Suite for chamber orchestra

Suite

for chamber orchestra

Prologue

Ragtime

Valse Boston

Tango

Shimmy

Step

Jazz

Schulhoff first came across jazz in 1919 through his friendship with the Berlin dadaist artist George Grosz, who was one of the first European collectors of jazz records from America. The discovery made an enormous impression on the Czech composer. After his traumatic experiences in the Austrian Army during the First World War, he had rejected the mainstream current on which, though far from conventionally, his music had developed so far. But he was unsure where he would go from there. Jazz he welcomed as both compatible with his new-found socialist principles and as a way out of the post-war crisis.

There was more to it than that, however. The jazz-influenced dance music of the time appealed to him on a deeply personal level, to what he described in a letter to Alban Berg as his “unbelievably earthy, almost even animal” instincts. Night after night, he confessed, he danced with bar girls to indulge his passion for the rhythms and the sensual excitement of the latest dances, such as the foxtrot, the Boston, the slingan and the paso doble. Informing Berg of the composition of the Suite for chamber orchestra, he asked, “If Bach and his contemporaries, and Mozart and Brahms and Schubert wrote dances for their time and loved them too, why shouldn’t I write these dances and love them too?” His (scarcely translatable) dadaist Prologue to the Suite - intended to be spoken without accompaniment - wallows in the low-life associations of his dance music while achieving a nonsense kind of poetry culminating in a coda on Bayer Aspirin.

Although jazz had begun to seduce European composers a few years earlier - notably in the Ragtime number in Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale, the sound of which is echoed from time to time in the first movement of the Suite - Schulhoff’s understanding of the popular dance music of the day is remarkably sophisticated. He was a year ahead of Hindemith in making a feature of the Boston slow waltz and while he was year behind Milhaud with the tango he was no less resourceful in his treatment of it in his own, rather more relaxed and euphonious way. Schulhoff’s brilliantly witty Shimmy must be a first of its kind in the classical repertoire and, surely, no one had written anything as daring as his Step for untuned percussion alone. Jazz is an exhilaratingly brisk finale.