Things Negro have been and still are the victims of two vicious extremes,—uncritical praise or calculated disparagement. Seldom, if ever, do they achieve the golden mean and by escaping both over-praise and belittlement receive fair appraisal and true appreciation. Of no field is this more true than Negro music. I have read nearly all that has been written on the subject, and do not hesitate to rate most of it as platitudinous piffle—repetitious bosh; the pounds of praise being, if anything, more hurtful and damning than the ounces of disparagement. For from the enthusiasts about Negro music comes little else than extravagant superlatives and endless variations on certain half-true commonplaces about our inborn racial musicality, our supposed gift of spontaneous harmony, the uniqueness of our musical idioms and the infectious power and glory of our transmuted suffering.
True—or rather half-true as these things undoubtedly are, the fact remains that it does Negro music no constructive service to have them endlessly repeated by dilletante enthusiasts, especially without the sound correctives of their complementary truths. The state of Negro music, and especially the state of mind of Negro musicians needs the bitter tonic of criticism more than unctuous praise and the soothing syrups of flattery. While the Negro musician sleeps on his much-extolled heritage, the commercial musical world, revelling in its prostitution, gets rich by exploiting it popularly, while the serious musical world tries only half-successfully to imitate and develop a fundamentally alien idiom. Nothing of course can stop this but the exhaustion of the vogue upon which it thrives; still the sound progress of our music depends more upon the independent development of its finer and deeper values than upon the curtailing of the popular and spurious output. The real damage of the popular vogue rests in the corruption and misguidance of the few rare talents that might otherwise make heroic and lasting contributions. For their sake and guidance, constructive criticism and discriminating appreciation must raise a standard far above the curb-stone values of the market-place and far more exacting than the easy favor of the multitude.
Indeed for the sound promotion of its future, we must turn from the self-satisfying glorification of the past of Negro music to consider for their salutary effect the present short-comings of Negro music and musicians. It is time to realize that though we may be a musical people, we have produced few if any great musicians,—that though we may have evolved a folk music of power and potentiality, it has not yet been integrated into a musical tradition,—that our creativeness and originality on the folk level has not yet been matched on the level of instrumental mastery or that of creative composition,—and that with a few exceptions, the masters of Negro musical idiom so far are not Negro. Bitter, disillusioning truths, these: but wholesome if we see them as danger-signs against the popular snares and pitfalls and warnings against corruption and premature decadence. This is why, although sanguine as ever about its possibilities, I entitle my article, Toward a Critique of Negro Music.
These shortcomings, however, are not entirely the fault of internal factors; they are due primarily to external influences. Those Negro musicians who are in vital touch with the folk traditions of Negro music are the very ones who are in commercial slavery to Tin Pan Alley and subject to the corruption and tyranny of the ready cash of our dance halls and the vaudeville stage. On the other hand, our musicians with formal training are divorced from the people and their vital inspiration by the cloister-walls of the conservatory and the taboos of musical respectability. Musical criticism for the most part ignores these lamentable conditions, wasting most of its energies in banal praise. Of the four to five thousand pages I have read on the subject of Negro music, four-fifths could be consigned to the flames to the everlasting benefit of the sound appraisal of Negro music and of constructive guidance for the Negro musician. For myself, I would rescue from the bon-fire not much more than these few: W. F. Allen’s early comment on the Slave Songs, Thomas W. Higginson’s essay on them, Krehbeil’s definitive treatise on Afro-American Folk Song, (still the best after thirty years), the few paragraphs on Negro music in Weldon Johnson’s Anthology, the essays on Negro music in the New Negro, the comments on Negro folk-music by W. C. Handy and Abbe Niles, pertinent commentary on the “blues” by Carl Van Vechten and Langston Hughes, Dorothy Scarborough’s On the Trail of Negro Folk Songs, Handy’s Beale Street, certain pages of Isaac Goldberg’s Tin Pan Alley, R. D. Darrell’s essay on Duke Ellington, some of the penetrating and constructive criticisms of Olin Downes, and interpretations of jazz by Irving Schwerké and Robert Goffin—especially the latter’s On The Frontiers of Jazz. Fifty pages of real value, certainly not more, may have escsaped my memory, but I strongly recommend these few gleanings to the serious reader.
One should also include, of course, what little is said on the subject of Negro music in Henry Cowell’s American Composers on American Music, a projected review of which was the initial cause of this article. But disappointment at what could have been said in this volume sent me into a turtle-shell of silence and brooding from which the editor of Opportunity, who has patiently prodded me for a year or so, will be surprised to see me emerge. It is not that a good deal of importance on this subject is not said in this volume, but here again it is odd to find the best of it coming from two talented Cuban composers and the rest of it from one or two modernists like Cowell and Theodore Chandler. But it is just as odd to find the best criticism of jazz coming from foreign critics like Schwerké and Goffin. Indeed the whole field is full of paradoxes, for after all the most original and pioneering creative use of Negro musical idioms still goes to the credit of white composers from Dvorak down to Aaron Copeland, Alden Carpenter, George Gershwin, Paul Whiteman, and Sesana.
What does this mean? Primarily that Negro musicians have not been first to realize the most genuine values of Negro music, and that the Negro audience has not pioneered in the recognition and intelligent appreciation of the same. Familiarity has bred contempt and nearness induced a myopia of judgment. With our music thus at the mercy of outside recognition and support, the first flow of Negro creative genius has been unusually subject to commercial control, cheap imitation and easy plagiarism. In fact Negro music, like the seed-sower’s in the parable, has chiefly fallen by the wayside and has been picked up by musical scavengers and devoured by the musical birds of the air. But lest we charge all of this to outside factors, let us remember that much has also fallen upon our own stony ground of shallow appreciation or been choked by the hostile thorns of a false and blighting academic tradition. No musical idiom that has arisen from the people can flourish entirely cut off from the ground soil of its origin. Even in the sun of popular favor it is baked to an early death unless it has deep under it roots of vital nourishment. Nor can it be effectively developed by the timid and artificial patronage of arid academicians. Vital musical idioms have not been taken up sufficiently by our trained musicans; most of them have been intimidated by their academic training. Many of them are also aesthetic traitors in their heart of hearts. True, they accept the spirituals and other forms of the folk-tradition in the face of an overwhelming vogue, because they must,—but with half-hearted appreciation, often inner contempt. At the beginning of the vogue, I remember when an urgent appeal had to be sent afield to Coleridge Taylor to transcribe a group of spirituals. In that day our trained musicians disdained the effort. And until quite recently, the Negro composers’ treatment of the spirituals has resulted in the most sophisticated and diluted arrangements:—witness a good deal of the work of Burleigh, Rosamond Johnson and Nathaniel Dett. And even those centers which have the avowed purpose of preserving and developing Negro music have ulterior and far from musical motives. To them too often it is a matter of bread-and-butter propaganda, with a fine tradition prostituted to institutional begging and the amusement of philanthropists.
To this must be added the surprising lack of the theoretical study of music beyond conservatory requirements and the resulting paucity of an original vein of composition. This with the tardy development of instrumental virtuosity except in a limited range of instruments, has resulted, despite the efforts of Jim Europe and Marion Cook, in our having almost no orchestral tradition. These facts have blocked the fusion of classical forms with the Negro musical idiom when they have not resulted in an actual watering-down of these idioms by the classical tradition. So except in choral singing,—the one vein of Negro music inherently orchestral, there is yet a deep divide between our folk music and the main stream of formal music.
I ask the reader’s patience with these negative but incontestable statements. Encouragingly enough at certain historical stages this same state of affairs has existed with other musical traditions,—with Russian music before Glinka, with Hungarian music before Liszt and Brahms, and with Bohemian music before Dvorak and Smetana.
However, if we would draw consolation from these parallels, we must remember that it took revolutionary originality and native genius to transform the situation, lift the level and break the path to the main-stream for each of these musical traditions. It is inevitable that this should eventually happen with Negro folk-music for it is not only the most vivid and vital and universally appealing body of folk-music in America, there is little in fact that can compete with it. Yet it is far from being much more as yet than the raw material of a racial or national tradition in music in spite of Weldon Johnson’s famous statement of its claims. This is, after all a statement of promise, not realization. Mr. W. J. Henderson is right in a recent article, “Why No Great American Music,” when he says,—“Where there is no unification of race, as in this country, the folk idiom does not exist except as that of some fraction of the people.” He is equally right in saying,—“the potent spell of the Negro spiritual is a deep-rooted, almost desperate grasp of religious belief. It is the song of the Negro soul. It not only interests, but even arouses, the white man because of its innate eloquence,” but,—he continues, “the Negro spiritual tells no secret of the wide American soul; it is the creation of black humans crushed under slavery and looking to eternity for their only joy.” For the present, this is quite true. But the very remedy that Mr. Henderson prescribes for the creation of a great national music is the same for the proper universalization of the spirituals and other Negro folk-music. What is needed is genius, as he says, and still more genius. That is to say, the same transforming originality that in the instances cited above widened the localisms of Russian, Hungarian and Czech music to a universal language, but in breaking the dialect succeeded in preserving the rare raciness and unique flavor. Certainly the Negro idioms will never become great music nor representative national music over the least common denominators of popular jazz or popular ballads. And perhaps there is more vital originality and power in our secular folk music than even in our religious folk music. It remains for real constructive genius to develop both in the direction which Dvorak clairvoyantly saw.
But the New World Symphony stands there a largely unheeded musical signpost pointing the correct way to Parnassus, while the main procession has followed the lowly but well-paved jazz road. Not that the jazz-road cannot lead to Parnassus; it can and has,—for the persistent few. But the producers of good jazz still produce far too much bad jazz, and the distinction between them is blurred to all but the most discriminating. Jazz must be definitely rid of its shoddy superficiality and its repetitious vulgar gymnastics. Further it must be concentrated nearer to the Negro idioms from which it has been derived. Even good diluted jazz of the sort that is now so much in vogue does a dis-service to the ultimate best development of this great folk tradition. Only true genius and almost consecrated devotion can properly fuse art-music and folk-music. Stimulating and well-intentioned as Gershwin’s work has been, I question very seriously the ultimate success of his easy-going formula of superimposing one upon the other. “Jazz,” he says, “I regard as an American folk music; not the only one, but a very powerful one which is probably in the blood and feeling of the American people more than any other style of folk-music. I believe that it can be made the basis of serious symphonic works of lasting value in the hands of a composer with talent for both jazz and symphonic music.” True,—but out of the union of the two a new style and a new tradition must be forged. Only rare examples of this have appeared as yet, and there is just as much promise of it in Louis Armstrong’s and Ellington’s best, perhaps more—than in the labored fusions of Carpenter, Gruenberg, Gershwin and Grofe. The late Otto Kahn said, with instinctive intuition: “I look upon modern jazz as a phase, as a transition, not as a completed process.” The final jazz will be neither Copeland’s bizarre hybrid of European neo-impressionism and jazz rhythms, nor Gruenberg’s fusion, however deft, of jazz themes with German and Central European modernisms of style, nor Gershwin’s pastiche of American jazz mixed with Liszt, Puccini, Stravinski, and Wagner.
This is not said ungratefully, for each of the above has done yeoman service in the vindication of the higher possibilities of jazz and the education of the popular taste out of the mere ruck of popular song and dance. Rhapsody in Blue opened a new era; Alden Carpenter’s work brought the first touches of sophistication to jazz, Whiteman and Grofe together broadened the whole instrumental scope of the jazz orchestra; Copeland’s Concerto carried jazz idiom as far as it could go by sheer intellectual push into the citadel of the classical tradition; Gruenberg has taken jazz to the chamber music level and lately has adapted it more than half-successfully to the dramatic possibilities of opera. However, more remains to be done,—and I hope and expect it from the Negro musician in spite of his present handicaps and comparatively poor showing. Already a newer type of jazz, at one and the same time more intimate to the Negro style and with more originality is coming to the fore, witness Dana Suess’s Jazz Nocturne, Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande, and Otto Sesana’s brilliant Negro Heaven. Unlike the first phase of classical jazz, these are not artificial hybrids but genuine developments from within the intimate idiom of jazz itself. A still further step may be expected from the growing mastery of the Negro jazz composers, who in the last few years have reached a new plane, and also from those brilliant mulatto composers of Latin America who may roughly be called the Afro-Cuban school even though some of them are from Mexico, Central America and Brazil.
Much indeed is to be expected of the two geniuses of the South, Amateo Roldan and Garcia Caturla, who since 1925–26 have been developing a serious school of Negro music out of the Afro-Cuban material. Caturla says: “The so-called Afro-Cuban native music is our most original type of folk song and is a mixture of African primitive music with early Spanish influences. It employs many percussion instruments which have been developed in Cuba and are to be found nowhere else, although they have their origin in African primitive instruments.” The manuscript works of these composers for orchestra show greater instrumental originality than has yet appeared in the American school of serious jazz. For its counterpart, we have to go to the unacademic and unwritten but creative jazz technique of our own Negro jazz orchestras.
But with these South Americans, it is a matter of deliberate path-breaking. Roldan expresses his creed by saying “indigenous instruments, both melodic and percussion, should be used not in order to obtain an easy local color, but with the purpose of widening their significance beyond the national boundaries. The sound of a banjo must not always bring jazz to our minds, nor should the rhythm of our guiro always recall a rhumba.” Accordingly his Poema Negro for string quartet and his Motivos de Son, based on native song-motifs with unusual combinations of instruments, and his Afro-Cuban ballet represent, like a good deal of Caturla’s work, high points in the serious conquest of a new Negro music.
With us, however, our music is at a new chrysalis stage: there are stirring signs everywhere of a new promise. But it is as yet uncertain whether the startling new thing will come from the camp of the popular or from that of the formal musicians. Jazz has already prepared us for new things: it may create them. Already it has educated the general musical ear to subtler rhythms, unfinished and closer harmonies, and unusual cadences,—indeed it has been a conquering advance-guard of the modern type of music in general. It has also introduced new principles of harmony, of instrumental technique and instrumental combinations, and promises to lead to a new type of orchestra and orchestration. Yet it must completely break through the shell of folk provincialism as only the spirituals have as yet done, and completely lift itself from the plane of cheap popular music. The academic musicians must look to their laurels.
In conclusion, I would like to discuss what seems to be the most promising possibilities of the contemporary scene. Certainly of the popular musicians, the most consistently developing genius is Duke Ellington, and the white hope of the formal musicians for the moment certainly is Grant Still, especially after the tragic loss of the talented Jenkins. Incidentally, Negro music has had such tragic losses,—the sudden death of Jim Europe, the premature retirement of Marion Cook, the loss of Bob Cole, the death of Jenkins and until recently the sporadic activity of Hall Johnson.
Mr. Still’s own declaration in American Composers gives little insight into his position: Cowell’s estimate gives more. “William Grant Still, Negro,” he says, “uses his people’s themes and feelings as a base for his music which is otherwise in modern style with some rather vague European influence. Perhaps he possesses the beginnings of a genuine new style.” Obviously this vague European influence is that of Varese, the Italian futurist, under whose tuition Still has been. Howard Hanson, who has been responsible for the repeated performance of Still’s serious orchestral work, undoubtedly regards him as among the American musicians of promise and originality. This is true in spite of the academic modernism in his work. But there is really an unfortunate schism in Mr. Still’s style as in his life work,—for some of his most brilliant orchestral writing has gone into countless anonymous jazz-arrangements for Whiteman, Hollywood and Willard Robeson’s orchestra. If this vital substance has been free to flow into his formal composition, they would have been less tainted with stilted sophistication. His Afro-American Symphony, not yet completed, promises to outgrow these limitations,—and his colossally elaborate ballet Sadjhi, is proof of his mastery of large technical resources. His tardy freedom from musical drudgery on a Guggenheim scholarship this year promises to release a valuable talent. But there are dangers in self-conscious academic racialism; it is no more desirable than self-conscious nationalism; of which sterility we in America have also had too much.
But personally I am not so sure that the development we are looking for may not come from the camp of popular music. The titanic originality of the great Negro orchestras has only to be intellectualized to conquer Parnassus or raise an Olympus of its own, and while there are many practical masters of it from Sam Wooding, Noble Sissle and Fletcher Henderson to the contemporary Don Redman, Baron Lee, Claude Hopkins, Earl Hines, Cab Calloway and Jimmy Lunceford, it seems to me that Duke Ellington is most likely to push through to this development. For Ellington is not only one of the great exponents of jazz, he is the pioneer of super-jazz and the person most likely to create the classical jazz towards which so many are striving. He projects a symphonic suite and an African opera, both of which will prove a test of his ability to carry jazz to this higher level. His style has passed through more phases and developed more maturely than any of his more spectacular competitors and I agree with Robert Goffin in saying that “the technique of jazz production has been rationalized by Ellington” and that “he has gradually placed intuitive music under control.” R. D. Darrell’s tribute, though rhapsodic, is probably an anticipation of what the future will judge. “The larger works of Gershwin, the experiments of Copeland and other serious composers are attempts with new symphonic forms stemming from jazz but not of it…. One can say truthfully that a purely instrumental school of jazz has never gone beyond the embryonic stage…. Ellington has emancipated American popular music from text for the first time since Colonial days…. Within an Ellington composition there is a similar unity of style of the essential musical qualities of melody, rhythm, harmony, color, and form. Unlike most jazz writers, Ellington never concentrates undue attention on rhythm alone…. Delightful and tricky rhythmic effects are never introduced for sheer sensational purposes, rather they are developed and combined with others as logical part and parcel of the whole work…. Harmonically Ellington is apt and subtle rather than obvious and striking, and in the exploitation of new tone and coloring, he has proceeded further than any other composer—popular or serious—of today…. His one attempt at a larger form, a two-part Creole Rhapsody, is not wholly successful, although it does develop and interweave a larger number of themes than usual in his work. It is here that Ellington has most to learn…. He may betray his uniqueness for popularity, be brought down to the level of orthodox dance music, lose his secure footing and intellectual grasp in the delusion of grandeur. Most of his commercial work evidences just such lapses…. But he has given us, and I am confident will give us again, more than a few moments of the purest, the most sensitive revelations of feeling in music today.” It will be to the lasting credit and gain of genuine Negro music if Mr. Ellington or some other of our musicians lives up to this challenge and prophecy.
Negro music should be expected to flower most gloriously and most naturally in the field of vocal music. Here already there is a great tradition, for Negroes sing creatively and orchestrally. But the spirituals that have not been put into the strait-jacket of the barber-shop and stage quartet, have been developed in a line false to their native choral nature. Of course, some superlatively fine music has been made from the treatment of the spirituals for solo voice with instrumental accompaniment, and no one would sensibly dispense with it. But the true vein of this music will never be realized until the spirituals are restored to their primitive choral basis. Herein we have the significance of the newer types of Negro choir that are now beginning to appear or re-appear, among them most significantly, those of Eva Jessye and Hall Johnson. Indeed it is just here that I find the great pioneer significance of Hall Johnson as contrasted with Burleigh, let us say, who served well in his generation, but whose work along with that of his contemporaries represents hybrid versions and a watering-down of the native materials of Negro folk-song. It is Hall Johnson’s versions of both the spirituals and the secular songs, that point to the promise of the future, and that alone can realize for Negro choral music the values that have been developed, for example, by the Russian choral composers and singing choirs. This is not a racial matter, although one naturally expects from racial composers and singers the best results. I would, in fact, rather hear the carefully studied and very understanding arrangements of Frank Black for the famous Revellers than many missionary circus stunts of quartets and octets from “down home,” and there is such competition now in the intimate study of the idioms of Negro singing by white artists that the Negroes in this field will have to look to their laurels and to their heels.
No sounder advice has ever been given us on this point than that of Mr. Olin Downes in his critical comment on the Carnegie concert of the Fisk Choir. He advises us rightly to sing in the Negro idiom and to lift it to the level of formal art. It is easy to turn such good advice aside on the false interpretation of advising Negroes to stick to their own limited province. It is a deeper problem than this; that of developing a great style out of the powerful musical dialect we have. Eventually choral works of an entirely new sort can and must come from Negro sources—great liturgical forms from the Spirituals—unique choral folk songs as Hall Johnson’s arrangement of “Water Boy” and “I’m an Eas’-man” and perhaps even a technique of chant singing such as was exploited by Gruenberg rather artificially but quite effectively in the operatic version of The Emperor Jones.
This brings me to my last observations of a most promising recent development in Negro music—Asadata Dafora Horton’s African Dance Opera—Kykunkor. Here we have something that starts soundly from the primitive African tradition and not from the exotic grafting on of “native material.” The African drum orchestra has been developed into something of vital artistic device—and the dance-motifs have been transposed almost as vitally as Shan-Kar’s transposition of Hindu dance forms. This we hope is but the beginning of an entirely new and healthy pioneering in the African tradition after several generations of merely superficial dabbling in its local color and titillating strangeness. With the effective orchestration of Mrs. Upshur, the score proves that the African rhythms can be transposed to the Western scale and Western instruments with some supplementations as one might expect. At any rate Kykunkor has given us our first glimpse of the African tradition in a healthy pagan form with primitive cleanliness and vitality instead of the usual degenerate exoticism and fake primitivism to which we have been accustomed.
Out of some negative criticisms, then, we have come to a discernment of truer values and finer possibilities for Negro music in the future. Though he should not confine himself to the limited materials of folk-music, the Negro musician should realize that his deepest hopes and best possibilities are based upon them. For a constructive creed, one could almost paraphrase verbatim the remarks of the Cuban composer, Caturla, reading in Negro where he uses the adjective Cuban. “If composers,” he says, “imitate other people’s music or already known styles, they are not expressing themselves, nor are they fulfilling their purpose of delivering an inner message to the outer world through music…. In order to arrive at genuinely Cuban music, it is necessary to work with the living folk-lore. This should be polished until the crudities and the exterior influences fall away; sane theoretical discipline should be applied, and the music should be condensed into musical forms which shall be especially invented to be suitable, the same as has been done in the case of different European countries…. When these new forms, together with the new musical instruments or orchestral colors derived from them, are woven together into cohesive works which contain a genuine message, this message will represent the fulfillment of Cuban music…. When this is done, Cuban music will take its place with the music of the older peoples.”
Roldan has a similar Credo—with its striking lesson for the American Negro musician. He says, “My aim is, first of all to attain a production thoroughly American in its substance, entirely apart from the European art; an art that we can call ours, continental, worthy of being universally accepted not on account of its exotic qualities (our music up to now has been accepted in Europe mainly upon the basis of its outlandish flavor that brought something interesting, something queerly new, being received with the accommodating smile with which grown people face a child’s mischief, without giving to it any real importance); to produce a music capable of being accepted for its real significance, its intrinsic worth, for its meaning as a contribution of the New World to the universal art.”
With such sound principles and high motives, Negro music can confidently and creatively face the future, and achieve rather than betray its birthright.
THANKS to Leopold Stokowski and William Dawson, the answer to the main challenge of this article has been flung into the arena: the first “Negro Folk Symphony” by a Negro composer has been triumphantly performed in Philadelphia and New York by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. It is not the first symphony of Negro authorship, or the first accredited performance, Howard Hanson and the Rochester Civic Orchestra have played parts of William Still’s “Afro-American Symphony;” and Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony have played “Florence Bond Price’s Symphony” and her Concerto in D Minor for piano and orchestra, all creditable accomplishments. It is the form and character of the Dawson symphony that makes it so significant and promising. It is classic in form but Negro in substance, it shows mastery or near-mastery of the terrific resources of the modern orchestra, it builds on to the classic tradition with enough “modernism” to save it from being purely academic, and with enough originality to save it from the blight of imitation, and more than all else it is unimpeachably Negro.
Negro thematic substance does not alone suffice to make a Negro Symphony. The folk character must enter into the melodic pattern, the instrumentation, the rhythmic line, and if possible the harmonic development. In every one of these respects Mr. Dawson has tried to make his music racial, without at the same time losing touch with the grand speech of the master tradition in music. When one considers how near he has come to success on all these points, it is marvelous as a first symphony. May there be more; not too many; indeed a revised first is in order,—for characteristic as the third movement is in thematic material, it is not particularly distinctive in form. The second movement, in spite of redundance and occasional grandiloquence, is a masterful expression. One can pardon its redundance on racial grounds: the race is artistically rhapsodic. Its greatest grandiloquence is movingly successful, where a duel of pagan melody and rhythm toss wave-high against a Christian spiritual like the meeting of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic. It is moments like this that I had in mind in writing that the truly Negro music must reflect the folk spirit and eventually epitomize the race experience. To have done this without too much programistic literalness is an achievement and points as significant a path to the Negro musician as was pointed by Dvorak years ago. In fact it is the same path, only much further down the road to native and indigenous musical expression. Deep appreciation is due Mr. Stokowski for his discerning vision and masterful interpretation, but great praise is due Mr. Dawson for pioneering achievement in the right direction. His future and that of Negro music is brighter because of it.