Free The Ellington Century by David Schiff

which evinced its whiteness by using only strings, began with the tonal emblem of whiteness, a simple cadence in C major. The timbre and tonality bore a heavy ethical message, which Stravinsky made explicit in his Poetics of Music , delivered at Harvard in 1939 (just as Ellington was composing “Ko-Ko”): “My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminished constraint diminished strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.” 55 The music and choreography for Apollon musagète (a.k.a. Apollo ) have become classics of high modernism, but it is edifying to view them as a statement of European essentialism (not without protofascist overtones). But don't take my word for it:
    George Balanchine: I myself think of Apollo as white music, in places as white-on-white.…For me the whiteness is something positive (it has in itself an essence) and at the same time abstract. 56
    Lincoln Kirstein: In its grave sequence Balanchine carved four cameos in three dimensions: Calliope portrayed the metric and caesura of spoken verse; Polyhymnia described mimicry and spectacular gesture; Terpsichore, the activity, declaration, and inversion of academic dancing itself. These are all subservient to Apollo, animator and driver; they are his handmaidens, creatures, harem and household.
    With Lifar, Balanchine had been given a boy who might conceivably become a young man. In America, with Lew Christenson (who danced the role in New York in 1937), he found a young man who could be credited as a potential divinity. Praxitelean head and body, imperceptibly musculated but firmly and largely proportioned, blond hair and bland air recalled Greek marbles and a calm inhabitant of Nicolas Poussin's pastorals. 57
    Boris de Schloezer: “Whatever may have been the circumstances which led to the birth of Apollo , the work reveals to us its author's secret, his thirst for renunciation, his need for purity and serenity.” 58
    It's not easy being white.
    SOUNDS AND PERFUMES: SYMBOLISM IN WHITE AND BLACK
    Kandinsky's theories about the relation of music, color, and words were a belated summation of the larger artistic movement, Symbolism, whose aesthetic ideology shaped the modernist literature of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Georg Trakl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, among many others. 59 Symbolist literature aspired to the condition of music. It often cloaked this goal, however, in a mask of obscurantism. In the compositions of Debussy and Ellington Symbolist aesthetic ideas became far more accessible to everyday life. Arcane modernism became “jazz modernism.”
    Debussy's music is key to understanding the newly exalted role played by tone color as a means of representation. In his oeuvre Debussy gave musical form to the complex interplay of sensual perception and imaginary evocation that Baudelaire termed “correspondences”:
    La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
    Laissen parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
    L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
    Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
    Â 
    Nature is a temple of living pillars
    where often words emerge, confused and dim;
    and man goes through this forest, with familiar
    eyes of symbols always watching him. 60
    In this forest of symbols the human subject does not control meaning rationally but perceives it through sensory association as an endless chain of metaphors.
    Debussy imbibed this Symbolist creed, further elaborated in Verlaine's “Art poétique,” Rimbaud's “Voyelles,” and J. K. Huysmans's novel A Rebours , and in the preface to Oscar