When the Cathedrals
Were White, 1936

("The Spirit of the Machine, and Negroes in the USA")

"The Negroes showed their remarkable abilities in plays, in musical programs, in stage design. It was a "revelation".
I shall have something to say about Negro music.
But now I am thinking about our "conservatories" (what a significant term!) continuing instruction in the polite way of playing music, when in the USA the Negroes freely express their high spirits and when that immense and splendid body of pure and admirable music talent is finding itself in relation to and in the face of everything else in the life of the world...

Are these manifestations insignificant at a time of great economic, political, and social crises?
They serve to stir up consciousness in a profound way. They introduce new values into the depth of the heart. The horizon changes. The great transformation will come about only through hierarchic elevation. It is through the individual reformation of consciousness will be accomplished. When consciousness shall have passed beyond the agonies of its present incertitudes, collective allegiances will develop and a new world will replace the fallen one...

Negro music has touched America because it is the melody of the soul joined with the rhythm of the machine.
It is in two-part time: tears in the heart; movement of the legs torso, arms and head. The music of the era of construction: innovating. It floods the body and the heart; it floods the world...

Nothing in our European experiences can be compared to it.
The implacable exactitude expresses American taste; I see in it the effect of the machine...
In Harlem as on Broadway, the Negro orchestra is impeccable, flawless, regular, playing ceaselessly in an ascending rhythm the trumpet is piercing, strident, screaming ...

Jazz, like the skyscrapers, is an event and not a deliberately conceived creation.
They represent the forces of today. The jazz is more advanced than architecture. If architecture were at the point reached by jazz, it would be an incredible spectacle...The fundamental revolution in the plastic arts is likewise taking place in music. Through the breach made by cubism,those arts have re-established contact, across time and space, with the high periiods...
They are the foundations of cathedrals of sound already rising.