons. Venus is copper, which in the ancient Mediterranean came from the island of Cyprus, where Venus was born from the sea.2 Saturn is lead, the heaviest of metals for the slowest of the planets. Jupiter gets tin because that’s what’s left over, and the planet Mercury, the fastest-moving planet associated with the god with winged feet, gets the slippery-slidy metal Mercury.

With one exception, we no longer use these associations. But alchemical texts might speak of combining Jupiter and Mars when they mean tin and iron. The only one of the metals that still retains its planetary name in common use is Mercury. There is, however, also a name that refers to the metal only—quicksilver. “Quick” here means “living,” rather than “speedy”; think of cutting your nails to the quick. So “quicksilver” is “living silver.” The Greek name for the metal is “hydroargyrum,” or “liquid silver.” This is the source of the modern chemical abbreviation for mercury (or quicksilver)—Hg.

So what does all this have to do with Harry Potter? Well, which character has a name that’s a form of the god/planet/metal we’ve been talking about? That’s right, Hermione (a feminine form of Hermes). And what’s her last name? Granger. So what does that make her initials? HG. And what do her parents do? They’re dentists. What do dentists traditionally make fillings out of? Mercury. Coincidence? I think not.

For further reading:

Lawrence M. Principe. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

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Renaissance Gettysburg

One gorgeous summer afternoon a few years ago, while in Gettysburg, PA for a chamber music camp, I used our afternoon break from playing string quartets to visit the Gettysburg National Military Park and take some photos. I stopped the car at the most prominent monument I could see, which turned out to be the Pennsylvania Monument.

As I was walking around it looking for good photographic angles, I noticed how the summer sky was framed by the monument’s arch. “That’s beautiful,” I thought. “It looks just like a painting.” Then I realized, “Hold on—it looks like THE painting.” A quick search on my phone confirmed my suspicion. The Pennsylvania Monument is indeed very similar to the architectural setting of Raphael’s 1509 fresco The School of Athens, right down to the sky framed by the arch. (The other tourists visiting the Battlefield that day probably wondered why I was jumping up and down in excitement).

So, was The School of Athens the inspiration for the design of the Pennsylvania Monument? The monument was commissioned in 1907 by the Pennsylvania state legislature; architect W. Liance Cottrell was awarded the job. (Sculptor Samuel Murray, who studied with Thomas Eakins, got the sculpture commission.) The monument was still incomplete when dedicated in 1910; more money was appropriated and the finished memorial was rededicated on July 1, 1913, as part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg.

I have so far been unable to find any evidence that Cottrell had Raphael’s fresco specifically in mind when he designed the memorial to Pennsylvanians who fought at Gettysburg. Cottrell was trained in the Beaux-Arts school of architecture, which made extensive use of classical style. Raphael and Cottrell may simply have chosen the same classical elements for their creations. But I like to imagine that Cottrell tried to bring Raphael’s imaginary building to life on the field of Gettysburg.

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Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 4

Progress and Piano Professors

While white women were pushed to the margins of the Fair, the contributions of African-Americans to the story of American progress were not simply marginalized; they were erased. Not for nothing was the Fair nicknamed the “White City.” Only European-derived culture and achievements could be displayed in those gleaming neo-classical buildings. Visitors to the Fair could see Africans themselves displayed on the Midway in Dahomey Village, one of the living ethnological villages whose purpose was to set the utopian vision of progress in the adjacent White City into sharper relief.1 But no African-Americans were on the Fair’s planning commissions; no building was dedicated to the progress they had made since the abolition of slavery. There was a “Colored American Day,” analogous to other special “Days” at the Fair arranged to boost attendance. Antonin Dvořák, who was summering that year in Spillville, Iowa, conducted his Eighth Symphony and other works on Bohemian Day, for example. African-American musicians Harry T. Burleigh and Will Marion Cook (both of whom studied with Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York) joined poet Paul Laurence Dunbar for a program on Colored American Day at which Frederick Douglass also spoke. Otherwise, African-American participation was unofficial and undocumented.

It is generally believed, based on oral traditions, that several “Piano Professors,” as they were called, playing music that would soon be known as “ragtime,” performed either on the Midway or at various establishments in the neighborhood of the Fair. Despite a lack of written documentation, scholars concur that Scott Joplin, the “King of Ragtime Writers,” was probably one of these Piano Professors. Ragtime has been called the first indigenous American musical style. Joplin established the ragtime form in his “Maple Leaf Rag” of 1899, which also became his biggest hit. Joplin composed over forty other rags after “Maple Leaf,” including the “Cascades” Rag inspired by the 1904 St Louis Fair commemorating the Louisiana Purchase, which he definitely did attend.2

Scott Joplin

The World’s Columbian Exposition closed over 125 years ago, on October 31, 1893. Little of the physical Fair remains today. The buildings of the White City, which were never intended to be permanent, are all gone, except for the Fine Arts building, now the Museum of Science and Industry. Besides its name, the Midway survives only as a wide grassy strip on the University of Chicago campus. The legacy of the Fair remains, however, in perhaps unexpected places. If you’ve ever ridden on a Ferris Wheel or enjoyed the midway at a county fair; drunk Welch’s grape juice or eaten Cracker Jack (both introduced at the Fair); recited the Pledge of Allegiance (written for the Fair’s Dedication Day ceremonies) or sung the fourth verse of “America the Beautiful” (with its reference to “alabaster cities”), you can thank the Chicago World’s Fair.

The Fair also left a musical legacy. Concert-goers who attend classical performances still mostly hear the music of dead European males, although, after being mostly forgotten after her death in 1944, Amy Beach has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Similarly, ragtime faded in popularity in the early twentieth century (although not before it influenced jazz), but experienced a revival in the 1970s, especially after the 1972 movie The Sting used Joplin tunes in its soundtrack. (For a time, it seemed that every piano student in the land was playing an arrangement of “The Entertainer.”) The issues raised by the experience of music at the Chicago World’s Fair—what to play, who should play it, how do you get an audience to come hear it, and how do you pay for it—are familiar to every classical music organization today.

For Further Reading:

Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.

Curtis, Susan. Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin. Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994.

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Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 3

Progress and Parlor Music

Both Thomas’ program of concerts and the Fair as a whole were designed to display progress. But progress is by its nature a comparative concept. The idea of progress as it arose in the Enlightenment implies that a society has journeyed from a worse state to a better one. So demonstrating progress requires showing its opposite— knowledge to compare with ignorance, reason with superstition, civilization with barbarism. This ideology of progress was mapped onto the geography of the Fair. Although Bertha Honoré Palmer, President of the Fair’s Board of Lady Managers, had negotiated a Women’s Building to celebrate female accomplishment, and engaged a woman architect, Sophia Hayden, to design it, the Women’s Building was not deemed worthy of a prime location on the Court of Honor.1 Rather, it was pushed, literally, to the margin of the Fair, on the extreme edge of the main Fair grounds adjacent to the Midway.  In the Fair’s hierarchy, white women occupied a borderline space, on the threshold between the civilization of the White City and the barbarism of the Midway.

Women’s music was marginalized as well. Like Chadwick and Paine, composer Amy Beach is also considered a member of the Second New England School. Like Chadwick and Paine, she was commissioned to write a work for Dedication Day in October 1892. Unlike Chadwick and Paine, however, Beach was not to hear her piece performed at that ceremony.  After much back-and-forth between male Fair officials and Bertha Palmer, Beach’s composition, the “Festival Jubilate” for chorus and orchestra, a setting of Psalm 100, “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands” (Opus 17), was instead performed at the dedication of the Women’s Building on May 1, 1893. The lack of music by women composers at Paderewski’s concert was typical of the programming of the rest of the Music Hall concerts (and, of course, typical of much classical music programming even today).2

Although Beach had already written one large-scale work, a Mass in E-flat (Opus 5, 1890), which could have been performed at one of the Choral Hall concerts, she was not given a place in any of the concerts planned by Thomas. She did return to the Fair on July 5-7 for the Women’s Musical Congress. The Fair’s organizers sponsored numerous International Congresses that ran concurrently with the Fair, meeting in downtown Chicago’s newly-constructed Art Institute. The Congresses assessed the state of the topic, discussed controversial issues, and debated what progress had been made and what remained to be done.3

Beach performed her own compositions on each of the Congress’ three days. The pieces she chose for these performances were not the large-scale works like symphonies and concertos that were featured in the Music Hall series. Rather, Beach highlighted smaller-scale genres whose very names— parlor songs, salon pieces, chamber works—emphasize the domestic setting that women musicians were associated with. On July 5, she played two piano pieces, “In Autumn” and “Fireflies,” from her Opus 15, Sketches, published the previous year. The following day she premiered her Romance for violin and piano, Opus 23, with Maud Powell, the first American violin virtuoso, as the soloist. The final day of the Congress, she accompanied vocalist Jeannette Dutton on Beach’s song “Sweetheart, Sigh no More,” whose melody she had adapted for the Romance. Although much of Beach’s oeuvre falls into these domestic genres, she did not confine her creative output to the parlor. In the years following the Fair, she composed her Gaelic Symphony in E minor, opus 32 (1897) and her Piano Concerto in C# minor, opus 45 (1900), both premiered by the Boston Symphony (the Concerto with Beach as the soloist).

Amy Beach

Next: Progress and Piano Professors

For Further Reading:

Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Feldman, Ann E. “Being Heard: Women Composers and Patrons at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” Notes, 2nd series, 47, no. 1 (Sept. 1990), 7-20.