05 December 2012

[sc]airquotes (i)



"One important aspect of Afrological improvisation is the notion of the importance of personal narrative, of 'telling your own story'...

...An Afrological notion of an improviser's 'sound' may be seen as analogous to the Eurological concept of compositional 'style,' especially in a musically semiotic sense. Moreover, for an improviser working in Afrological forms, 'sound,' sensibility, personality, and intelligence cannot be separated from an improviser's phenomenal (as distinct from formal) definition of music. Notions of personhood are transmitted via sounds, and sounds become signs for deeper levels of meaning beyond pitches and intervals. The saxophonist Yusef Lateef (1985-88, 44) makes it plain: "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising. We feel that we can hear character or personality in the way the musician improvises...

...Interestingly, Cage's critique of jazz also likens it to personal storytelling. Cage's description of jazz seems to liken the music to a ring shout: 'The form of jazz suggests too frequently that people are talking-that is, in succession-like in a panel discussion .... If I am going to listen to a speech then I would like to hear some words' (quoted in Zwerin 1991, 162). This perceptive comment from a composer who could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be portrayed as possessing any affinity with Afrological musical forms, provides some intersubjective justification for the notion that one of the central aesthetic demands made on Afrological improvisers is that the improviser 'tell a story.'

In any event, Eurological improvisers have tended to look askance on the admission of personal narrative into improvisative activity. I believe that, for postwar Eurological improvisers, the ideas of Cage have, again, had the greatest impact in this regard: 'What I would like to find is an improvisation that is not descriptive of the performer, but is descriptive of what happens, and which is characterized by an absence of intention'(quoted in Kostelanetz 1987, 222).


George E. Lewis
Improvised Music after 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives
Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 22, Supplement: Best of BMRJ (2002), pp. 241-242




Professor Lewis is more or less beyond reproach, and nothing he says here is debatable in the sense that it is inaccurate. I for one am struck, rather, by what is not said. The validity/usefulness/expressive power of personal narrative would seem to my Eurologically-inclined sensibilities to be almost completely dependent on the nature and content of the narrative in question, and not simply projectable a priori across an entire culture (less yet to others) without case-by-case evaluation of this content. In other words, apples-and-oranges characterizations fail when one prefers Granny Smiths to Clementines and Navels to Red Delicious. Mustn't we be allowed our own value judgments as to who's story matters to us? And if we simply don our dreadlocks and patchouli oil and decide that everyone's story matters, does anyone's story really matter?

Lewis makes no explicit endorsement of such expansive relativism, but nor does he avail himself of a readymade opportunity submit it to the same kind of fruitful interrogation the Eurological view receives in ensuing paragraphs. It's plain enough even to someone like me that, "The sound of the improvisation seems to tell us what kind of person is improvising," so plain, actually, that I'm not sure what we've really established by stopping there. The deeper questions, I think, are about the nature and importance of this knowledge to the listener and the citizen.

In any case, I continue to maintain that I'm not nearly interesting enough to be the focal point of my own music, or alternatively, that if the most interesting thing about my music is that I made it, I've probably not achieved much. The question of individuality, highly valued in Afrological thought according to Lewis et al, is thus related, but nor is uniqueness broadly construed any more sufficient, in my opinion, than narrativity broadly construed to confer value on any given work without considering what is unique and how the story actually goes.

3 comments:

Stefan Kac said...

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media (1964)
MIT Press edition (1994)

"The word "jazz" comes from the French jaser, to chatter. Jazz is, indeed, a form of dialogue among instrumentalists and dancers alike. Thus it seemed to make an abrupt break with the homogeneous and repetitive rhythms of the smooth waltz. In the age of Napoleon and Lord Byron, when the waltz was a new form, it was greeted as a barbaric fulfillment of the Rousseauistic dream of the noble savage. Grotesque as this idea now appears, it is really a most valuable clue to the dawning mechanical age. The impersonal choral-dancing of the older, courtly pattern was abandoned when the waltzers held each other in a personal embrace. The waltz is precise, mechanical, and military, as its history manifests. For a waltz to yield its full meaning, there must be military dress. "There was a sound of revelry by night" was how Lord Byron referred to the waltzing before Waterloo. To the eighteenth century and to the age of Napoleon, the citizen armies seemed to be an individualistic release from the feudal framework of courtly hierarchies. Hence the association of waltz with noble savage, meaning no more than freedom from status and hierarchic difference. The waltzers were all uniform and equal, having free movement in any part of the hall. That this was the Romantic idea of the life of the noble savage now seems odd, but the Romantics knew as little about real savages as they did about assembly lines.

"In our own century the arrival of jazz and ragtime was also heralded as the invasion of the bottom-wagging native. The indignant tended to appeal from jazz to the beauty of the mechanical and repetitive waltz that had once been greeted as pure native dancing. If jazz is considered as a break with mechanism in the direction of the discontinuous, the participant, the spontaneous and improvisational, it can also be seen as a return to a sort of oral poetry in which performance is both creation and composition. It is a truism among jazz performers that recorded jazz is "as stale as yesterday's newspaper." Jazz is alive, like conversation; and like conversation it depends upon a repertory of available themes. But performance is composition. Such performance insures maximal participation among players and dancers alike. Put in this way, it becomes obvious at once that jazz belongs in that family of mosaic structures that reappeared in the Western world with the wire services. It belongs with symbolism in poetry, and with the many allied forms in painting and in music."

(pp. 279-280)

Stefan Kac said...

Ernest Borneman
"The Roots of Jazz"
in Jazz, ed. Henthoff and McCarthy]
quoted in
LeRoi Jones
Blues People (1963)

"While the whole European tradition strives for regularity—of pitch, of time, of timbre and of vibrato—the African tradition strives precisely for the negation of these elements. In language, the African tradition aims at circumlocution rather than at exact definition. The direct statement is considered crude and unimaginative; the veiling of all contents in ever-changing paraphrases is considered the criterion of intelligence and personality. In music, the same tendency towards obliquity and ellipsis is noticeable: no note is attacked straight; the voice or instrument always approaches it from above or below, plays around the implied pitch without ever remaining any length of time, and departs from it without ever having committed itself to a single meaning. The timbre is veiled and paraphrased by constantly changing vibrato, tremolo and overtone effects. The timing and accentuation, finally, are not stated, but implied or suggested. The denying or withholding of all signposts."
(p. 31)

More:
Bodies and Artifacts (iii)

Stefan Kac said...

Christopher Lasch
The Agony of the American Left
(1969)

"The one thing that emerges clearly from Herskovits's work is that whether one is talking about Latin America or about the United States, African survivals are easier to trace in areas like music and religion than in language, politics, social organization, and family life, where they seem almost nonexistent.

"Unfortunately the whole question of African survivals has now become involved in the politics of cultural nationalism, and it is hard to argue against Herskovits without being accused of wishing to subvert the cultural identity of black people."

(pp. 121-122)

(more)