[Photo credit: Wonderlane]So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.
Here is the third installment of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to more or less present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004).
Enjoy, if you can!
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Introduction, part oneIntroduction, part two* * * * *Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and AuthenticityChapter One: Ellington, Beethoven, and the Rhetoric of Genius (part one)I first became aware of the music of Duke Ellington through a biography by James Lincoln Collier, published in 1987. A jazz neophyte at the time, I had only the dimmest awareness of who Ellington was, and had no idea that this particular work (bearing the utilitarian title,
Duke Ellington) had been the center of a controversy in the music world. But in fact many had rallied against what William Youngren called Collier’s “preoccupation, even obsession, with proving that Ellington was not really a composer” (Youngren 86). Amiri Baraka, for instance, commented that Collier’s “various writings give off the distinct aroma of a rotting mint julep” (Anderson 173), and Stanley Crouch characterized the biography as “insipid, sloppy and irresponsible” (Crouch 442).
I will address the criticisms of Collier’s book (many of which are quite valid) later in this chapter, but I want to begin by pointing out that one of the things that interested me about this text was that, according to Collier, Ellington’s creative modus operandi -- to put it simply -- challenged the traditional western conception of artistic genius by substituting collaboration for solitary artistry. Ellington’s career may in fact demonstrate this idea more obviously than that of any other “great” composer, and thus it turns out that he is the perfect introductory subject for my study. But an understanding of Ellington’s compositional practice also enables audiences to reconsider other artists in similar terms. Indeed, one of Collier’s shortcomings is that he implies that Ellington’s collaborative compositional technique is an aberration in western music, one that stands out against the romantic idea of a Beethoven or a Mozart (say) composing great works in isolation.
1 And much of the negative response to Collier was in turn prompted by a desire to argue that Ellington was a composer in the Beethovenian or Mozartian mold, as traditionally understood. Now I too want to offer a response to Collier’s view -- not by arguing that Ellington is like Beethoven or Mozart, but rather by flipping the equation, and arguing that Beethoven and Mozart are like Ellington. In other words, the collaborative model of artistry did not begin with jazz.
The contrast between this collaborative model and the (more common) innate or individual model requires some definitional groundwork. Let’s begin with what I have been calling the “traditional western conception of artistic genius.” To put it plainly: in western music the compositional ideal, derived from the heyday of art music (between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), is the solitary figure who singlehandedly produces masterworks, and is often discussed in language similar to that of the following quotation, taken from Alfred Einstein’s well-known biography of Mozart: “As an artist, as a musician, Mozart was not a man of this world. To a certain part of the nineteenth century his work seemed to possess so pure, so formally rounded, so ‘godlike’ a perfection that Richard Wagner, the most violent spokesman of the Romantic Period, could call him ‘music’s genius of light and love’” (3). A more recent example of this kind of purple prose can be found in an essay filmmaker Ken Burns wrote about his popular but controversial documentary on jazz: “Louis Armstrong is quite simply the most important person in American music. He is to 20th century music (I did not say jazz) what Einstein is to physics, Freud is to medicine [sic] and the Wright Brothers are to travel. He transformed first instrumental playing, liberating jazz, cutting it loose from nearly all constraints, essentially inventing what we call swinging, and then brought an equally great revolution to singing.”
Numerous other examples could be cited to illustrate the point, but I will assume the reader has at least some familiarity with this kind of language -- as it applies not only to music but to any of the arts, and indeed to the sciences and other disciplines as well. Of course, discussions of traditional genius can also take on a sarcastic tone; engraver and sculptor Eric Gill has called this the artist as “a God kindly handing out his infallible works” (Grigely 67), and historian M.S. Anderson has similarly identified it as “the exceptional spirit leading, and entitled to lead, the mediocrities by whom he inevitably found himself surrounded” (Anderson 332). Einstein, Burns, Gill and Anderson all stress the solitude (and even solipsism) of the artist figure, and it is this solitude that is a key component of what I call the “rhetoric of genius.” For while it is true that there are variations on the basic idea of artistic genius in the west (Peter Kivy makes a convincing argument in his
The Possessor and the Possessed), they all share this characteristic of solitude: the artist creates individually, and the participation of other human beings, and of contexts, is secondary, passive, and non-essential. In this sense, artworks attributed to genius appear to have an entirely different provenance than artworks attributed to collaboration.
I use the word “rhetoric” because I want to highlight that what I am addressing is a way of speaking about art, a fascination with the sound of aesthetic language rather than a concern for its meaning. I draw here on the Orwellian idea that language influences thinking.
2 In my view, the rhetoric of genius creates and sustains habits of perception that distract us from effectively interrogating the creative process -- wowing us with enthusiastic praise for the artist, and emphasizing “mystery” and “magic” over a more nuts-and-bolts view of creativity. At its most extreme, there is a religious dimension to this language.
3 The idea that the works of Mozart or Armstrong were produced in isolation provides a kind of spiritual comfort -- consider again Einstein’s comment that Mozart’s work “seemed to possess so pure, so formally rounded, so ‘godlike’ a perfection” or Ken Burns’s confession (following the quote cited a few paragraphs back) that because of Armstrong “my own contemplation of mortality is now tempered by the undying hope that I will get to hear him playing with Gabriel someday.” Even such an aesthetic iconoclast as Debussy is quoted as having said that Bach “was a benevolent god, to whom musicians should offer a prayer before setting to work so that they may be preserved from mediocrity” (qtd. in Day 66). Such patterns of language may explain why the rhetoric of genius gained ascendancy in the nineteenth century, as Judeo-Christian belief systems came under greater assault and many searched for alternate sources of spiritual certainty; the idea of a single artistic creator provided a means whereby religious skeptics could nevertheless espouse a belief system that was clearly analogous to western monotheistic theology.
While I do not want to exaggerate the case here by suggesting that the rhetoric of genius is the only available mode for speaking about art in our culture, I do see it as a dominant mode, and one that informs important cultural insitutions through the present day, from the university system to such popular events as the Academy Awards or the
American Idol TV series. All of these institutions reinforce versions of what has been called the “star system” -- a kind of hierarchy of celebrity that arguably emerged, like the rhetoric of genius itself, in the nineteenth century. In universities, individual intellectuals develop the power to strongly influence cultural canons; in Hollywood, individual artists develop the power to determine what kinds of films are made and marketed; in the music industry, image and celebrity conspire to limit the kinds of recordings and performances that are made easily available. In all of these areas, despite palpable evidence of collaborative practices, the power (both popular and elite) that attends our understanding of creativity tends to accrue to specific individuals.
4Ironically, in recent years, the traditional view of artistry has been subject to careful critique by textual scholars working primarily within the field of Literature. Consider, for instance, discussions of the poet John Keats. Some have suggested that after his death, Keats’s poetry was heavily reworked by various nineteenth-century editors so that it would “fit into a [new] social and critical moment” (Grigely 34).
5 This reworking helped construct what Joseph Grigely calls the “canonical Keats” (i.e., the Keats we know today), and this construction, as opposed to the original or “embarrassing Keats” (i.e., the Keats who, Thomas DeQuincey argued, “played such fantastic tricks as could only enter into the heart of a barbarian, and for which only the anarchy of Chaos could furnish a forgiving audience” (Grigely 34)), determined to a large extent how nineteenth century audiences read the poet.
I refer to this kind of activity -- hands-on participation in the production of an artwork, through acts like editing or translating -- as
direct collaboration. In one sense, of course, the idea that direct collaboration is artistically important is nothing new: editing and translating are vital literary enterprises, as any Shakespearean or Homeric scholar will tell you: a particular edition or translation can alter a work in significant ways.
6 But the textual critique of Grigely and others raises questions about whether direct collaboration is all that different from “actual writing” (i.e., what Keats or Shakespeare or Homer did), thereby undercutting the notion that the latter is “artistry” and the former mere “tweaking.” In my own view, “actual writing” is best seen as an
initiating act -- an artistic “setting the ball in motion,” a choice made by an individual artist, but not exceeding direct collaboration in aesthetic significance.
At its most provocative, the textual critique of literary works goes much further than this, raising questions about practical matters that inform the production of literary texts -- manufacturing and marketing techniques, technologies of dissemination, and so on. Consider the role of apparently insignificant factors such as the choice of a typeface. One might argue that Times New Roman creates an entirely different impression (more fluid, perhaps; sophisticated and yet accesible) from Courier (choppy, business-like, technological), and that each has a different impact on meaning. Page thickness, binding, coloration all play similar roles. Such observations suggest the importance of context, or framing. Grigely argues that in visual art
[w]e are traditionally inclined to think of how an artwork transforms the space it inhabits -- more literally how a painting “fills” a room -- but we must also consider how a text is transformed by that same space. In the Louvre Mona Lisa does not sit alone but in the presence of guards, a humidity-controlled vitrine shielded by two panes of three-layered bullet-proof glass, dark walls, a roped barricade, innumerable viewers jostling for a better view, and the constant hum of camcorders: one cannot read the text without the presence of other readers […] I might argue then that the Louvre text of the Mona Lisa is not a mere painting, but a performance, a mise-en-scene in which the cultural status of the work is reflected in how it is presented and received (45).
These observations point to the most elusive layer of creative activity, which I call
contextual (or indirect) collaboration. Unlike direct collaboration, contextual collaboration is the idea that artworks are understood through and therefore shaped by ostensibly “passive” entities like physical environments (e.g., the reading room and the museum), historical moments (e.g. the impact of preceding artists, cultural trends) and technologies (e.g., printing techniques, framing techniques, etc.). Instead of seeing context as a background to the work, the notion of contextual collaboration suggests that the work and the context are mutually dependent -- one cannot exist without the other.
In sum, then, what the textual critique of literature implies is a consideration of artistry as a triangular relationship between
initiating acts (decisions and moves made by individual writers),
direct collaboration (the hands-on role of editors, translators and others), and
contextual collaboration (the role played by “passive” entities like readers, physical environments, technologies and historical moments) -- rather than a hierarchical relationship in which the latter two merely support the former.
Although it is possible to argue that literature and painting take place in a social context, music is an even more explicitly “social art,” and for this reason it seems particularly well-suited to an adaption of the foregoing critique. By explicitly introducing the factor of performance, music may demonstrate the complexity of artistic processes (complicating the notion of the “work”) more forcefully than literature or painting. For instance, in the 1957 “live” recording of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” by Duke Ellington and his Orchestra, the creation of the “chart” (i.e., the paper on which the notes are written) might be the initiating act, whereas the performance of that chart by the Orchestra is direct collaboration and the response of the audience is contextual collaboration. Or, one might also argue that the performance itself is the initiating act (led by Paul Gonsalves’ 27-chorus solo), the audience response (as audibly captured on the recording) is direct collaboration, and the audience listening at home to the CD several decades later, contextual collaboration. In the end, the specific definitions used for the three collaborative roles -- initiating acts, direct collaboration, indirect (i.e., contextual) collaboration -- are less important than the recognition that an artwork never emanates from a single source.
In any case, although musicology lags behind textual studies in the exploration of these nuances, there are those who have begun to consider the importance of musical forms of both direct collaboration (addressing the role of bandmembers or fellow musicians, arrangers, producers, engineers, or others directly involved in composition but not credited as such) and contextual collaboration in recent years. As an example of the latter, sociologist Tia DeNora, in her controversial book,
Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, demonstrates not that composer Ludwig van Beethoven did not possess musical ability of a very high order (as some of her critics have charged) but rather that what is commonly thought of as “Beethoven’s” genius was in fact a complex process that to some extent was contingent upon a number of contextual factors: the support of such key aristocratic patrons and tastemakers as Baron Gottfried van Swieten and Prince Karl Lichnowsky, advancements in piano manufacturing that worked well for Beethoven’s comparatively forceful manner of playing that instrument, a historical moment that was ripe for stylistic change, and so on.
Composer / alto saxophonist John Zorn too suggests that collaboration has achieved greater recognition as a compositional method in recent years; the following comments come from the liner notes to his
Spillane album (Elektra / Nonesuch, 1987):
Whether we like it or not, the era of the composer as autonomous musical mind has just about come to an end. At this point in musical history, the relevant question is, “What exactly does a composer do?” Over the past 40 years, many of the great composers have worked with collaborators. Ellington had Billy Strayhorn as well as his amazing band. John Cage had David Tudor and Takehisa Kosugi. Stockhausen has depended on the Kontarsky brothers, Harold Boje, his son Markus, and Susanne Stephens, among others. Mauricio Kagel’s group included Vinko Globokar, Crisoph Caskel, Edward Tarr, etc. Philip Glass and Steve Reich work closely with their ensembles.
The collaborative aspects of the recording process make this even clearer. When the Beatles put together Sgt. Pepper with George Martin, or Frank Zappa worked with the Mothers of Invention on the early Verve records, the collaboration helped produce a musical statement greater than the sum of the individuals involved.
Note that Zorn’s quick survey here touches on all three elements of the collaborative model of creativity: the initiating acts attributable to composers like Ellington and Cage, the direct collaboration of other composers like Billy Strayhorn and David Tudor, and the kind of contextual collaboration provided by (say) the environment of a recording studio, in which the state of technology helps determine what is possible in the “final product.” My only qualification of Zorn’s commentary is that the “era of the composer as autonomous musical mind” is a rhetorical construction that never accurately addressed how art happens. DeNora’s work on Beethoven, which we will examine later in this chapter, will be useful in demonstrating this point.
The collaborative model of art is useful from a purely philosophical point of view, but it also has practical ramifications. As we shall see by chapter five, the rhetoric of genius is closely intertwined with copyright law as it now exists. Legal theorizing has moved that law into the arena of material value: making sure copyright holders are remunerated for their efforts is the paramount concern. In music the initiating acts of the composer provide the focus of this valuation. Put simply, the first two chapters of this book are guided by the following questions: why are direct and contextual collaboration valued any differently? What is the mechanism by which we determine the cultural worth of one activity as compared with the others?
i. Collaborating with Duke EllingtonOne of the most impressive facts about the music associated with Duke Ellington is that there is so much of it. The individual songs and pieces credited to the bandleader run well into the thousands (some estimates run as high as five thousand (Rattenbury 2)). Scott Yanow writes that “there are currently a countless number of Ellington albums available… with ‘new’ (previously unissued) ones coming out nearly every month as if he were still alive” (Yanow 1213). Yanow is not alone in arguing that, despite its bulk, this material is of “consistently high quality; there are few if any throwaways in Ellington’s entire discography!” (1213).
Indeed, Ellington is considered by many to be one of America’s most original and valuable composers, and throughout the twentieth century his supporters used what I have already defined as the rhetoric of genius in their analyses of his work. Consider, for instance, this passage from a 1931
Pittsburgh Courier article, and the way emphasis is placed on Ellington the original composer, effectively obscuring the orchestra with which he was associated:
During the past year or more the name of Duke Ellington has lingered upon the lips of radio fans, dance lovers, theatregoers and the amusement public of the Nation in general… Crowned ‘King of Jazz’ last week in the National ‘Most Popular Orchestra’ Contest conducted by the Pittsburgh Courier, reigning supreme and having polled 50,000 votes, the largest amount, competing with over 50 orchestras and bands all over the United States, Duke Ellington has proved that he is the most popular orchestra leader today (DER 54).
Note the fetishization of the Ellington moniker here (“the name of Duke Ellington has lingered upon the lips of radio fans, dance lovers, theatregoers and the amusement public”). Much writing about Ellington has made use of this same band-obscuring synecdoche. George Avakian’s review of “Ellington at Newport” (1956), for instance, begins thus: “Overshadowing everything else… Duke Ellington’s [that is to say, the orchestra’s] performance of Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue in the last set… turned into one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of [the Newport Festival]” (290) (ironically, one of the things that made the piece extraordinary was a twenty-seven chorus solo by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves, of which more later). Stanley Crouch, in a 1988 article describing several of the band’s extended works, takes this language to a level worthy of the Old Testament -- reminding us once again that the rhetoric of genius has religious overtones. He writes that
at this point in the maestro’s career [the fifties], the view from the mountaintop was as clear and precise as that of an extraordinary hunting bird who continued to amaze as he swooped down into the valley, got what he needed, then started moving up higher, and higher, leaving an indelible image in the sky (DER 442).
Earlier writers employed similarly biblical terminology. For instance, Andre Hodier, one of the first critics to appreciate the work of Ellington’s band from a musicological perspective, wrote in 1958 that “Duke Ellington holds a privileged position in the history of jazz [. . .] Single-handed he changed the face of a desert and brought forth the first fruit of that multidimensional music which may one day supplant every other form of jazz” (DER 297-98). Richard O. Boyer, in a 1944 portrait of Ellington called “The Hot Bach,” describes what seem to be scenes right out of Peter Schaefer’s Amadeus, underscoring what he perceived as the effortlessness of Ellington’s process: “[S]ome of [Ellington’s] best pieces have been written against the glass partitions of offices in recording studios, on darkened overnight buses, with illumination supplied by a companion holding an interminable chain of matches, and in sweltering, clattering day coaches” (DER 216). Furthermore, it is important to note that critics are not the only ones who conceive of Ellington in this way. The trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, for instance, has been quoted as saying that “all the musicians in jazz should get together on one certain day and get down on their knees to thank Duke” (DER 364).
What is interesting about many of these critical assessments is that, although the rhetoric of genius stands out as the most salient feature, the same writers simultaneously take note of facts that appear to contradict that rhetoric. For instance, Yanow remarks that Ellington “always considered his orchestra to be his main instrument” (1213), and in the remainder of his article suggests just how much Ellington depended on the people with whom he worked; commenting, for instance, that “[w]hile most big bands might have three or four notable soloists, Ellington’s orchestra in the ‘30s featured eight” (1214). Crouch makes a similar point, arguing that “[I]n order to do what his creative appetite, his ambition, and his artistic demon asked of him, Ellington had to maintain an orchestra for composing purposes longer than any other, almost fifty years” (443). Hodier is more specific about this dynamic; in his review of “Concerto for Cootie” (named for featured trumpeter Cootie Williams) Hodier writes that
[u]nlike the European concerto, in which the composer’s intention dominates the interpreter’s(4), the jazz concerto makes the soloist a kind of second creator, often more important than the first, even when the part he has to play doesn’t leave him any melodic initiative. Perhaps Cootie had nothing to do with the melody of the Concerto; he probably doesn’t stray from it an inch; and still it would be impossible to imagine Concerto for Cootie without him (DER 284).
If we look at Hodier’s previously quoted remarks (“Single handed he [Ellington] changed the face of a desert and brought forst the first fruit”) and juxtapose them with this passage (particularly the comment that “the jazz concerto makes the soloist a kind of second creator, often more important than the first […] it would be impossible to imagine Concerto for Cootie without [Cootie]”), the contradictory threads of this criticism become clear.
These comments suggest the importance of direct collaboration in the Ellington group -- collaboration which in the case of “Concerto for Cootie” took the form of a distinctive sound employed by a notable player. Specifically, the reason it would be impossible to imagine “Concerto for Cootie” without Cootie Williams is that the trumpeter had an idiosyncratic performance style -- a greatly valued characteristic in jazz -- involving a combination of mutework and vocalized tone. As Hodier suggests, this tone itself is one of the crucial elements of the composition. In
Beyond Category, his biography of Ellington, John Edward Hasse reveals that a similar role was played by the alto saxophonist Johnny Hodges. For a variety of reasons (including the feeling that he wasn’t being well-compensated), Hodges (as well as trombonist Lawrence Brown and drummer Sonny Greer, two important bandmembers in their own right) left the Ellington orchestra in 1951. Hasse writes of this event that “Hodges’s sliding, passionate way with ballads, his moving blues, and his majestic melodies helped define the Ellington sound; robbed of it, how could Ellington continue his band, keep alive his sound? It was a stunning blow, the greatest professional crisis Ellington had ever faced” (298). Note here how the possessive case slips from Hodges to Ellington: “Hodges’s sliding, passionate way with ballads, his moving blues, and his majestic melodies” is rhetorically absorbed into the “the Ellington sound,” suggesting a kind of aesthetic hierarchy. Yet Hasse simultaneously recognizes that Ellington depended on Hodges, going so far as to argue that during Hodges’ sabbatical from the band (the altoist would return in 1955), “none of Ellington’s recordings can be considered quintessential” (322). This statement requires some explanation, for if Ellington was indeed the individual genius that Hasse ultimately argues he was, we might legitimately wonder why he could not more easily have overcome Hodges’ departure.
Direct collaboration in the Ellington group was not limited to the lending of an interpretive style. Many “sidemen” contributed (sometimes against their will) musical fragments (melodies, riffs, and other ideas) that were incorporated by Ellington into the music for the group, often without compositional credit. This is the feature of the Ellington band that is taken up most forcefully and controversially in the Collier biography; Collier argues, for instance, that “the central melodic ideas of virtually all of Ellington’s best-known songs originated in someone else’s head” (302). He then proceeds to make a list of eighteen of the most popular songs associated with Ellington (e.g. “In a Sentimental Mood,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Creole Love Call,” “Mood Indigo”), indicating which bandmember he believes was responsible for the main idea of each piece. He goes on in more detail:
The men in the sections worked out a lot of the voicings, although in the main from chords supplied by Ellington. Tom Whaley and Juan Tizol often made alterations as they extracted the parts. A great many of the contrapuntal or answering lines were suggested by members of the band, in some cases simply to give themselves something to play while the main line was carried by someone else. Phrases, snatches of melody, came from everywhere. And, of course, after 1939 Billy Strayhorn contributed a great deal. Given all of this, we are entitled to question not just whether Ellington was America’s greatest composer but whether he was a composer at all (303).
This comment in fact echoes something said by one of Ellington’s more outspoken bandmembers, trombonist Lawrence Brown, who apparently once told the leader that “I don’t consider you a composer. You are a compiler” (Collier 130).
Ken Rattenbury makes a similar point, though perhaps more delicately, in
Duke Ellington: Jazz Composer (1990). Rattenbury cites the observations of Gunther Schuller: “The interesting question is how were Ellington and his men … able to create a unique kind of big band jazz, in the late 1920s and early 1930s? Bubber Miley [one of the first trumpeters in the group] was largely responsible for the initial steps through his introduction of a rougher sound into the band” (qtd. in Rattenbury 16). Schuller goes on to describe Miley’s pioneering efforts in the development of the “growl” technique on the trumpet, and then indicates how Miley taught this technique to some of the other brass players in the group: trombonists Charlie Irvis and Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton. Finally, he adds that
Miley’s influence extended far beyond these effects. He was not only the band’s most significant soloist but actually wrote, alone or with Ellington, many of the compositions in the band’s book between 1927 and 1929. Although the extent of Miley’s contribution has not yet been accurately assessed, there seems little doubt that those compositions that bear Bubber’s name along with Ellington’s were primarily created by Miley. These include the three most important works of the period -- recorded in late 1926 and early 1927 -- East St. Louis Toodle-Oo, Black and Tan Fantasy, and Creole Love Call. (18)
Rattenbury judiciously points out that Miley was never credited for “having collaborated with Ellington in the composition of Creole Love Call, either on the sheet music, first published in 1926, or in the list of works in Music is My Mistress [Ellington’s autobiography] -- only Ellington’s name appears” (18). And yet, with great irony, the rhetoric of genius then reimposes itself, as Rattenbury includes a transcription of “Creole Love Call” for the reader’s consideration -- crediting it only to Ellington.
It is clear how such discussions threaten the notion of individual or innate genius. And to be fair to its critics, it may be that the reason Collier’s text was more controversial than Rattenbury’s (which on the whole adopts a sympathetic view of collaboration within the Ellington group) is that the former is often quite condescending -- as Francis Davis puts it, Collier’s text was “unconsciously racist” (22), advocating what Tom Piazza calls “a kind of bogus primitivism” (49). Indeed, Collier expresses critical displeasure with the band’s “serious,” concert-oriented music, arguing that the numerous short and “popular” pieces that it produced in the twenties and thirties represented an artistic peak which was never duplicated after WWII. Whatever one thinks of the content of this assessment, Collier expresses it in a way that is problematic; he writes, for instance: “I have seen this sort of thing happen, again and again: the writer of much-admired children’s books abandons his method when he sets out to write an adult novel and tries to imitate Henry James; the successful advertising illustrator paints in a wholly different style when he does what he considers serious work” (221). The analogy here -- Ellington as a writer of children’s books, or as an adman -- both infantilizes the bandleader (thereby recalling a long tradition in which white critics highlight the “primitive” aspects of jazz) and cheapens the work of his group, compounding the uphill battle jazz scholars have had to fight in order to get this music accepted as a legitimate and important art form. Thus we can understand, to a certain extent, the negative reaction Collier’s book provoked.
Still, the controversy is worth considering further.
7 Many critics responded to
Duke Ellington by reasserting the rhetoric of genius, magnifying the contradictions I have already discussed. One good example of this response occurs in
Beyond Category. Hasse refers to recent scholarship suggesting that sometimes Ellington wrote the solos for his bandmates, and that because he had an ear for the style of a particular soloist, audiences often believed that these parts were improvised. Hasse argues that “[t]his discovery does […] suggest a higher valuation of Ellington’s composing genius than some in recent years -- for example, the biographer James Lincoln Collier -- have been willing to concede him” (216); and I would certainly agree that it is evidence of Ellington’s talents. And yet on the immediately preceding page, Hasse makes a very different kind of observation, pointing out that “Ellington created many compositions based on a riff or phrase Johnny Hodges or one of his other players might toss off” (215). He even demonstrates an awareness of the negative response such acts would engender:
Ellington’s use of his players’ melodic ideas became a bone of contention for some of his men—especially Hodges. “Every time Duke would take a few notes that were Johnny’s,” Helen Dance recalled, “Johnny would clear his throat and give him one of his looks out of the side of his eye, and Duke knew that Johnny figured this was a hundred dollars” (215).
Hasse fails to integrate this information into a more complete and realistic conception of Ellington the artist -- a theory of art as an interaction between initiating acts and direct collaboration. Instead he insists on returning to the notion of “Ellington’s composing genius,” allowing this notion to take rhetorical precedence over the fact that Hodges (for instance) also played a role in the composition process.
Mark Tucker reveals similar tensions in his liner notes to
The Blanton-Webster Band (RCA), a 3-CD compilation of the Ellington group’s work between 1944 and 1946. Tucker begins by encouraging us to see Ellington as a singular genius: “In considering Ellington’s rich and productive life as a professional musician […] one’s head spins. How did he do it? What could count for his unparalleled success?” (1). Ironically, when discussing the origins of the piece “Cotton Tail,” Tucker is forced to draw on the notion of direct collaboration, providing such a convincing answer to his own question that one wonders why he needed to ask it in the first place. He writes that “Cotton Tail emerges as a simple, straightforward romp on the chords of Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm […] Ben Webster’s celebrated solo forms Cotton Tail’s centerpiece. The later chorus for the reeds is also thought to be Webster’s invention. In fact, it sounds like a harmonization of a sax solo” (Tucker 8). If we accept the validity of this information, it follows that 84 bars of this composition can be attributed to Ellington (76 bars of ensemble playing and 8 bars of Ellington’s soloing), whereas Webster’s contributions comprise 104 bars (the 64 bar main solo, an 8 bar solo break and 32 bars of harmonized solo at the end). In other words, Webster’s contributions are proportionally greater -- one reason the title of the CD set (
The Blanton-Webster Band) makes sense (in addition to Webster, bassist Jimmy Blanton is featured on this compilation). Of course on one level “measuring” a composition in this way is an admittedly mundane exercise -- but if it is true that Webster contributed more than half of the piece, is it fair to call the tune “Ellington’s,” as the producers of this CD set do? And if so, by what criteria?
One response to this reading is that Ellington’s position as the manipulator of the fragments offered by others (to the extent that this was his role) is more important than the position of those who provided the fragments in the first place -- according to this view, the raw materials of a composition are less important than how those materials are arranged. Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s musical associate for almost thirty years (Strayhorn, ironically, was the composer of many “characteristic” Ellington pieces, including “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Chelsea Bridge,” and “Lotus Blossom”; he also did a great deal of arranging for the band) articulated this argument in a 1962 interview with Bill Coss. Their exchange is worth quoting at length.
COSS: So many people suggest a question which, I suppose, is the kind you expect when someone gets into a position as important as Duke’s. What it comes down to is that Duke doesn’t really write much. What he does is listen to his soloists, takes things they play, and fashion them into songs. Thus the songs belong to the soloists, you do the arrangements, and Duke takes the credit.
STRAYHORN: They used to say that about Irving Berlin too.
But how do you explain the constant flow of songs? Guys come in and out of the band, but the songs keep getting written, and you can always tell an Ellington song.
Anyway, something like a solo, perhaps only a few notes, is hardly a composition. It may be the inspiration, but what do they say about 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration? Composing is work.
So this guy says you and he wrote it, but he thinks he wrote it. He thinks you just put it down on paper. But what you did was put it down on paper, harmonized it, straightened out the bad phrases, and added things to it, so you could hear the finished product. Now, really, who wrote it?
It was ever thus.
But the proof is that these people don’t go somewhere else and write beautiful music. You don’t hear anything else from them. You do from Ellington (DER 502-3).
While I want to defer to Strayhorn’s first-hand expertise here, however, it is not clear to me how to establish that one facet of the compositional process he has described can take precedence over the other. Rather, the initial inception (what Strayhorn appears to concede to the bandmembers who claim Ellington borrowed things from them) and the artful arrangement (the process of “finishing” a piece by transcribing, harmonizing, straightening out and adding) seem mutually dependent. Further, Strayhorn’s comment that “[c]omposing is work” is misleading, because it implies that “something like a solo, perhaps only a few notes” is, by contrast, not work. This view suggests that composition is mediated, edited, worked-over, while improvisation is casual, unthinking, and easy. Yet great improvisers spend long hours practicing and listening to music; an effective solo may have the illusion of spontaneity, but it is typically the result of careful preparation and dedicated toil. This explains why, in response to a woman who had an unfavorable response to something he was playing, trumpeter Miles Davis replied: “It took me twenty years study and practice to work up to what I wanted to play in this performance. How can she expect to listen five minutes and understand it?” (qtd. in Ellington 244).
I might add that it seems to me that there was a “constant flow of songs” (as Strayhorn puts it) not in spite of the fact that bandmembers came and went, but in part because of it. That is, although the lineup in the Ellington band was far more consistent over time than in most bands of its size, the periods of turnover kept the collaborative process fresh. In any case, there were always other musicians present; the composition process never occurred in a vacuum. Thus, although the relationship between initiating acts / direct collaboration may have changed and adapted -- with different people fulfilling the different roles -- the collaborative dynamic itself always remained intact. As for the idea that “these people don’t go somewhere else and write beautiful music” -- this does not disprove the collaborative theory; it merely suggests that those bandmembers who did leave were unable to find the same sort of collaborative relationship in their new ensembles.
Direct collaboration in the case of “Cotton Tail” involves more than just the input of Ellington and Webster. In addition to the bandleader and soloist, we could also point to composer George Gershwin as an artistic source, for it is his “I Got Rhythm” chord changes which form the harmonic underpinning of the piece -- a pattern often referred to by jazz musicians as “rhythm changes.” As Richard J. Lawn and Jeffrey L. Hellmer put it in their discussion of this tradition: “The original composition that inspired rhythm changes was George Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’ from his 1930 musical Girl Crazy […] Hundreds of different melodies have been written over variations of this progression” (203). Improvising on a commonly-understood set of chord changes is in fact one of the standard practices in jazz aesthetics. Charles Hartmann, for instance, writes that “[m]any of [altoist Charlie] Parker’s important compositions were new tunes constructed on old harmonic foundations: ‘Donna Lee’ is based on ‘Back Home in Indiana,’ ‘Ko Ko’ on Cherokee,’ and so on” (19). A more extreme example of this phenomenon is “Round Midnight”; one of the most popular of jazz standards, it is in many senses a “communally authored” piece. It was originally written by Thelonius Monk in 1944, but when trumpeter Cootie Williams recorded it, he embellished the melody. When sheet music transcriptions were made of Williams’ recording, they included his embellishments, which were subsequently accepted as an integral part of the piece. Paul Berliner continues:
[. . .] when Dizzy Gillespie recorded the piece in 1946, he added to its form an eight measure introduction and coda that he had originally used as the coda of his version of “I Can’t Get Started.” By 1955, after the “imported introduction” had itself become a standard feature among renditions by various artists -- including Monk himself -- Miles Davis personalized the composition further by adding a 3-measure interlude to the end of the 1st chorus, which other artists subsequently adopted as a formal part of the composition (Berliner 88).
The complete “Round Midnight,” which is still often attributed to Monk, was thus actually authored by four separate musicians at separate times.
It is not unusual for improvisatory arts to draw upon relatively static forms that can serve as a fundamental structure for the improvisor; oral poetry like the Homeric epic is a well-known example of this phenomenon in the west. In this sense the use of “I Got Rhythm” as the basis for numerous other jazz tunes is perhaps nothing new. The difference may be that whereas the Homeric poets inhabited a pre-capitalist, artistically anonymous world in which the multiple threads of collaboration were considered unremarkable, in today’s era of copyright law and celebrity, it is possible for one individual (or, more accurately now, one corporation) to claim ownership of a work, and to reap the corresponding financial rewards. Usually such practices take the form of cultural appropriation -- raising the question of whether it makes sense to stop at Gershwin as the “inventor” of the aforementioned rhythm changes. Certainly, like Elvis Presley many decades later, Gershwin helped popularize for a white audience what had previously been considered “black music” -- but whatever the racial provenance of the rhythm changes progression, it is highly unlikely that Gershwin was the first to use it. In any case, for the time being it is at least important to point out that the Gershwin connection adds another layer to the relationship between initiating acts and direct collaboration in the story of “Cotton Tail.”
The third leg of the collaborative model of art I have been describing is what I earlier termed contextual (or indirect) collaboration, or the idea that artworks are shaped by “passive” entities such as the physical environments and historical moments in which they exist, as well as by the technologies through which they are produced. I will close this section on Ellington, then, by examining a case of contextual collaboration in a particular work associated with his group.
This example was initially suggested to me by a recording of the tenor saxophonist Big Jay McNeely, an important practitioner of the “honking school” of R&B saxophone popular in the late 1940s and 50s. The recording is question is McNeely’s rendition of his own “Deacon’s Hop,” broadcast live from downtown Los Angeles’s Olympia Auditorium in 1951. McNeely’s performance is bookended by the manic voice of DJ Hunter Hancock, who opens and closes the recording (“We’re gonna rock! And we’re gonna rock here until two o’clock in the mornin’!”). It is accompanied throughout by the sound of a live crowd. The fact that the performance was recorded in the early fifties suggests that there were probably a limited number of mics present -- a suggestion supported by the uneven recording levels between McNeely, Hancock, and the crowd, all of whom sound like they are competing for a single input. But the recording quality is interesting for another reason: there are moments where the audience response seems to be strangely out of sync with McNeely’s solo -- rising to a fevered pitch when nothing particularly interesting is happening musically.
The liner notes to the collection from which my copy of this recording comes (
Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles (1921-1956) (Rhino)) provide some clues to what might be going on here, and its connection to the artistic role of context. In one section of the CD booklet, saxophonist Art Pepper describes the contemporary scene in Los Angeles: “One time I was at the Downbeat, and Big Jay McNeely was playing across the street. He marched up and down the street playing his horn, he lay down on his back playing his horn, he came into the Downbeat playing his horn” (qtd. in Dawson 83). Note how Pepper cites McNeely’s physical presence (marching, laying down), a description illustrated by the Bob Willoughby photograph on the next page in the CD booklet [see below], in which McNeely is indeed pictured lying flat on his back as he plays (this was and continues to be McNeely’s trademark). The even more interesting thing about this photo is the fact that McNeely is not the focal point: he takes up only about a third of the photographic space, and furthermore, is depicted off to the side. Central to the image, on the other hand, are the audience members who crowd the stage’s edge. Willoughby shot McNeely from behind, and so we get a performer’s-eye-view of several fans leaning onto the stage. These fans are clearly lost in the throes of an emotional response: fists clenched, eyes closed, heads tilted back -- all gestures that would become commonplace in the rock ‘n roll era.
In short, Pepper’s description and this image both suggest that those seemingly out-of-sync bursts of crowd noise were in all likelihood responses to the physical portion of McNeely’s act, which might not have always corresponded with what he was playing. Taken together, the recording and the photograph provide striking evidence that audience participation, in the form of a whole range of physical gestures of pleasure, contributed significantly to the creation of the performance.
The usual mode of thinking about a live performance of this sort -- a mode that bastions the traditional notion of genius -- is to perceive it as a linear or top-down emanation directly from the “heart and soul” of the artist (again, as Grigely put it, we are used to thinking of how a painting transforms a room). According to this view, McNeely “produced” the audience response with a combination of musicality and theatrics, and he similarly inspired Hancock’s fast-talking rap. And yet the problem with this etiological reading is that it is difficult to know where exactly to stop: how do we know where to finally locate the “origin” of an artwork? The idea that McNeely is the true “creator” of this work is compromised, for instance, by the fact that “Deacon’s Hop” is actually based on the old jazz standard “Broadway,” and further by the fact that McNeely was one of a school of “honking sax” players that also included Louis Jordan and Red Prysock. A more effective way to conceive of this performance is to think of it in interactive terms: the piece is clearly changed by the presence of the audience and Hancock (compare this recording with McNeely’s 1949 studio recording of the same tune). Artist and audience share a responsiveness and give and take in the performance (note that call and response patterns are common in the African musical traditions from which blues, R&B and jazz were derived). This interpretation is supported by McNeely’s comment in a recent interview that “the people are really… we’re the ones that should humble ourselves to them because they are our audience” (Soul-patrol.com).
Ellington too spoke of the importance of an audience:
Every once in awhile, you’ll notice that I drop out of vaudeville [i.e., the concert circuit] for a week or a few weeks and play dance engagements. That wakes up the boys and they get back into form. When they see people moving around the floor, they’ve got to put snap and ginger into their work […] Perhaps [they] imagine they see the members of the audience circling around the floor. Anyway, there’s a big difference in their work, and perhaps there’s a difference in my work. Somehow, I always feel that we’re not playing for [the audience]: we’re playing with them and entertaining them. We like to know that they feel they’re taking part in it with us, that they’d like to sing or dance (Hasse 159; emphases added).
A good example of this dynamic is the famous 1957 recording alluded to earlier: “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” featured on
Duke Ellington and his Orchestra at Newport (Columbia). As the album title suggests, this was a live performance. It marked a revitalization of Ellington’s career, going on to become one of his best-selling recordings and coinciding with his recognition on the cover of
Time magazine a few weeks after the festival (a before then unheard-of accolade for a jazz musician). “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” featured an unplanned 27-chorus solo by tenor saxophonist Paul Gonsalves. Gonsalves’ solo, like that of Ben Webster in the recording of “Cotton Tail,” occupies a significant percentage of the piece’s overall timeframe (just over six minutes out of a total of 14:37), and thus offers another instance of direct collaboration. But aside from Gonsalves’ contribution, aside from the record’s historical importance, and aside from the arranged portion of the music, this performance is well-known for another reason, described in the reissue liner notes by Stanley Dance. According to Dance, Gonsalves’ solo
[p]rovoked pandemonium among the festival crowd, especially when a blond in a black dress got up in one of the front boxes and began to dance ecstatically. Eyes closed, paying little attention to the microphone (hence variations in the recording level), Gonsalves presented a dramatically convincing picture of the driven jazz musician, an archetype possessed by the emotional intensity of fervent improvisation, fired by a remorseless rhythm section. His triumph was not short-lived; it was well-remembered and tended to dominate his career in repetitions demanded by audiences everywhere for the rest of his life […] “It happened,” [Gonsalves] said, “that there was a real competetive feeling in the band that night.” You can hear that in the way its members -- not merely the energizing rhythm section -- urge him on.
Whatever the musical merits of Gonsalves’ playing here, it is clear that the contexual collaboration of the evening -- the frenzy of the crowd, the “blond in a black dress,” the in-and-out-of-focus effect created by the microphone, the shouts of encouragement -- were all equally vital to the performance’s success. In fact, if one measures the composition by what is audible, there are moments when the sound of the crowd outweighs any sound being made by the orchestra itself, and Gonsalves’ playing in particular is at a low volume throughout. Again, a listener has only to imagine how different this performance would have sounded in the controlled environment of a studio (the 1938 recording of the piece is instructive in this regard) -- how 27 choruses of blues might not have been quite as interesting without the sounds of the audience, and more importantly, without our knowledge of what the significance of those sounds was. Of course, the true experience of this collaboration happened at the festival itself, but as with “Deacon’s Hop,” the recording provides evidence -- the trace left behind -- of how the audience took part in the creation of the piece, in a way which thus far has yet to be accounted for by either discussions of traditional musical genius or western copyright law.
A counterargument intrudes here, to the effect that, being live performances, the McNeely and Ellington examples don’t necessarily offer convincing evidence for the idea of contextual collaboration by an audience in general. Such a counterargument might suggest that the audiences at these performances were unusually rowdy, whereas in genres like “classical” music audiences are usually “polite.” It might also suggest that the contextual collaboration of an audience does not come into play in a studio recording session, or in private listening done at home. Yet such an argument assumes that “quiet” audiences do not physically participate in musical performances, and indeed that music can actually exist without an audience. These assumptions point to what Susan McLary calls “one of the principal claims to supremacy in European classical music (and other forms of high culture)” -- the idea that music “transcends the body, that it is concerned with the nobler domains of imagination and even metaphysics” (57). Yet there is a great deal of evidence that, regardless of genre, music is always a physical art form (as John Blacking put it, “[m]any, if not all, of music’s essential processes can be found in the constitution of the human body and in patterns of interaction of bodies in society” (qtd. in Storr 24)). The “profoundly deaf” percussionist Evelyn Glennie argues that
[h]earing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too […] For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing.
In Glennie’s conception, the body becomes the ultimate transducer, the mechanism by which music itself exists, and thus an important component of any listening situation -- as well as a vital form of contextual collaboration.
The body has of course long been associated with jazz -- the “vocalized tone” referred to earlier is but one means by which jazz musicians demonstrate this association, which can be partly traced to the music’s African precursors. But even in the western “high art” tradition referred to by McLary, there is palpable evidence that music is more than a merely intellectual phenomenon, even in the case of private listening. Consider for instance the breathing that is audible in the Lindsay String Quartet recordings of Beethoven’s late string quartets (released on the Musical Heritage Society label), or the palpable physicality in the
painting reproduced on the cover of Tia Denora’s
Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (1995). Credited to Albert Graefle, the latter is a depiction of Beethoven, seated at the piano, and surrounded by four men who listen to him perform. While Beethoven occupies the central position, it is actually the dramatic physicality of his small audience that dominates the painting. Of the three men who are seated, one is leaning back fully, staring at the ceiling; the second is turned away from the piano, his face completely covered by his hand; and the third clutches his chin in a classic gesture of contemplation. The fourth man, standing behind Beethoven, has his arms crossed and stares pensively at the pianist. In the process of being -- to adopt Glennie’s term -- “touched” by the music in this way, this small audience transforms it -- even though they are clearly not as demonstrative about that transformation as the audience in the Ellington or McNeely recordings.
* * * * *Notes for this section
1. Note again that the word “romantic” here is intended as shorthand for a complex set of views associated with artistic genius. It is not intended as a monolithic notion.
2. In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell notes that writers / speakers can avoid the trouble of being careful about language by “simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you—even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent—and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself” (505).
3. In Music, the Brain and Ecstasy, Robert Jourdain describes how composers perpetuate this religious dimension: “Witness Handel, found in tears by his servant while writing the entirety of his messiah during a twenty-four-day mania: ‘I thought I saw all of heaven before me, and the Great God himself.’ Or Puccini: ‘The music of this opera was dictated to me by God. I was merely instrumental in putting it on paper and communicating it to the public.’ Or Brahms: ‘I felt that I was in tune with the Infinite, and there is no thrill like it’” (170).
4. It is important not to assume that this view of art derives primarily from either “high culture” (where it is construed as “genius”) or “low culture” (where it is construed as “celebrity”). Rather, these are part of the same impulse. Simon Frith points out that “the mass cultural notion of stardom, combining a Romantic belief in genius with a promise to make it individually available as commodity (and merchandise) derives as much from the packaging of ‘high’ artists as from the hype of the low” (31).
5. Grigely’s further explication of this is worth quoting: “As most Keats scholars know, Milnes accomplished his task [.e., the editorialization of Keats] by means of a careful exclusion of materials (most of Keats’s carpe diem poems were omitted, as were references to Fanny Brawne in his letters, not to mention the letters to Fanny herself), and by judiciously correcting the glaring intransigencies of Keats’s syntax and diction. In one sonnet, the line ‘The anxious month, relieving of its pains’ is changed to ‘relieved of its pains’; in another sonnet Milnes changed ‘browless idiotism’ to ‘brainless idiotism’; in yet another sonnet he added a word to correct a missing foot; in another poem he reversed word order. The previously unpublished poems were extensively repunctuated and edited [. . .]” (34).
6. Though this might seem to be a trivial observation within an academic context, outside of that context, translation is generally assumed to be something other than a type of authorship.
7. And indeed much of the critical response to Collier seemed to be couched in what Joseph Horowitz calls an “attitude of hortatory, contentious reverence” for Ellington. Writing about classical music, Horowitz indicates that this attitude “craves and coddles objects of worship. It denounces imposters and wards off agnostics. It is often encountered among adolescents and adult males. (Are women too socialized, insufficiently self-involved, to fetishize personal preferences so belligerently?) Consider, too, that prodigious discophiles are always men” (19).
