Cakewalk

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The Cakewalk is a ballroom dancing , which was described in 1850 as an independent dance in the United States; he was initially called Chalk Line Walk (English for " chalk line walk "). From 1895 to 1905, the dance then based on was ragtime music as Cakewalk to the famous dance craze ; It had a second heyday in 1915, which was worldwide before it went out of fashion around 1920.

Poster from 1896

Emergence

Around 1840 the dance Chalk Line Walk was created in the large plantations in Florida ( USA ) when African-American slaves combined a dance by the local Indian people of the Seminoles with dances from their African homeland. They took over the basic form of serious step dance for couples, adding elements of the dances of the Xhosa and the Ring Shout . The dancer walker called (English for "walkers" or "walker") short of a straight line, and balanced thereby a bucket filled with water in the head.

Over time, the bucket of water disappeared and the dancers instead began to parody the behavior of their white masters . They imitated the proud below the white Ballroom Dancers , played exaggerates the flirting with the ladies after bowing exaggerated deep, brandishing imaginary walking sticks and greeted with mostly nonexistent hats. Many plantation owners were amused by these presentations by their slaves and organized performances for themselves and their visitors. Competition arose from the performances: The plantation owners wanted to prove to each other that their slaves were the better dancers and therefore held Sunday dance competitions. Since the prize for the winner of such a competition was initially a cake, the name of the dance changed to Cakewalk . According to Ekkehard Jost , it is not certain whether the dance was really called that because a cake was offered as prize money. According to other traditions, the dance is less a formal dance than a dance game with cake and part of a wedding tradition .

Spread

The cakewalk was also used in the North American minstrel shows . There it served since the end of the 1870s "to accompany the" walkaround ", ie the final part of a minstrel show. However, the cakewalk was increasingly used independently of this use: the cakewalk made its way to other parts of the world at the turn of the century. The silent film Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), which Edwin S. Porter made based on the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe , made dance known in Europe, where it also made its first recordings and developed into fashion dance.

Sheet music from Martin Saxx Jemima's Wedding Day (1899). There it is advertised that the melody could be performed very differently.

Musical form and rhythm

Maximilian Hendler reports the hypothesis that the Cakewalk could be derived from the Clave Cinquillo . However, there are only audio documents of the Cakewalk from its middle and later dissemination phase. "From the early days there are neither notes nor any descriptions that reflect more than the most general impressions."

In most cases, the printed cakewalks comprise sub-units with mostly 16 bars each , which are available in forms such as AABBACCAA, i.e. are more simply structured than the march or ragtime. Melodies such as the cakewalk "At a Georgia Camp Meeting" composed by Kerry Mills in 1897 could be interpreted as a two step as well as a polka and also as a cakewalk, but also as a march . As interpretations by the band of John Philip Sousa show, cakewalks were also played as a “march with syncopation ”.

Cakewalk in art music

The French composer Claude Debussy uses a cakewalk entitled " Golliwogg ’s Cakewalk" as the final movement of his Children's Corner piano suite, composed between 1906 and 1908 . The middle section of the piece, in ragtime rhythm, parodies the beginning of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, including the “ Tristan chord ”, which is important for music history .

Word meaning and origin

Cakewalk is the Germanization of the English term cakewalk , which literally means "cake walk " or "cake promenade". (The translation “cake dance” given in the Duden dictionary is imprecise.) The name supposedly goes back to the fact that plantation owners had their slaves compete in this dance form on Sundays and the winner received a cake as a prize; he was supposed to imitate the affected walk of whites.

The earlier name for the dance form was chalk line walk , English for " chalk line walk " or " chalk line promenade ". The reason for this name is not known, it probably goes back to the fact that the couples promenade on an (imaginary) straight line.

Related terms and idioms

Eli Green's Cake Walk by Sadie Koninsky (sheet music edition 1896)

The Cakewalk gave rise to the following English phrases:

  • (to) take the cake - "take the price off"
  • that takes the cake! - "that is (lonely) great!"
  • it's a cakewalk - " it's child's play"

The following English saying may also go back to the Cakewalk:

  • that's a piece of cake - "that's child's play", "that's easy", "that's easy"

literature

  • Astrid Kusser: body tilted. Dancing in the whirlpool of the Black Atlantic around 1900 (= Post_koloniale Medienwissenschaft 1). Bielefeld 2013.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Street Swing's Dance History Archives: Cake Walk
  2. ↑ a b c Maximilian Hendler: Prehistory of Jazz. From the departure of the Portuguese to Jelly Roll Morton. Graz 2008, p. 178f.
  3. ↑ Cakewalk. In: Wolf Kampmann (Ed.), With the assistance of Ekkehard Jost : Reclams Jazzlexikon . Reclam, Stuttgart 2003, ISBN 3-15-010528-5 .
  4. ^ Maximilian Hendler: Prehistory of Jazz. From the departure of the Portuguese to Jelly Roll Morton. Graz 2008, p. 180.
  5. ↑ Cf. Maximilian Hendler: Prehistory of Jazz. From the departure of the Portuguese to Jelly Roll Morton. Graz 2008, p. 168f.
  6. ^ Maximilian Hendler: Prehistory of Jazz. From the departure of the Portuguese to Jelly Roll Morton. Graz 2008, p. 181.
  7. ↑ cit. n. Hendler, p. 180.
  8. ^ So Hendler, p. 181, about their recording of "At a Georgia Camp Meeting" from 1902.
  9. ↑ Duden homepage, online search - entry: "Cakewalk"
  10. ^ A b Heinz Messinger: Langenscheidts Large School Dictionary English - German. 12th edition. Langenscheidt, 1994, ISBN 3-468-07122-1 , p. 163, keyword cake
  11. ↑ a b LEO German-English dictionary - keyword "cake"

Web links

Commons : Cakewalk  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Cakewalk  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations