Re: Thanks! (was: List Moderation)

[Ralph Dumain <rdumain@xxxxxxx>]

At 06:18 PM 5/26/99 +0300, j laari wrote:
>But I also know that you haven't answered to this question: what
>makes jazz aesthetically valuable (and comparable to more trad.
>art music)? At least you haven't told it so that even I could have
>understood it.

Suppose I asked you what makes European classical music aesthetically
valuable?  What would your reaction be?  Are you a music educator, a
professional musicologist?  Do you have a reading list handy that explains
how the music is put together, that proves why it's such great stuff?
Could you name one book off the top of your of you head that explains
classical music?  Would you just tell me to go listen to Beethoven?  Would
you tell me to bugger off and come back for serious discussion when I have
the minimal competence to be taken seriously as an interlocutor?

I know I wouldn't be spending my precious spare time reading this kind of
literature; I'd be listening to the music.  Maybe Gunther Schuller explains
it all in one of his books.  Maybe Paul Berliner's (who brought us
beautiful recordings of Shona mbira music) recent book on improvisation
would explain how it's done.  Oddly, I'm more familiar with the
ideological, sociological, and historical literature on jazz than the
aesthetics of it, a fact I ought to be ashamed of, but an autobiographical
accident of history.  Which reminds me, add LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka's
BLUES PEOPLE to the list, as one of the pioneer sociological historical
efforts.

>My interest in asking that is basically this: is aesthetic value
>reducible
>to ideological/discursive practices? (One can interpret reception
>aesthetics to represent such a view.

I probably don't understand your question, but I'd answer "no" anyway.  I
can't imagine anything more revolting than reducing aesthetics to an
ideological practice.  And, if we are talking about music, I don't know
what you mean by discursive practice.  Loosely one can talk of musical
languages, but learning to appreciate a different musical "language" is
just not the same sort of thing as learning a real language.

BTW, though one could talk about "resistance" in connection with the
history of African-American music, I'm completely against judging the
"emancipatory" value of art in such terms.  I'm interested almost solely in
instrinsic aesthetic properties and the effect they have on human beings,
which is the only place "emancipation" has a meaningful place.  Art as
propaganda is not my bag.

There are volumes to be written about the aesthetic qualities of a whole
range of black music, its various incarnations and mutations, and their
evolution, the hows and whys, and I'd love to discuss them with more than
the five people I already do, but I have to ask the question: what would be
the point of discussing all this on the Frankfurt list, if most of the
discussion is irrelevant to the Frankfurt School and the Frankfurt School
is only tangentially relevant to a substantive discussion of music?  The
prerequisites for such a discussion are not knowing German, not studying
with Kracauer, not digesting the Frankfurt School and the history of German
philosophy: the prerequisites are a detailed knowledge of the music and its
history.  So before we even begin we have a crisis of credentials.

This even before we get to the cultural limitations and biases that totally
discredit the Frankfurters as an authority.  For Adorno, the only real
music was bourgeois European music, by his own admission.  Indian classical
music, Japanese music, Balinese gamelan music, African music, none of this
was recognized in his world view.  And that such judgments come from a
_German_ ought to make them suspect from the gitgo.  A German is a very
small thing to be in the scheme of things.  Just look at their repulsive,
marionette-like folk dances, their ugly, thin-lipped mugs, listen to their
insipid folk music and their hideous-sounding language: the "master race"
has got to be one of the most repellent creatures on the face of the earth,
and we are supposed to go by their standards of beauty?  Oh, excuse me, I
forgot the Franks eschewed folk culture and took refuge in high culture,
and most of them were Jews anyway.  Well, for me, their mentality is still
German down to their toenails: they never understood anybody but the people
around them.  I deny them authority on any cultural matter but their own
decay, of which they are the definitive authorities.

Once we dispose of illegimitate authority and re-orient ourselves as to who
must prove what to whom, we can begin to ask real questions.
Macrosociological judgments on aesthetic forms do not impress me.  That
various forms are constrained by economic, institutional, market factors
does not settle all judgments once and for all.  Even the shaping and
standardization of taste doesn't say everything that must be said.  Lyrics
of course have demonstrable ideological content, and one could say that
about musical forms too in many cases, but that doesn't answer all the
relevant questions.

>.... what I was looking (asking) for - a clear statement that,
>for example, "jazz is art because it's structurally and
>melodically complex". Gee, am I despite of my claims asking
>obligatory simplification...? Perhaps so, but that at least would
>clarify to me your point. Aha, I could say, Ralph has committed to
>such and such aesthetics... That's basically what I was looking
>for.

OK, this is a great starting point.  Let's start from the point that jazz
is a structurally, melodically, harmonically, rhythmically complex and
flexible form of music, not reducible to stereotypical formulaic
expressions, with an inherent tendency built into its history to innovate
and evolve.  I'm not going to argue the obvious.  I'd rather get down to
more specific questions, both about the characteristics of jazz in
different periods and the changing reception of various subgenres, and what
the problem is today.  However, I begin from different presumptions than,
say, the opposition between the popular and the esoteric, and the
presumption of greater musical authenticity based on marginalization.  The
whole Sun Ra discussion has to be re-cast on different premises, for
example.  The Wynton Marsalis phenomenon is interesting in a variety of
ways; one of them is that Wynton is so obviously a product of market
segmentation and market forces, esp. since he was molded and became
successful at such an early, impressionable age playing music from other
generations, both classical and jazz: "authenticity" just happens to be his
market niche.  What went wrong with fusion, or free jazz, are other
interesting questions.  (My current interest is the ideology of spontaneity
[not the same thing as improvisation!] that justifies so much bad
unstructured music.)

Then there are a whole range of somewhat different questions regarding less
complex genres of popular music.  Given that popular genres must be held to
certain restrictions before they break down as genres, how do we account
for the vitality or corruption of various genres, as explained by an
interaction of market forces with intrinsic genre-related qualities?  How
does the blues function differently than rock or country as a both a genre
and a market?  Motown was a product of a great deal of conscious
contrivance and market manipulation as well as the spontaneity of talents
emerging out of the woodwork, or should I say the ghetto.  Why was that
stuff so good, limitations aside, in contrast to so much shit that has come
out since?

How about popular music in relation to dance?  Does functional music--dance
music--have to be banal, or can it be as good as anything else?  What is
the difference between an Afro-Cuban orchestra of the 1940s and Glenn
Miller?  Is popular black music as dead and mechanical in Brazil or West
Africa today as it is in the USA and why not?  Could Bloch have been wrong
about the jitterbug but right about disco had he lived to see it?

There is so much territory to cover, and so much preliminary detail to
discuss before anything resembling the Frankfurt School becomes relevant to
the discussion, and then I would suggest only when the underlying
rottenness of something comes into focus, that I seriously question whether
this is the appropriate forum to pursue such questions to the depth that
they deserve.  I certainly didn't see anybody else make an effort.  And now
that I know there is one person here who intends to make a publication for
himself out of this debate, why should I single-handedly do his work for
him, or for anybody else on this list?  What's in it for me?  What are any
of you giving away?

>There's obviously 'clarity' in several senses.
>One being the 'clarity' and obligatory simplifications of logical
>empiricism they criticised. And, of course, denial of theory. Yet
>Adorno's writings are very clear, at least to me. I'm no
>specialist on Adorno but what I've read have usually been lucid
>conceptual extrapolations (i'm thinking of parts of Negative
>dialectics I read last autumn).

I agree.  Adorno is a great read in English translation, even when the
translations are bad.  Adorno also has his tongue firmly pressed in his
cheek in some of his best writing.  Adorno has a superb sense of irony,
oddly lacking in the industry that has formed around him.  Irony is most
appropriate when one knows the discourse of one's environment is
essentially not what it purports to be.  Ironically, Adorno's NEGATIVE
DIALECTICS, a book inherently restricted to a select audience, is really a
book that is not for that selected audience, but a book posited upon
everyman.  It is esoteric but non-institutional.

>About the rest of your post: I didn't recognised myself as the
>addressee of it.

For those for whom the shoes fits .....