Annotated Listening: Duke Ellington

Ellington, Duke. “Such Sweet Thunder.” Such Sweet Thunder. Sony Records CD, 1999.

After performing two concerts at the Shakespearean Festival in Stratford, Ontario in July of 1956, Duke Ellington, no doubt impressed by the brilliant performance of a young Canadian actor named William Shatner, was inspired to write a jazz suite inspired by the works of the Bard. Composed with long time collaborator Billy Strayhorn, Ellington sought to create a series of musical portraits for some of Shakespeare’s most famous characters. For students and teachers of both literature and music, Ellington’s daring work offers an exciting tool for the discussing the individual personalities of Shakespearean characterization, Ellington’s sophistication and ambition, jazz’ musical vocabulary, and larger questions about music’s ability to create mood, tone, and perhaps even tell a story.
Ellington’s initial work offered eleven songs, each linked to a Shakespearean character: “Sweet Sweet Thunder” is based on Othello; "Sonnet for Caesar" on Julius Caesar; "Sonnet to Hank Cinq" on Henry V; "Lady Mac" on Lady Macbeth; "Sonnet in Search of a Moor" on Othello; "The Telecasters" is for both the Three Witches from Macbeth and Iago from Othello; "Up and Down, Up and Down, I Will Lead Them (Up and Down)" on Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; "Sonnet for Sister Kate" on Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew; "The Star-Crossed Lovers" on Romeo and Juliet; "Madness in Great Ones" on Hamlet; and "Half the Fun" on Cleopatra. While some tracks work better than others as reflections of Shakespeare’s characters, each is ambitious and interesting in its own right and may be recommended for classroom use.
One of the interesting things about the title track “Such Sweet Thunder” is that while it purports to describe the character of Othello, it is actually a line lifted from another play—it is taken from Hippolyta’s description of Hercules in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Some critics have argued that the title is actually a clever reminder of how jazz was initially dismissed by white listeners; the full quote is “I never heard/so musical a discord, such sweet thunder.” The song itself is a 12-bar blues based on strong drum beats and low horns, but how does Ellington make this piece fit Othello? This may be one of the issues worth exploring in class discussion as there seems to be no clear consensus. Stephen M. Buhler, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, suggests that the “music is applied to Othello's accounts of his own experiences (see Othello 1.3. 128-45). Ellington and Strayhorn factor in how these adventures and the man who endured them might have sounded to Desdemona.” Jack Chambers, in his essay Birdland: Shakespeare in Ellington’s World,” is not so convinced, saying, “Unlike the other scenes, however, it is only tangentially Shakespearean. It has no connection to its source play. Originally titled "Cleo," it might have been intended as an evocation of Cleopatra’s sexuality, which certainly works, but instead Ellington always introduced it as (at Juan les Pins in 1966) ‘the sweet swinging line of talk that Othello gave to Desdemona which swayed her into his direction.’ That does not work. It is far from pillow talk, by any criterion. Though it works perfectly as overture, it is one of the pieces that only loosely fits the thematic conception.” An ongoing debate concerning music and the story telling tradition, and one I won’t attempt to answer here, is whether or not music is properly equipped with the necessary devices to narrate. While there is little question that music, especially in the skilled hands of a composer like Ellington, can evoke a mood, create a scene, inspire feeling, and even invite listeners to visualize action, students may enjoy debating the question of whether or not the tracks on Such Sweet Thunder reveals anything about character and plot.