1920s Music

Now I am not going to claim that 1920s music is the Pinnacle of Western Civilization.

For one thing my music mistress, Miss Formaldehyde would probably have my hide. She thinks Mozart is pretty hot potatoes and I'm sure she ought to know.

I am perfectly willing to believe that you couldn't find an uncut rug for miles around Salzburg when Wolfgang and His Whistlin' Dixies were in town. (Actually I don't know the name of Mozart's band so I made that one up. I'll ask Miss Formaldehyde next time I have my lesson).

All right. So scrub the Pinnacle of WC bit. What you've got to say, though, is that 1920s music was really the beginning of 20th-century popular music.

Hotter than hot
bluer than blue,
meaner than mean,
newer than new.

This is how the 'Varsity Drag bills itself, and this might well be the motto for 1920s music as a whole. Take a gander below if you want to hear the Drag.

(Your sound hasn't broken, it just takes a minute to get going!)

The Great War has swept away many of the traditions and inhibitions of the previous era. Suddenly skirts are shorter than they had ever been, makeup is wholly acceptable and a new type of music has swept the Western world: a music that might be called Art Deco in sound.

That ol' banker T.S. Eliot perfectly catches the rhythm in the slightly sniffy lines from "The Waste Land" (1922):

Is there nothing in your head
but
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent

The sharp syncopation of the music mirrors the geometric lines of Art Deco. Honestly it does. I'm going to put it in my essay

And yet to many - like Mr. Eliot and Miss Formaldehyde - 1920s jazz music seems like a travesty of the civilisation that produced Mozart and Shakespeare.

Is civilisation taking a nosedive? Not just yet we think! I'll tell you what my friend Hortense said in class the other day:

Hortense: Just as Art Deco itself introduced a new Fine Art for the Machine Age, so 1920s music translates that art into sound.

Miss Formaldhyde: You are a clever girl, Hortense, but I don't think you can ignore the looseness and foolishness that invariably accompanies 1920s jazz music.

Hortense: I cannot and do not ignore it, ma'am. But remember that in the 1930s there is a great return to femininity and elegance and a reassertion of moral values. But all this is combined with an art that can carry us into the machine age and a music that is becoming more sophisticated and more beautiful by the year. Just providing that Herr Hitler does not start another beastly war and mess it all up, I think we should have the most elegant, pure, gracious and moral civilization the world has known by the turn of the next century.

Well, that's my friend Hortense for you. She's what they call an intellectual.

But what she's saying is that while 1920's music is undeniably nifty and utterly high-temperature pommes de terre, it is also an important social and artistic thingummy-whatever, or it will be with a bit more polishing.

Or something.

Anyway, my intention is to write a few pages about some of the hotter bits of rannygazoo going on in the sphere of 1920s music.

And if you want to posh it up with intellectual thoughts you won't see me making faces.

Miss Formaldehyde never sees me, and she has eyes in the back of her head, so I'm darn sure you won't.

Until next time, I'm,

Gone Sylli.

(Sylvia M. Bell)