SPOTLIGHT ON HISTORYSPOTLIGHT ON HISTORY
Marian Anderson Gives a Lesson in Tolerance
D
espite a distinguished early career in
Europe and the United States, where she
had sung with the New York Philharmonic
in the 1920s, Marian Anderson continually con-
fronted setbacks caused by racial discrimination.
In 1939, after the Daughters of the American Rev-
olution denied Anderson the use of Washington’s
Constitution Hall because of her race, First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the organiza-
tion and President Franklin Roosevelt approved
plans for Anderson’s recital to take place on the
National Mall. There, on Easter Sunday, 1939, sev-
enty thousand people gathered to hear Ander-
son’s rich contralto voice. One newsreel reported
the event with the headline “Nation’s Capital Gets
Lesson in Tolerance.”
K Contralto Marian Anderson (1897–1993) at the Lincoln
Memorial, Easter 1939, with Secretary of the Interior Harold
Ickes, who introduced her with the words “In this great
auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”that its composer had aspirations beyond the three-minute limit of most popu-
lar recordings.
Four years later, with Reminiscing in Tempo, Ellington reached even further,
creating a composition nearly thirteen minutes long and spanning four sides. His
Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue (1937) again fi lls a single record, with “Diminu-
endo in Blue” on one side and “Crescendo in Blue” on the other. Like Creole Rhap-
sody, the title self-consciously invokes Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, but the music
is grounded in the twelve-bar blues, the jazz tradition’s most familiar form, with
its three phrases of four bars each, its characteristic harmonic progression, and
the implied call and response in each phrase. Ellington uses this form, on which
many players in his band were capable of improvising at length, as the basis for
an ingeniously shaped piece in which improvisation plays only a small role.
The opening of “Diminuendo in Blue” illustrates something that clarinetist
Barney Bigard once said of Ellington: “At fi rst, just after I joined Duke... I used
to think everything was wrong, because he wrote so weird.” By changing some
element in each of the fi rst four choruses —adding measures, delaying a har-
monic arrival point, or switching the expected ordering of calls and responses—
Ellington sows seeds of doubt in his listeners. Are we hearing blues choruses or
not? We cannot be sure until chorus 5 arrives.
“Diminuendo in Blue” moves from dissonance to consonance, from loud to soft,
from density to sparseness, from rhythmic disruption to smoothness, and from
formal ambiguity to formal clarity. In contrast to traditional classical structuresDiminuendo and
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