Darius Milhaud, The Creation of the World

In 1922 French composer Darius Milhaud came to the United States on a concert tour, playing several of his compositions with American orchestras. Milhaud had already heard American jazz in England, where he listened enthusiastically to the Billy Arnold Orchestra. In New York Milhaud was taken to Harlem nightclubs, where stride pianists, blues singers and jazz bands were playing for racially mixed audiences. In his autobiography he reports listening to a female blues singer (Alex Ross guesses it may have been Mamie Smith), “whose grating voice seemed to come from the depths of the ages."

Milhaud’s association of American jazz with human prehistory let him to compose The Creation of the World, a ballet based on African creation myths,. The ballet was introduced in October, 1923 by the Ballet Suedois with sets and costumes by Fernand Léger. Today, however it is heard mainly as a concert work.

The score alternates between dreamy sections in which a saxophone or an oboe plays plaintive melodies over modal harmonies in the strings (e.g. beginning, RN 17, RN 20), and rhythmically propulsive sections featuring dance rhythms, percussion, and flashy instrumental solos (RN 11, RN 26, RN 29, RN 35). Milhaud borrows several melodic-rhythmic fragments that can be heard on jazz recordings from the early 20s – like the syncopated fill in the trumpets at RN 1, or the hemiola 16ths in the clarinet at RN16. But he also uses many musical techniques that are entirely foreign to 1920s jazz – for example the fugue at RN 11, contrapuntal lines like the oboe and horn at RN 51, and parallel harmonizations (RN 26 ff). Sometimes Milhaud achieves jazz effects by non-jazz means – for example at RN 35 and following he uses intricate counterpoint and voice exchange to create the effect of simultaneous improvisation by several instruments.

After The Creation of the World Milhaud pretty much abandoned American jazz as an available vernacular and a source of inspiration, returning to French and other European folk and popular musics and to his Jewish heritage for materials. In 1926 remarked to an American journalist that jazz “no longer interested him.”