DECEPTIVE TUNES

'La ci darem la mano' (from Mozart's 'Don Giovanni') by Walter Richard Sickert (1860 - 1942)

THE PREVAILING IMAGE OF MOZART IN POPULAR CULTURE HAS been undoubtedly colored by Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play turned 1984 film Amadeus. The image is one of a silly, fanciful, perhaps spoiled, but nonetheless inspired child prodigy turned adult genius. A naïve phenom. In Shaffer’s work, Mozart laughs, giggles, guffaws, farts, raspberries, carouses; in short, he is not presented as a terribly serious person. In the same way in which he would nonchalantly dash off three symphonies of eminence brilliance in the matter of a few weeks, it would seem that his personality was just as carefree and unaffected. The wit and lightheartedness of his musical lines seemed to embody his own personality: a playful figure whose genius seemed to stunt any kind of deep personal maturation. This stereotyping of Mozart is not entirely off the mark. In reading his letters, one only rarely encounters, if ever, the emotional sturm und drang, the expressive catharsis one sees in the letters of Ludwig van Beethoven for example. Mozart’s darker emotions, what he referred to as his “black thoughts,” were held close to his chest. He hardly ever expressed anything akin to a deep depression.

But in the course of painting Mozart with too broad a brush, as a kind of jolly savant, one misses the complex paradoxes the lie at the core of his music, specifically in his late operas written in collaboration with the masterful librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. How could a composer, so distant from expressing deep emotional pathos in his personal life, write music which demonstrates an astonishing understanding of the human condition? Mozart, it would seem, throws a wrench into the often incorrect notion that all art is some form of autobiography. We take those passionate, sometimes strikingly morose letters of Beethoven, and set them alongside movements from symphonies or piano sonatas that seem to capture that sorrow or anguish. We assume that great music which conveys grand emotions must have been written in a passionate white heat, if not shortly thereafter once the artist cooled off. But in the case of the three Mozart-Da Ponte operas, Don Giovanni, Le Nozze di Figaro, and Cosi Fan Tutte, Mozart’s complex, multilayered, and empathetic characterization of people who are oftentimes objectively horrid seems to come out of left field. He, in other words, deceives us.

As do his characters. Mozart musically demonstrates a profound understanding of human psychology, notably, that a person and can say—or in this case sing—one thing while feeling or intending another. This would seem obvious: characters in operas lie to one another. But it is how Mozart goes about composing that deceit which is both musically and psychologically masterful. The grand contradiction in Mozart’s operas is his deployment of unquestionably beautiful music for characters to sing when they are in the act of sinister deception and manipulation. Reserved like a top shelf bottle of sherry, Mozart breaks out sublime simplicity and beauty for the worst people at their worst moments.

This would seem, on the surface, not to make much sense. Our gut reaction would be to set horrible deeds against a backdrop of equally terrifying music. But in deploying gorgeous music when a character is in the act of manipulating another character, there are two levels of deception at play. The first is the deception which exists in the plot itself. Beautiful music lures and convinces otherwise intelligent characters to believe the lies that are hidden behind the surface. The second, and perhaps most brilliant deception, is a kind of meta deception on the audience viewing the opera. The audience oftentimes knows far more information than the helpless victim on stage as well as the psychological chess game the manipulator is deploying. Nonetheless, the audience seemingly washes that knowledge away when the harmonic motion of a scene cools, melodic lines gently rise, and the orchestra blossoms. The audience is, in most cases, as conceived of the master manipulator’s lies as the character on stage is. The syrupy lushness of the aria takes a hold of the audience, a set of outside observers, as much as Mozart and De Ponte’s characters. 






THERE IS PERHAPS NO OPERA MORE OBSESSED WITH THE MARRIAGE of seduction and deception than Don Giovanni. Though often portrayed in older productions or album artwork as a kind of Pepé Le Pew like figure, a suave yet ultimately unsuccessful philanderer, Don Giovanni is no such thing. There is no need to perform some kind of deep reading or close examination of Da Ponte’s libretto or Tirso de Molina’s 17th century play which provided the source material. Any reader, or listener for that matter, can clearly understand that Giovanni is unquestionably not a simple ladies man, but a violent serial rapist and a murderer. The full weight of his depravity is shown in blinding technicolor from the very outset of the opera. After breaking into the apartment of Donna Anna and donning a mask, he attempts to rape the young woman. Minutes later, he murders her father for having the gumption to stand in his way. The message of just the first few minutes of the opera is crystal clear: Giovanni is a sociopath who will kill with ease anyone who gets in the way of the thing he wants. And the thing he wants, more than anything else, is women. He is not a “sexually promiscuous nobleman,” as some online synopsis would want one to believe. But a cold, calculating, and callous rapist and murderer.

For a good half hour or more, we encounter more characters who add color commentary to Giovanni’s past. Not one of these anecdotes contradict the actions of the man we have met. Instead of adding a nuanced set of flesh and bones, the more we learn of him, the deeper we see his depravity. Then Giovanni and his loyal wing-man Leporello happen upon a country wedding, and see two young peasants frolicking in blissful matrimony. When Giovanni eyes the young bride Zerlina, the scene is set like a PBS nature documentary; the lion has set its sights on the gazelle. Everyone viewing the action inevitably knows what will come next.

After engaging in a bit manipulative small talk, Giovanni kicks the seduction into high gear and we, the audience, witness for the first time, his sexual pursuit. What comes out of Don Giovanni’s mouth is unquestionably the most lyrical, beautiful melody thus far in the opera. We have heard wordy patter arias, rage arias, comforting duets, but a simple, straightforward almost folk like tune has been skillfully reserved for this moment.

The famous aria “La Ci Darem La Mano” (There you’ll give me you hand) would seem, out of context, like a precursor to the short, folky strains of a Schubert lieder. There is a steady, unadorned string accompaniment with a similarly modest harmonic language made up of the solid building blocks of nearly all popular music: the tonic, subdominant, and dominant. It sounds almost guitar like in its simplicity, and Giovanni will later in the second act, break out a mandolin and seduce another woman under her window in true bommbox-raised-over-the-head fashion. Indeed, the tune is so closely related to contemporary popular music that Frank Sinatra smoothly covered the aria in a scene in the 1947 musical comedy It Happened In Brooklyn, not in a grand operatic style, but in his buttery croony baritone. The music, unlike the antagonist’s intentions, is plainspoken and direct.

In a way, Giovanni is musically “speaking” in the simple language of the young country woman he is trying to capture. A nobleman, Giovanni is musically donning a folk tune as a method to manipulate someone of the lower class, to essentially speak on her terms. Zerlina, though initially hesitant, gradually succumbs. The American musicologist and theorist Charles Burkhart noted that the rhythm and structure of the aria mirrors Zerlina’s gradual change in outlook. Trading the tune back and forth, Burkhart remarks that Giovanni’s part is “characterized by ever shorter measure groups as he presses his suit with ever-increasing insistence, while Zerlina's part … is most notable for its ever longer extensions as she wrestles with her conscience and stalls for time.” Zerlina is eventually won over and joins Giovanni in a duet, the two singing for the first time in harmony. At this moment of turning herself over, the music suddenly changes affect into a cool yet lively 6/8.

We, the audience, could sit there in the opera house in stark judgement. We have seen this man, whom she has quickly turned herself over to, rape a woman, kill her father, and then heard story after story about this his debauchery. But unlike Zerlina, we know this information. And yet, we too are musically seduced by this beauty. We too have been won over and we, in fact, know better. Even with all the information we know, we are beguiled.

At its best, great art can function as a kind of empathic imagining. Instead of passing judgement on individuals who stay in abuse relationships, or in the case of this moment in Don Giovanni leave a new marriage to enter one, we have briefly caught a glimpse, through Mozart’s manipulative but nonetheless deeply effective music, why that might be. Like Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s “What’s The Use of Wondering,” we briefly embody, at least musically, the complexity of turning oneself over entirely to someone or something that we know will end us.



THE LAST OF MOZART’S OPERAS WRITTEN WITH DA PONTE, COSI Fan Tutte reads like a bad swingers comedy from the 1960s. Two young couples engage in a game of wife swapping, though this sexual switch-a-roo is not disclosed to the woman. The game is part of a cynical and bluntly misogynistic bet wagered between the old philosopher and confidant Don Alfonso to the two men. The soon to be husbands first convince their girlfriends that they have been sent off to war and then return disguised as sexy foreigners to ensnare each others wives in hopes to see if they stay loyal. Meant to prove the folly of feminine desire, both sexes cave to their fantasies in the end.

Fiancee swapping aside, the first in a series of cruel manipulations occurs when the woman are informed that their husbands have been drafted into a phony war. (Somehow Don Alfonso quickly assembles an entire choral ensemble to send them off to sea). The shock of seeing their fiancees suddenly plucked out of domestic life into deadly battle is, understandably, too much to bear. So they, along with Don Alfonso, sing a prayer for the safe return of their lovers.

This trio “Soave sia il vento” (May the wind be gentle) is arguably, along with the Adagio from his Gran Partita K361, the most sublime music Mozart ever composed. The orchestra, like the sea they are staring off into, is placid and vast. The harmonies progress slowly by way of undulating upper strings forming a stream of endless sixteenth notes. The hymn being sung is simple and profound.

After a brief quasi a cappella section, the music suddenly breaks into an icy stillness by way of a fully diminished seventh chord, orchestrated hauntingly in the winds with the violins bringing back the timeless waves of the opening. The chord is alien to the musical vocabulary of this trio, and indeed of this opera, and clashes against all that has come before. Functioning dramatically if not harmonically, the chord sits much like Wagner’s Tristan chord, the famously static yet unstable sonority that governs the emotional terrain of Tristan und Isolde. Both chords seem unable to resolve. In the case of Cosi, the chord falls upon the word “desir,” which is translated either as “wishes” or “desires.” I’m privy to “desires” for more reasons other than the obvious one.

The deployment of this chord on the word “desires” is both an emotional spotlight on the present and a dark premonition of the future. In the present, there are two simultaneous desires being conveyed in this trio between the three singers. The first and perhaps most obvious, is the desire of the two woman, for the safe return of their husbands from a violent war. The second, more illusive, is of Don Alfonso, whose desire relies upon manipulating the two woman and their husbands in this physiological wager. But the chord is also a premonition. It will indeed be all of their desires, the sexual and the philosophical, that will lead to their downfalls. Their fate, much like the unresolved, static nature of the harmony, is immobile.

And yet again, we are confronted with sublime music to occupancy a masterful deception. The music and words are profoundly heartfelt for two of the three singers. The third must wear this sentimental hymn much like Don Giovanni wore simple folk music. The two men, Giovanni and Alfonso, must disguise their inner thoughts and desires as a way to ultimately manipulate their victims. And we, the audience, are once again wrapped up in this deceit as much as the victims on stage are.


THERE IS A POPULAR ARGUMENT, NOT WITHOUT MERIT, THAT MEGA canonized composers like Mozart are almost immune from any real, substantial criticism. Almost. That untouchable, statuesque mold we put Mozart into seems to dissolve rapidly when the topic of his operatic finales are brought up. After an ingeniously crafted evening of dark situation comedy which brilliantly fits the dramatic strictures of sonata form like a glove, comes this oftentimes awkward musical appendage. The drama of the opera has since been closed and now the characters strip their roles, hurtle themselves towards the footlights, and address the audience directly like a Greek chorus. It seems terribly old fashioned: the members of the cast come forward and essentially explain to us that this whole musical enterprise has been a simple morality tale.

After the title character has been dragged to hell in the penultimate scene, the end of Don Giovanni concludes with this text, translated by J.D. McClatchy:

“Let the villain rot,

Tied in Pluto’s knot!

Good people all agree.

Come sing joyfully

The oldest refrain there is.



Watch out now for what lies ahead.

A sorry fate awaits each sinner.

He suffers life,
and ends up dead.”

Like an overly preachy after-school special, the point of the opera—as though there must be one single point—has been handed to us. Bad things happen to bad people. Well, I could have saved us all the last few hours of recitatives, arias, and ensemble pieces if that was the concluding message!

After nearly all of the characters in Cosi have been caught with their collective pants down, figuratively if not literally, this too is closed off with a moralistic coda. The concluding action of Cosi is perhaps more painful, complex, and less in need of a simple morality tale than Don Giovanni. Upon throwing their disguises, the women learn of their fiancee’s plan and, worse off, their infidelity. Conversely, the men have learned a great deal over time about each other’s soon to be wives. The revelation, and all that is implied and unspoken, hangs in the air awkwardly. Like the aftermath of a violent argument between a couple, the broken picture frames and glasses are scattered on the floor with deafening silence surrounding the painfully revealing incident.

And this is how Da Ponte breaks that silence:

“Happy is the man who looks

On the bright side of everything,

And in all circumstances and trials

Lets himself be guided by reason



What only makes the others weep

Will be for him a source of joy,

And amid the storms of this world

He will find his peace in every season.”

This cheerful “but all will be well” style ending is also foisted upon the characters in the other Mozart-Da Ponte collaboration, Le Nozze di Figaro. How could it be that all three of these operas that treat difficult, dark subject matter with such risky care can so grandly drop the ball at the last minute? This, too, might be a bit of a depiction on the part of the creators. The conventions of the time nearly demanded a bombastic closing number for symphonies, concerti, and operas. Even though the drama here ends unsettled and complicated, the ending needs, almost begs for, a big finale.

But in all the bombast and joyful merriment, there is a kind of neurotic tick below the surface: everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine. The very end of Figaro finds the whole ensemble, first muttering then gradually exclaiming “Let’s hasten to the revelry.” Essentially, “let’s put this all behind us and quick!” The problems and revelations are dashed off so quickly and with such blinding, Panglossian optimism to be phony. Indeed, the “true finale” in Figaro—by which I mean when the celebration really kicks into high gear—is only about one or two minutes of music, profoundly disproportional for an opera lasting almost three hours. In a famous, perhaps infamous depending on who you are, production by Peter Sellars, the cast adorns this over the top romp with jazz hands and a line dance.

There is absolutely no way the characters in these three operas think everything is okay. They, like so many people trapped in uneasy situations, just want to simply move on. So they force joy on to themselves. The final lie in each of these operas, works that have been laden with cruel deceit and manipulation, is a lie to themselves.

The Sound of Music

Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station

IF you happen to be in Los Angeles County, as I will be in about two weeks, and are looking for an inexpensive evening of classical music, you would be hard pressed to find a cheaper option than the free nightly concerts that occur on the corner of 7th and South Alvarado St. You can embrace a bit of miserly pride in attending one of these concerts, being only an eight minute drive from the famed Walt Disney Concert Hall, home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic which would have certainly set you back at least thirty or forty bucks. This underground venue is not one of the hip genre-bending concert hall/bar/nightclubs that have popped up in most major cities over the last decade or so. Rather, this concert is held in the fully operational Westlake/MacArthur Park Metro station.

Last month, LA Metro began pumping in a recurring playlist of classical music as a way to deter unhoused people from loitering in the stations at night. This pilot program, which comes complete with original lighting design in the form of two massive floodlights on either end of the platform, uses piano sonatas by Mozart, symphonies by Beethoven, and concertos by Vivaldi to drive away the poor and, in the words of the Metro, “reduce crime.” And to take the point of the Metro seriously for just a moment, there has been a staggering number of deaths, twenty-one at present count, in LA Metro stations so far this year. These deaths were not random stabbings or robberies gone wrong against commuters by loiters, but rather a series of skyrocketing fentanyl overdoes by the people the Metro is attempting to remove. This move by LA Metro is part of a larger effort across the country to visually clean up their cities, also known as crime reduction. This is not exclusive to big cities like LA, New York, and Chicago, but smaller ones, like here in Bloomington, IN, where the city cleared out a dozen or so tents occupied by unhoused people in the dead of winter last year.

But the narrative that a major US city is using classical music as a tool to extinguish the existence of poor people seems like a metaphor too on the nose to even need to mention. It feels too grand a fable of our staggering wealth inequality. It caricatures the worst elements and cultural assumptions of classical music and uses it as a weapon. If I were go on with the narrative and tell you that there is an unhoused man named Mo The Last Black Panther who has lugged a full-sized, DJ-style speaker down into the station to drown out the classical with old-school rap, it would seem like an aural metaphor stretched to its ultimate limits.

But I will state the seemingly obvious: beyond the fact that classical music is by and large royalty free and cheap for the city to play in public spaces, there is a deeper, structural reason for this choice of music. By using our cultural associations with classical music; vast wealth, whiteness, inaccessibility, the Metro hopes to drive away people who see themselves as living outside that world. By manipulating those cultural associations into action creates a space in which some, commuters, are welcomed while others, the poor, are not. The wager here is that LA Metro hopes that classical music will act as a dog whistle against the poor; a sonic realization of the social classes. In turn, this creates, by design, a stark physical divide along racial, ethnic, and socio-economic lines. The fact that the music is also being played at an average volume of 83 decibels (point of comparison: the CDC puts gas-powered lawnmowers at 80–85 decibels) also forces the commuters to hightail it out of the station.

USING music in general as a type of deterrent or irritant is nothing new. The F.B.I. and A.T.F. famously blasted, night and day, Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’” at David Koresh and the Branch Dravidians in Waco, TX nearly thirty years ago. The military used the obnoxiously bouncy theme song from the children’s T.V. show Barney & Friends as a torture tool at Guantanamo Bay. Sixty years ago, shopping malls would play Mitch Miller, of Sing Along With Mitch fame, as a way keep teens from loitering at the food court or parking lot.

But the use of classical music specifically as a way to rid areas of the poor or people of color is a somewhat recent phenomenon. The musicologist Lily E. Hirsch, author of “Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment,” traces this history back to the late 1980s, when a string of 7-Eleven convenience stores in the U.S. and Canada began playing Mozart and Bach to deter teens from hanging around the stores at night. The policy seemed to work. Teenagers stopped loitering outside of the stores, and at its peak, some one hundred and fifty 7-Elevens were using this new method. The news of the seemingly successful 7-Eleven experiment began to spread. It also began to envelope new populations of undesirables, away from teenage hoodlums and towards the poor and homeless. Subway stations in the UK, parks in Hartford, Connecticut, and storefronts in West Palm Beach all implemented the new tactic. The police department in West Palm Beach stated that calls for service declined from 119 to 83 over a five month period after implementing the program in so-called “troubled areas.” Eventually, the people who were being driven away by the music simply took action and ripped out the speakers.

Police 1, a news website created by the private law enforcement consulting company Lexipol, wrote an article in 2018 about the use of classical music as a successful tactic to reduce crime. The article cites the 7-Eleven and the British subway testimonials, but then begins to wax poetic about outdated ideas concerning the very stuff of classical music. Not only will the class and racial associations with classical music make homeless people feel uncomfortable and unwelcomed in a given space, but the music itself, the A-flats and quarter notes and arpeggios of Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms has the power to heal these people. “Research has suggested the positive impact various music genres can have on your mood — from releasing stress to improving sleep quality.” I would just add that I personally find it difficult to believe that those 83 decibel strains of Vivaldi in the LA Metro will have any effect on the sleep quality of a person who is also being simultaneously blasted with floodlights. The article goes on. “Mental health professionals have even utilized music’s power on the brain in therapy.”

The shamanistic, mystical powers of classical music’s wave frequencies have long been used to prove everything from better test scores to greater attention spans to, I don’t know, fewer cavities. The Mozart Effect, the theory that babies who listen to classical music either in the womb or in infancy are more likely to do generally better in life, proved so convincing in the 1990s that then Georgia governor Zell Miller added $105,000 a year to the state budget so that each child in the state would have a CD of classical music. The whole theory has, from the beginning, a kind of neo-eugentics flavor to it. There is nothing inherent in the sonic output of Mozart that leads to higher IQ’s than the sonic output of Willie Nelson, Run DMC, Charlie Parker, Megan Thee Stallion, or Bruce Springsteen. There is, however, a series of sociological questions that should be addressed. Which families play Mozart to their infants? Are those people of a higher socioeconomic status? Could that, maybe, possibly, help out with the test scores more so than the Piano Concerto K. 488 in A Major? I’ll leave it to the shop owner in Boston who was asked by the L.A. Times why he plays classical music outside his store. The shop owner replied “classical music soothes the savage beast.”

Police 1 video demonstration of the Classical Music Method at work in San Francisco

The phrase “reduce crime” comes up all the time when looking up these tactics of deploying classical music as a weapon. But crime actually didn’t go down in most if not all of these cases. Not robberies or murders or sexual assaults. But then again, the sight of the poor and the homeless, an ever-increasing occurrence in a county that continues to chip away at a social safety net, is, to some, a kind of crime in and of itself. The sight of homeless people around a store has the potential to hurt a business’s bottom line, so the solution is to move the problem out of sight. Perhaps underground.

And even though I take serious issue with the idea that classical music can cure diseases or increase test scores, I know that it can, at best, move, inspire, transform, and delight a listener. I even believe that in the rare instance, it can encourage a listener reassess the world around them and some of their core beliefs. But when I last checked, playing classical music cannot make access to SNAP more accessible or give out food at a soup kitchen or build more affordable housing or hand out clean needles or offer drug treatment or provide blankets in the cold or eliminate the need to kick homeless folks out of shelters at 6am. The LA Metro has weaponized classical music, not even in the service of a solution, but as a needlessly cruel tourniquet.

ON the first of this month, a young black man named Jordan Neely boarded an F train in Manhattan and began demanding food and water from his fellow passengers. After a few moments, a twenty-four-year-old commuter named Daniel Penny put Neely into a choke hold and killed him. The news of Neely’s murder was almost immediately thrown into the ongoing bi-partisan concern over public safety and crime. New York City mayor Eric Adams said that we cannot “say what a passenger should or should not do in a situation like that,” while Kathy Hochul, the governor of New York, said, “There’s consequences for behavior.” Who’s behavior the governor was referring to was never made clear.

The talking point that emerged was that it was Neely, not Penny, who was the criminal. That it was Neely’s presence on the F train that made riders uneasy and not Penny’s death grip that was the crime. Florida Governor Ron DeStantis posted a link to a crowd sourced fund for Penny’s legal fees, which at this writing has brought in over two million dollars, and wrote “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens. We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny. Let’s show this Marine… America’s got his back.”

We have confused discomfort for violence and uneasiness for crime. As uncomfortable as one may feel being on a subway, bus, coffee shop, or library with a mentally ill person, their presence alone is not criminal. The American poet and activist Nikki Giovanni in “Allowables,” a poem about the death of a harmless spider, writes in the end of the poem “I don’t think I’m allowed to kill something because I am afraid.”

Politicians have given us easy solutions to this problem, most of which revolve around us not having to see the problem anymore. They lock people up for low level crimes like loitering or play classical music in hopes that unhoused people will scatter away. These are, of course, band-aids to a moral wound. The question remains if we, as a society, are willing to embrace the occasional discomfort so that people who are living through circumstances, far more dire and difficult than our own, can have the chance to live?

The Last Dance

WHEN Lee Moates took Delma Nicholson by the hand, spun her around, and dipped her so low to the ground that her feet swung off the floor, they were simply going through the old motions. They had contorted their bodies round each other for years as a pair of celebrated Lindy Hoppers at the famous Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. During the height of the swing era, the pair, along with fellow Lindy Hopper George Sullivan, developed a new solo dance routine called “The Stew,” an explosive series of opposing arms and legs flailing about in all directions. Now, on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 1958, with slightly more effort behind their moves due to age, they were clinging on to one final dance at their old stomping grounds. After almost a decade of rumors, innuendos, high hopes, and ultimately fears, the Savoy Ballroom was finally set to close. Earlier in the day, a Steinway piano played by the likes of Duke Ellington and Count Basie and Erroll Garner and Fats Waller was auctioned off for $450 along with tables, bar stools, chairs, and other mainstays of the ballroom now deemed artifacts. Six months later, the Savoy was demolished.

During the 1920s and 30s, between 131st and 144th Streets in New York City, there were some fifty active night clubs, ballrooms, and dance halls, each with their own unique character, flavor, and ambiance. Looking up north from Lenox Avenue from the Savoy Ballroom, across 142nd street, was the Cotton Club, where Black entertainers such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway would perform for an almost exclusively white audience. Looking directly across the street from the Savoy was the Capital Palace. Walking south down Lenox for fifteen minutes or so to 133rd St., or as it was simply called “The Street,” you would find Connie’s Inn, the Rhythm Club, Dickie Wells’s Shim Sham Club, the Log Cabin, and more. A fantastical map of Harlem nightclubs by the legendary illustrator E. Simms Campbell shows this overlapping chaos. The mixed result of music from big bands and blues singers spilling out onto the street from four or five adjacent clubs converge into what would have been a wonderful cacophony. Campbell’s drawing is accompanied by descriptive annotations of each venue: the Radium Club offers “a big breakfast dance every Sunday morning 4 or 5 a.m.,” “Nothing happens” at Club Hot-Cha “before 2 a.m., ask for Clarence,” and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson “The Worlds Greatest tapdancer” can be seen at the Lafayette Theatre. Campbell did himself a service attempting to illustrate “The Street” writing on a small scroll that “there are clubs opening and closing at all times — There are too many to put them all on this map…”

E. Simms Campbell’s famous 1932 cartoon map of Harlem Night Clubs, published in the first issue of Manhattan Magazine.

The major swing bands and performers of the time were anchored to clubs like the Savoy and Cotton Club and the Log Cabin, and their constant presence created a distinctive culture exclusive to those few surrounding blocks. At the Savoy, starting in 1931, the Chick Webb Orchestra became the venue’s house band and originated the ballroom’s most recognizable musical export: the swing tune “Stompin’ At The Savoy.” While in residence at the Savoy, Webb’s band would hold Battle of the Bands contests between his orchestra and the leading swing bands of the day including Benny Goodman, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. Chick Webb wiped the floor with Goodman. But the legendary battle between Webb and Basie’s orchestras was the subject of much debate. Though the judge declared Webb the winner against the Kansas City import that night, many there remember Count Basie winning the battle outright. Basie, who had recently arrived in Harlem with his band, recalled that he was just relieved to walk away from the contest without embarrassing himself.

Similarly, there were dance battles between groups of Shim Shamers and Liddy Hoppers who would meet at crosstown ballrooms. The swing dancer Norma Miller, who would become a recognizable figure at the Savoy, grew up right behind the ballroom. When she finally went in the first time, she was quickly discovered by Twist Mouth George Ganaway, “the greatest dancer at the Savoy.” Miller remembered how he “just threw me up; my feet never touched the ground. People were screaming and he put me on top of his shoulders.” While most of the jazz clubs in the 1930s and 40s were segregated, such as the all white Cotton Club, the Savoy was one of the only integrated dance venues. “We lived in a very segregated country,” Norma Miller recalled half a century later, “but the amazing thing about the [Savoy] Ballroom was it was the first building in America, ever in the world, that opened its doors, completely integrated. At the time we didn’t understand that.”

The experience of entering the Savoy Ballroom was an architectural masterclass in subverting expectations and extending anticipation. After passing under the long rectangular marquee, adorned with brightly lit treble clefs and pairs of sixteenth notes which stretched far out over the Lenox Avenue sidewalk, one would open a pair of double doors and see, not a bandstand or ballroom, but stairs. The wide marble staircase ascended straight and opened up into the middle of a second floor ballroom, but with no dance floor or band shell in sight. Instead, a long line of intimate loges on either side of a back wall which stretched down the length of the block. But in turning around 180 degrees back towards the downward staircase, the room finally opened up, revealing a golden double band shell that towered over the musicians, all surrounded by a large dance floor. Beyond that, a series of round tables with complete bar to the left and lounge chairs and a soda bar to the right. The space during its heyday could accommodate upwards of 4,000 people.

The London-based dancer Sharon Davis has created a vast online resource, outlining in meticulous detail what the Savoy would have looked like in its prime. By using photographs, historic documents, and floor plans, Davis has laid down the groundwork in creating a three dimensional Savoy Ballroom, brought to life in virtual reality. Soon, just by donning a VR headset, a 21st century swing band obsessive can take a stroll around the bright greens, reds, and golds of the Savoy’s interior.

For those unable to experience the Savoy in person, the sounds of the ballroom echoed well beyond Harlem thanks to a series of coast-to-coast radio broadcasts. Beginning usually around 11PM on Saturdays and Sundays, radios across the country could tune in to swing bands performing thirty minute sets. Ella Fitzgerald, who was put on the map singing with the Chick Webb Orchestra in her late teens, gained near universal appeal with her appearances on these broadcasts.

The Savoy’s reputation across the country became one of cultural experimentation. The unique, daring, and varied style of dance and music and fashion would inspire and inform trends that rippled throughout the U.S.. But even within those blocks that made up Harlem, as Barbara Englebrecht wrote in her Swinging at the Savoy, the Savoy was “a building, a geographic place, a ballroom, and the ‘soul’ of a neighborhood.” Langston Hughes called it “the heartbeat of Harlem.” The Savoy Ballroom was not only a critical cultural artery for those who paid an entrance fee, but for a much broader, Black centered American culture.

The Savoy Ballroom, 1941

AFTER the war, Harlem saw mixed blessings. The economic boom that ripped throughout the United States was felt in Harlem, but not nearly to the same degree as the rest of the country. Some Black families were slowly beginning to enter something resembling a middle class lifestyle. The dance halls and night clubs and ballrooms were alive and well.

But wartime industrial production opened doors to manufacturing outside of major cities. Building planes and tanks proved far easier out in the Midwest, say, than confined to the grid of a large city. Now with the war over, the manufacturing sector which helped economically support African American and immigrant families was leaving Harlem. By the end of the 1940s, half of Harlem families lived below the poverty line. The housing infrastructure which propped up the Great Migration was beginning to overcrowd. “Rents are 10 to 58 per cent higher than anywhere else in the city,” James Baldwin wrote in his Notes of a Native Son, “food, expensive everywhere, is more expensive here and of an inferior quality…Negroes, traditionally the last to be hired and the first to be fired, are finding jobs harder to get, and, while prices are rising implacably, wages are going down.”

The Savoy Ballroom, on the other hand, came out of the war firmly on the positive side of Harlem’s mixed blessings. Even with the swing era firmly in the rear-view mirror, attendance records were being set during the early years of the 1950s. The tenor saxophonist Illinois Jacquet brought in over 10,000 people during a two day concert set in February of 1950. One night alone in 1954, the mid-century crooner Nat King Cole held a “farewell and birthday party” at the Savoy which exceeded capacity with some 5,000 paying attendees. Perry Como and Harry Belafonte similarly brought in capacity crowds during the mid 1950s. And even though there were nights when only 50 to 60 people would show up to the Savoy during the post war period, there were still plenty of hopes that the ballroom would continue to survive. Charles Buchanan, the manager and co-owner of the Savoy, went as far as to pay $109,000 in 1948 to have the venue remodeled.

But the privations that fell over most of Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s was soon to arrive at the Savoy. James Baldwin continued on in his illustration of post-war Harlem: “All over…there is felt the same bitter expectancy with which, in my childhood, we awaited winter: it is coming and it will be hard; there is nothing anyone can do about it.”

ON April 14, 1951, The Baltimore Afro-American, the longest-running African-American family-owned newspaper in the United States, reported that “a deal” was “going down in Harlem.” Two months later, the New York Herold Tribune also reported that a deal had been made in Harlem between a construction company and the City of New York to create a “housing project.” The location of the new project, which over time morphed into projects, was unclear. But one thing was certain: several of the most active dance halls, ballrooms, and nightclubs were standing in the way of the new housing projects. The Afro-American stated definitively that the “housing project will cause the Savoy Ballroom to be torn down.” The Tribune added that in addition to the Savoy, the Golden Gate Ballroom, a competing club next door on 142nd Street, and Club Sudan were going to be demolished. Around the same time, Billboard magazine reassured their readers that if the Savoy was to be torn down, there were plans to build a new Savoy at a different location.

The Savoy, along with other cultural landmarks that were central to the cultural life of the Great Migration and the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, were now caught in the cross-hairs of Robert Moses’s Harlem Slum Clearance program. When it came to shaping, building, and destroying New York in the post war period, it would seem that all roads, literally and figuratively, led to New York City Construction Coordinator Robert Moses. After creating his own position almost entirely out of thin air, Moses wrote into the bill which created his position that the Construction Coordinator shall, singularly, represent the city in all dealings with the federal government. So when the federal government passed the National Housing Act of 1949, it was Robert Moses who would have near total control over any federal funds New York received through the new program.

In Title One of the 1949 National Housing Act, cities were allowed to access federal funds in order to seize, clear, and make available areas considered “slums” to private contractors for redevelopment. These newly developed areas would create housing for mostly people like the ones that were displaced to begin with, low income immigrants and people of color. Though there was a slight dip in the economic life of post-war Harlem, due in large part to a diminishing manufacturing sector, the New York Times noted in the mid-1950s that the area was “on the upswing” in terms of “employment and infrastructure.” Nonetheless, according to one of a dozen Slum Clearance Plan brochures detailing the conditions of West 132nd to 135th on Lenox Avenue, an area which included “The Street”, not one residential building within these three blocks met the requirements of being “well-kept.” To be graded as “well-kept,” an older building had to be “very clean, requiring no major repairs or painting.” As it would turn out, 146 out of the 164 residential buildings examined were considered “run-down.” Such a building “might have deteriorated to the state of being in object for demolition.” Regardless of the fact that the Savoy Ballroom was far from being “run-down” and having just recently received a six figure upgrade, the site was still in the way of the wrecking ball.

What would rise in its place was Delano Village, a series of red brick high rises built by the Axelrod Construction Company. Axelrod had bought the site from the City of New York in July of 1952, less than a year after construction began on the site a few blocks south between 132nd and 135th Streets. Though intended to house poor people of color, after competing with other developers for land rights, Delano Village along with dozens of other housing projects decided it would be far more lucrative to build middle and upper class housing. Financial incentives aside, many developers simply did not want to rent or sell to the ever growing Black and Latino population of Harlem. By 1953, the buildings within the 200,000 square feet of what would become Delano Village were demolished and by the end of 1957, the first tenants moved into the new buildings.

The Savoy Ballroom, now surrounded on all sides by Delano Village, closed in July of 1958 “before a packed audience” according to The New York Amsterdam News. Though many cynically and indeed rightly believed that this was the end of the road for the Savoy, some still held out hopes that the Savoy could be saved. Whether its owner Charles Buchanan was one of those optimists is difficult to say. After failing to get a meeting with Mayor Robert Wagner, Buchanan went to Charles Axelrod, the president of the housing company, to work out a deal. Axelrod tentatively agreed to a deal to not demolish the ballroom but added that he would need final approval from the Slum Clearance Committee and Robert Moses.

When Charles A. came back to Charles B. in September, Axelrod came with a lease agreement in hand. In order for the Savoy Ballroom to survive, Buchanan would have to pay Axelrod’s company $45,000 a year in rent with a $73,000 deposit. Buchanan was under the assumption that Axelrod wanted far less, $30,000. The lease agreement, turning out to be far more expensive than expected, was never signed and Buchanan turned the Savoy over to the Axelrod Construction Company. During the negotiations, dozens of Harlem community groups and organizations protested to save the ballroom. As Harri Heinilä wrote in his End Of The Savoy, “a group called the ‘Friends and Patrons of Local Businesses’” led by Billy Butler, who years earlier had published a travel guide for Black travelers, tried to preserve the ballroom. They wrote, desperately, to Mayor Wagner and Robert Moses to save the Savoy.

However, before their September meeting, Charles Buchanan had actually planned to pay far more than $30,000. In July, Buchanan planned to spend upwards of $250,000 to remodel the Savoy and reopen the venue in September. Though in the long run, the offer made by Axelrod would have proven more expensive than $250K, in the short term, during what could have been a modified tenure as owner, Buchanan made the calculation to close rather than pay up or quite literally ship out to a new location — as the Cotton Club, the Savoy’s neighbor, had done in moving to Times Square years earlier.

So instead of a grand reopening in September 1958, there was an auction, and a final dance between Lee Moates and Delma Nicholson.

Lee Moates and Delma Nicholson dancing at the Savoy Ballroom in 1958

IN 2002, Norma Miller and Frankie Manning, members of Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers and mainstays of the Savoy Ballroom, unveiled a commemorative plaque at Lenox Ave. between 141st and 142nd Streets; the brown and red and gold of the plaque blending in with the colossal brick housing project that stands directly behind. Of the dozens of clubs, ballrooms, and dance halls shown in Campbell’s dizzying map from 1932, not one is still in operation or was ever preserved. With the exception of a few commemorative plaques scattered throughout, there is hardly a trace of the Cotton Club, the Radium House, the Log Cabin, Connie’s Inn, or the Savoy Ballroom. For that matter, there is hardly a trace of what came in its place, the smaller clubs and bars that arose in the late 1940s and 1950s that laced 52nd Street and Seventh Avenue: the 3 Deuces, the Onyx, the Famous Door, Jimmy Ryan’s, Club Downbeat, or Club Carousel. The buildings that fostered the creation and cultivation of an American art of the highest order, are now paved over by apartments, parking lots, and highways. Whether the lack of any federal preservation project for these historical venues was due to their commercial function, or a seeming lack of importance, or tried and true racism is difficult to say. But it is notable that while this country maintains thousands of historic sites, not one of these cultural landmarks were saved in time.

It is near impossible to disentangle African American culture from a broader American culture. Our cultural exports, from our music, our fashion, our dances, our colloquialisms are by in large the product of Black creativity and art. The Savoy Ballroom was a physical manifestation of this cultural emulsification. Black visual art and fashion and music and dance and improvisation not only came together between 141st and 142nd Streets, but were created and formed along that long block. The elimination of such a cultural artery is in turn not only to the obvious detriment of Harlem and New York City, but to the country and, more broadly, to the world.