In Africa especially, songs have continuously played an important role in shaping social relationships. In early oral societies songs, dance and performance embodied the people's aspirations and expectations. Africans graced almost all occasions with songs and dance. They sang and danced for joy, grief, love, sorrow, hate and even during labour and work. For most African societies, rhythm was an inextricable part of their everyday existence. Songs were therefore an expression of a whole people's experiences and not an individual's property, hence the existence of Shona hunting songs, Nguni bridal songs, Zulu war songs, to cite but a few examples. The music summarised the experiences of a whole people and were communally owned and enjoyed. It was the music of the people, about the people and by the people themselves.
One major change that the choir concept effected was to cut a clear division between those who were "gifted with voices" and those who were not, who consequently became the audience in a society where, before, virtually everyone was considered a singer in their own way.
- From The Jazz Book:
The message of jazz is not only "Be yourself." Jazz is also telling us "Free yourself." Jazz is a music of community, of being together, of sharing, of skill, of negotiation: ultimately, of the ability to communicate. (xiii)
Old New Orleans must have been an incredibly musical city. We know of some thirty orchestras from the first decade of the twentieth century. To appreciate what that means, you have to know that the Crescent City had little more than two hundred thousand inhabitants then. And in a city of that size, there were thirty orchestras, playing a vital, new kind of music. (6-7)
- From Eric Havelock's "The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences":
a nonliterate culture is not necessarily a primitive one
- Lawrence Lessig on Charlie Rose: (Too bad you can't embed non-YouTube videos into a Blogger template. Or at least not without some html knowledge. I'm particularly interested in what John Philip Sousa said in 1906, regarding community singing. Also, the "infernal machines," record players.)
- Dizzy Gillespie, "Tin Tin Deo":
The above bullets constitutes some "box" research. I've decided to turn my blog post into an experiment with box-based construction, as well as sort of a proposal for my final project. (Plus it helps me get some of my thoughts organized.)
My idea is this:
Ear players play music by ear. Many of them cannot or do not read music. Yet they can express themselves wonderfully. I think this parallels much of our class discussion regarding print literacy, moral panics, and so forth.
For centuries, ear players, folk musicians, what you will, were not able to preserve their individual work. They could only pass down a tradition. Then came the record player. In less than 100 years, an entire regime of taste--one dominated by written music and musicians who could read and therefore perform it--was replaced by a regime of taste based on personal authenticity and expressivity. Just compare Louis Armstrong with Pavoratti.
Classical music tends not to resonate as strongly with contemporary listeners. It lacks wildness, abandon, informality. You're not supposed to sing along and dance, you're supposed to listen and respect. That says it all.
The new regime of taste, symbolized by Armstrong, quickly evolved. By the time you get to Dizzy Gillespie above (and I personally will usually choose to listen to Dizzy before Louis), jazz is an art music. How and why this came about is mysterious, but the bebop moment is clearly the moment of departure. Rock and roll would get people dancing again, and jazz would quickly start to feel as distant to many listeners as classical music. Some even call jazz "America's classical music."
To digress a bit further, Frank Zappa has some interesting commentary on taste-making:
So laissez faire cigar chompers are better stewards of taste than "hip" or "educated" people. Who are the gatekeepers of the market place?
But before I try to sort all that out, which is probably beyond the scope of this semester, I should focus on the following. New Orleans in the early twentieth century was sort of like Athens around 450 B.C., in the sense that a new technology (sound recording) was enabling a new type of person (musically illiterate) to become really really influential.
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