Chinaman, Laundryman

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"Chinaman, Laundryman" is a song composed by Ruth Crawford Seeger. The song depicts the exploitation of an immigrant Chinese laundry worker.

Ruth Crawford Seeger American composer (1901-1953)

Ruth Crawford Seeger, born Ruth Porter Crawford, was an American modernist composer active primarily during the 1920s and 1930s and an American folk music specialist from the late 1930s until her death. She was a prominent member of a group of American composers known as the "ultramoderns," and her music influenced later composers including Elliott Carter.

Contents

In 1932 Ruth Crawford Seeger composed two songs for a commission from the Society of Contemporary Music in Philadelphia, which she called Two Ricercari . The first, Sacco, Vanzetti is a tribute to the infamous executions of the two Italian Anarchists after whom the piece is named, in Massachusetts. The second, Chinaman, Laundryman, depicts the exploitation of an immigrant Chinese laundry worker. Both are settings of politically militant poems written in 1928 by a young Chinese author, H.T. Tsiang. [1] When she wrote the songs, Crawford was a member of the Composer’s Collective in New York City, a group under the control of the American Communist Party, which sought to enlist art in the service of politics.

Philadelphia Largest city in Pennsylvania, United States

Philadelphia, sometimes known colloquially as Philly, is the largest city in the U.S. state and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the sixth-most populous U.S. city, with a 2017 census-estimated population of 1,580,863. Since 1854, the city has been coterminous with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the eighth-largest U.S. metropolitan statistical area, with over 6 million residents as of 2017. Philadelphia is also the economic and cultural anchor of the greater Delaware Valley, located along the lower Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, within the Northeast megalopolis. The Delaware Valley's population of 7.2 million ranks it as the eighth-largest combined statistical area in the United States.

Massachusetts State of the United States of America

Massachusetts, officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It borders on the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the states of Connecticut and Rhode Island to the south, New Hampshire and Vermont to the north, and New York to the west. The state is named after the Massachusett tribe, which once inhabited the east side of the area, and is one of the original thirteen states. The capital of Massachusetts is Boston, which is also the most populous city in New England. Over 80% of Massachusetts's population lives in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, a region influential upon American history, academia, and industry. Originally dependent on agriculture, fishing and trade, Massachusetts was transformed into a manufacturing center during the Industrial Revolution. During the 20th century, Massachusetts's economy shifted from manufacturing to services. Modern Massachusetts is a global leader in biotechnology, engineering, higher education, finance, and maritime trade.

Chinese people ethnic group

Chinese people are the various individuals or ethnic groups associated with China, usually through ancestry, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship or other affiliation. Han Chinese, the largest ethnic group in China, at about 92% of the population, are often referred to as "Chinese" or "ethnic Chinese" in English, however there are dozens of other related and unrelated ethnic groups in China.

Chinaman, Laundryman was premiered at the MacDowell Club in 1933, receiving favorable reviews. It was performed two more times, once in Philadelphia for the Society of Contemporary Music, and again at the First American Worker’s Music Olympiad for a large audience of leftist workers. It was not performed again during the composer’s life. (Tick 1997, pp. 188–194)

Olympiad period of four years associated with the Olympic Games of the Ancient Greeks

An Olympiad is a period of four years associated with the Olympic Games of the Ancient Greeks. Although the Ancient Olympic Games were established during Archaic Greece, it was not until the Hellenistic period, beginning with Ephorus, that the Olympiad was used as a calendar epoch. Converting to the modern BC/AD dating system the first Olympiad began in the summer of 776 BC and lasted until the summer of 772 BC, when the second Olympiad would begin with the commencement of the next games. By extrapolation to the Gregorian calendar, the 3rd year of the 699th Olympiad began in (Northern-Hemisphere) mid-summer 2019.

Form

The text of “Chinaman” contains two characters, a boss who verbally assaults his employee, and the laundryman himself who delivers a recitation describing the harsh working conditions he endures and spurring his fellow men to work for a better world. Crawford’s heterophonic setting is for a solo mezzosoprano with piano accompaniment. The singer employs Sprechstimme (Sprechgesang), or speech voice, a technique in which notes are indicated as approximations rather than definite tones, in order to give primacy to the text. The piano accompaniment is a monotonous series given in octaves that transmits the remorseless oppression of the capitalist boss and the inhuman conditions in which the exploited worker exists. (Tick 1997, pp. 188–194)

Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme are expressionist vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, Sprechgesang is directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing, whereas Sprechstimme is closer to speech itself.

Oppression can refer to an authoritarian regime controlling its citizens via state control of politics, the monetary system, media, and the military; denying people any meaningful human or civil rights; and terrorizing the populace through harsh, unjust punishment, and a hidden network of obsequious informants reporting to a vicious secret police force.

Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Characteristics central to capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, voluntary exchange, a price system, and competitive markets. In a capitalist market economy, decision-making and investment are determined by every owner of wealth, property or production ability in financial and capital markets, whereas prices and the distribution of goods and services are mainly determined by competition in goods and services markets.

Analysis

The pitch material in the piano part is strictly ordered and based on a process of rotation and transposition that is typical of Crawford. A nine note tone row, T0, one measure in duration, is presented, then rotated so that it begins its second iteration on the second note of the original row and ends on the first, the third iteration on the third note of the original ending on the second, and so on. After nine measures, each beginning on a new pitch of T0, the original row is transposed down a semitone, to begin on the second note of the original row, T11, and rotated as before for nine measures. Crawford continues the pattern, transposing the original row so that it starts on successive pitches of T0 and rotating the transpositions (with only a few anomalies) until she has done this nine times (T10, T8, T5, T9, T7, T4, and T6), then presents the original row and its rotations one last time. This pattern is depicted in figure 1, in which numbers under notes indicate measures in which that note begins the row. (Hisama 2001, p. 78)

Piano musical instrument

The piano is an acoustic, stringed musical instrument invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori around the year 1700, in which the strings are struck by hammers. It is played using a keyboard, which is a row of keys that the performer presses down or strikes with the fingers and thumbs of both hands to cause the hammers to strike the strings.

In music, a tone row or note row, also series or set, is a non-repetitive ordering of a set of pitch-classes, typically of the twelve notes in musical set theory of the chromatic scale, though both larger and smaller sets are sometimes found.

The rhythm is also serialized. Three rhythmic patterns, x, y, and z, made up of different combinations of pentuplets, sixteenth notes, triplets, and eighth notes organize the nine notes. With minor variation, the three patterns are played in groups as some permutation of xyz (zxy, yzx, etc.) until each permutation has been used before any one permutation is repeated. In this way, the three measure groupings are organized into groups of six, as in part B of figure 2. (Straus 1995, p. 117)

Permutation Arrangements of a list or set

In mathematics, permutation is the act of arranging the members of a set into a sequence or order, or, if the set is already ordered, rearranging (reordering) its elements—a process called permuting. Permutations differ from combinations, which are selections of some members of a set regardless of order. For example, written as tuples, there are six permutations of the set {1,2,3}, namely: (1,2,3), (1,3,2), (2,1,3), (2,3,1), (3,1,2), and (3,2,1). These are all the possible orderings of this three-element set. Anagrams of words whose letters are different are also permutations: the letters are already ordered in the original word, and the anagram is a reordering of the letters. The study of permutations of finite sets is an important topic in the fields of combinatorics and group theory.

The designation of this song as a Ricercar, a term which traditionally describes “work employing learned contrapuntal devices” certainly derives from this formulaic serialization of pitch and rhythmic content.

The vocal line includes motivic contours characteristic of both the boss and the laundryman. The boss’ signature motive is an ascending tritone or a phrase that outlines one, as in measures one and two of part A in figure 2, and the laundryman’s motive begins on the highest and end on the lowest note in the phrase and contains tones that lie within those boundaries in predominantly descending order, as in measures 4 through 6 of the same figure. The majority of utterances by the two characters throughout the song follow these contours. In the final fifteen measures of the song, the laundryman turns from lamenting his circumstances and implores his fellow workers to unite, a passage in which he alternates singing his descending motive and the bosses ascending tritone. The piano accompaniment returns to the original row in the same measure that this passage begins, reflecting that the laundryman is changed from the opening of the piece and is ready to do something more to change his situation than simply articulate it. (Hisama 2001, p. 92)

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References

  1. ↑ Hua Hsu, 'The Remarkable Forgotten Life of H.T. Tsiang',The New Yorker, 14 July 2016.
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