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Friday, April 15, 2011

Agency within Structure: The “Bottom-up” Aspect of Adorno’s “Top-down” Approach to Popular Culture

These are quick comments discussing two pieces I read for a graduate seminar in ethnomusicology. I get upset by current musicology's general misappropriation/misinterpretation of Adornian aesthetics and critical theory. For example, the version of "On Popular Music" that we read for this class rendered the entire ending section of that essay absent, the very section that was a true defense of his position.

In a comparison of classic theories of consumption and culture, Timothy Taylor (2001) situates the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools as “top-down” and “bottom-up,” respectively (p. 22).  For him, these theoretical positions “represent two poles” (p. 23).  Such a characterization is problematic, for just as the concept of polarity itself presupposes a pure opposition—the “north” and “south” could never meet, nor could the “positive” ever mix with the “negative”—the rhetorical use of this concept by Taylor presupposes that these two schools are theoretically static.  It is, in fact, this very assumption that makes it necessary for him to attempt to maintain that both perspectives are simultaneously effective as analytical tools (p. 25).  The flaw of Taylor’s argument is not in his realization that neither approach (i.e. that of the Frankfurt or Birmingham School) is wholly wrong, and hence that there is a need for his notion of a “double movement” between them; the flaw instead lies is in his claim that neither one is wholly right—“right” to the extent that neither group sufficiently maintains enough of both polarities (e.g. agency and structure) to maintain theoretical autonomy (p. 25).  It is possible to argue that both schools of thought are more dynamic in their own right than Taylor will admit, but the Frankfurt School, in particular—with Adorno as its exemplar—contains enough of the sought for dialectic diversity. Contrary to what Taylor posits, this critical approach turns out to be as much “bottom-up” as it is “top-down.”

The first of the two critical areas I address herein revolves around Taylor’s focus on agency, or in the case of his description of the Frankfurt School, its lack thereof.  The “top-down” approach, Taylor states, describes a situation where “the so-called culture industries promulgate their products on a public that accepts them unquestioningly” (2001, p. 22).  The implicit assumption here is that because the public uncritically swallows whole the pill offered by the culture industry, it (and the individuals that constitute it) does not have any agency in making its decision, or constructing meaning.   Taylor supports the prior statement through his description of the Birmingham School (i.e. the “bottom-up” approach and subsequently the polar opposite of the Frankfurt School).  This view, he claims, recognizes “that people make their meanings out of mass-produced and mass-mediated cultural forms” (p. 22).  This is in line with Taylor’s pre-occupation with the rhetoric of polarity (and the purity it implies), for it appears that his conception of “agency” seeks to avoid contamination—to remain separate from “structure.”  It is then apparent why he overlooks the existence of agency and meaning in the Frankfurt School.

If making choices and creating meaning is the hallmark of real agency, as Taylor (2001) holds it to be, it would seem unlikely one would find any mention of it in a “top-down” approach.  Adorno (2002) reveals that the opposite is true—public/individual agency and choice are, in fact, aspects of a successfully manipulative culture industry.  Commenting on the consumer of popular music he states: “They ‘join in the ranks,’ but this joining does not only imply their conformity to standards; it also implies a decision to conformthe decision is an act of will (emphasis mine)” (p. 466).  Assuming the role of consumer requires more than a mere dismissal of resistance, and whereas Adorno uses “will” instead of “agency,” it is undeniable that they are partners in reference to the same concept (2002, p. 466).  Interestingly, Adorno is optimistic, for he claims that the listener’s “will is still alive and that under certain circumstances it may be strong enough to get rid of the superimposed influences which dog its every step” (p. 468).  Where, then, is the structural determinism that Taylor claims comprises this “top-down” approach???  It is no doubt lost in the rhetoric of polarization.

At root, Taylor dislocates “agency” from its proper position.  His intent is to keep it pure, to situate it outside of structure, or at least outside of its influence.  But if “structure” were to allow an autonomous “agency” then it would cease to be “structure” as such.  Adorno, and the Frankfurt School, on the other hand make it very clear that agency is an irrevocable aspect of their “top-down” approach.  The “bottom-upness,” if you will, of agency, however is located (and contaminated in compared to Taylor’s pure “agency”) within structure.  Because “top-down” contains the “bottom-up,” the Frankfurt School successfully invalidates Taylor’s rhetoric of polarization and provides a theory as diverse and dynamic at that which he claims to support.





Adorno, T. W. (2002). On Popular Music (S. H. Gillespie, Trans.). In R. D. Leppert (Ed.), Essays on music (pp. 437-469). Berkeley, Calif. [u.a.: Univ. of California Press.
Taylor, T. D. (2001). Strange sounds : music, technology & culture. New York: Routledge.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Derridean Composition in the Avant-Garde

            Alvin Lucier’s piece I Am Sitting in a Room (1970) is an example of the deconstructive techniques used by the avant-garde to address the limits and interrogate the position of language as a mode of communication. Lucier tape records himself speaking a phrase in an empty room and then continues to double the recording on itself in a process of art creation that at the same time is a deconstruction of language.  Solie points out “that with each repetition the natural resonant frequencies of the room are reinforced, until eventually the speech patterns [read language] are entirely obliterated by emergent, eerily surrealistic sounds.”
    It is possible to substitute the semiotic and read this work as a comment of the destruction of humanity (language being unique to humans) by technology, or the mass reproductions of capitalism.  Ruth Solie, however, has analyzed the unique text-music relationships that exist in the avant-garde and takes the piece as less symbolically layered, she describes it this way: “The composition has a number of features emblematic of postmodernism… Lucier explains the process he will go through in making it, a strangely Derridean procedure in which the composition may be said to deconstruct its analysis.”[1]  This is certainly layered, there is more to the piece than simple aural experience, but it avoids projecting on to the object.     
            Lucier is employing the deconstruction of the language medium to achieve a greater communicative effect.  Interesting to note is the “speech impediment” that Lucier possesses.  As the piece continues, this “defect” in his speech is essentially removed, but instead of being “another layer of textual deconstruction in the process,” as Solie comments, it is a humanistic approach to questioning the assumed superiority of language in the mediation of communication.  If language is the “natural” way humans communicate, if it is intrinsic, why then would deconstruction remove flaws?  Why is it flawed to begin with?
            What Lucier seems to be suggesting, and what others in the avant-garde music scene also suggest, is a reconsideration of the stress western thought places on words.[2]  Through the melting of the text/music or language/music dichotomy Lucier is able to reveal just how much is missed when we pick favorites.  This technique allows us to approach in some form whatever exists before mediation.  The inevitability of mediation and the folly of a hierarchal preference of its forms, namely language, are addressed and forcibly reconsidered. 




[1] Ruth A. Solie, "When the Message Becomes the Medium: Text-Music Relationships in the Avant-Garde," Ars Lyrica 4(1989): 16.
[2] Ibid., 7-18.

Harmony as Habermasian Critique of Postmodernity in Laurie Anderson’s O Superman

            Theodor W. Adorno begins his Aesthetic Theory like this:  “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking.  Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.”[1]  A semester spent discussing the nuanced topics of women, performance, and the avant-garde make Adorno’s statement all the more acceptable.  It is not surprising, then, that Laurie Anderson’s crossover success, O Superman, requires approach from this take nothing for granted perspective.  McClary certainly recognizes the broad range of interpretation: “Depending on your point of view, then, Anderson’s strategy of simultaneously evoking and denying classic structural dichotomies is nihilistic, transgressive, or exuberant.”[2]
            Earlier in that work McClary offers a harmonic analysis of O Superman:  “Two alternating chords inflect the pedal [middle C] harmonically: an Aᵇ major triad in first inversion and a root-position C minor triad.”  This strikingly simple harmonic structure can reveal a larger and certainly more complex statement (if one refuses to take it for granted).  Anderson’s middle-C pendulum is commenting on the historical movements that influenced 20th-century culture.  She is, in fact, offering a Habermasian critique of modernity versus post-modernity.  Habermas has suggested “that instead of giving up modernity and its project as a lost cause, we should learn from the mistakes of those extravagant programs [earlier he mentions various avant-garde approaches to art] which have tried to negate modernity.”[3]  How does the cycling of two chords reveal any critique in line with these words, particularly when the piece as a whole addresses issues of gender, technology, the body, and American politics?[4]  McClary’s analysis of this harmony as a comment “about the premise of Western musical discourse and our own postmodern condition,” proves supportive and applicable to a Habermasian critique.
            If we, as is the tradition of the Western binary thought process, divide tonality into semiotic dichotomies, then major/minor might equal happy/sad.[5]  Major/minor in this piece actually equal postmodernity/modernity.  McClary comments:  “the fact that the major alternative is always unstable (because it is in inversion) and the minor always stable suggests that the security lies in the negative option.”[6]  She continues, “Thus although the major triad was established first (and has some claim to the status of “tonic”) it is increasingly hear as an inflection poised to resolve to C minor.”[7] 
            It is possible then to read Anderson in terms of the statement made by Habermas above.  The postmodern tendency to remove questions of right, or objectivity, allow the artist to effectively destroy history, thus forgetting where they are in the stream of time.  The major chord of O Superman, then, gets accepted as tonic initially just because it is heard first.  Postmodernity has tried so hard to destroy modernity that it has positioned itself in the same manner as that Aᵇ triad.  Because the difference of one tone is such a drastic one, Anderson can use the minor chord to bring the postmodern back to consciousness and the listener realizes that temporality is often perceived.  The C-minor triad is actually the tonic, despite its flaws, just as, for Habermas, flawed modernity is where solid enough ground can be found to offer art “a way out.”[8]


[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, International Library of Phenomenology and Moral Sciences. (London ; Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1983), 1.
[2] Susan McClary, "This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," in Feminine Endings : Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 145.
[3] J Habermas and S Ben-Habib, "Modernity Versus Postmodernity," New German Critique (1981): 11.
[4] McClary, "This Is Not a Story My People Tell: Musical Time and Space According to Laurie Anderson," 141.
[5] Ibid., 142.
[6] Ibid., 142.
[7] Ibid., 142.
[8] Habermas and Ben-Habib, "Modernity Versus Postmodernity," 11.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Objectification as Utility in Martha Wilson’s Painted Lady

            It is no stretch to say that cosmetics, the make-up products found in retailers worldwide, are often tools of objectification.  Make-up, when applied to the face, creates a mask, a “made-up” appearance, one that is supposedly more appealing to those who might find that face in their line of vision.  Altering the visual appearance of the face with these substances is not intrinsically gendered, but given that women are the dominant consumers of these products, and that certain made-up facial appendages on women are fetishized in western culture (red-lips, rouged cheeks, etc), it is safe to assume that the focus of these tools of objectification is the feminine countenance. 
            If a goal of feminism is an attack on the idea of woman as object, it seems unlikely that any feminist artist would willingly reproduce images easily mistaken as antagonistic to that goal, art that might appear sympathetic to male fetishization of female form.  Martha Wilson’s Painted Lady (1972), out of context and for mere face value, does just this.  Wilson’s willing submission to objectification, however, does not reify male hegemony.  Wilson situates objectification as utility; she puts masculine notions of the required feminine aesthetic to work for her. 
            That Wilson does this is not completely lost on her audience, but the goal of Painted Lady has been misinterpreted, particularly early on in its existence, despite any awareness of objectification as utility.  Jayne Wark comments:  “works like Painted Lady (1972), in which Wilson transformed herself into a paradigm of hyperbolic femininity, have given rise to interpretations of her work as preoccupied with how beauty myths objectify and oppress women.”[1]  That these types of interpretations exist indicate just how deep the objectification of women runs; this is actually what Wilson was addressing.  Wark continues, “By manipulating the binary framework and naturalizing narratives of gender identity, Wilson revealed how they obscure and authenticate the masculinist assumptions of artistic identity.”[2]  Wilson makes use of the Brechtian dialectic, within which Wark quotes Elin Diamond as arguing, “the performer-subject disappears neither into a representation of the character nor into a representation of the actor: each remains processual, contingent, incomplete,” to situate herself in a position of hyper-consciousness.  From this vantage point Wilson is able to guide objectified notions of identity through social signifiers of beauty into the realm of utility, and once there, society’s, men’s, the audience’s, whole mess of intertwined expectations is forced to address itself.
            Not every viewer is aware of the critical churning of expectations that objectification creates, or that Wilson employs, this would negate the need to (and/or the possibility to) utilize these notions to artistic effect.  Wilson, conscious of the existence and deep rootedness of objectification, summons enough artistic wherewithals to maintain a double-consciousness while sending her performative body deep into a situation of immanent masculine/social assumptions about female/artist identity.   Objectification, subsequently, becomes a tool to address objectification.


[1] Jayne Wark, Radical Gestures : Feminism and Performance Art in North America (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006), 149-49.
[2] Ibid., 149-150.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Messiness: Agency in Feminist Explication of the Body

            Naked women scare men; the hegemonic masculinity in present culture might initially read in opposite terms, but despite being a simplification, there is truth in such a statement.  Simplified out of that statement is the contextual agency of the nude body specific.  In addressing the role of the body in performance art, the statement could be reframed this way:  naked female artists scare men artists.  The feminist performance art of Carolee Schneeman, art that utilizes the artist’s body explicit while establishing the agentic embodiment of the artist, threatened the male dominated aesthetic of the art world.  In her work, that opening phrase receives its final rephrasing:  naked female artists, as art, scare men. 
            Schneeman did not introduce nudity to art; a walk through the Louvre, for example, blasts vision with an assortment of naked bodies in paint and stone that reach back into antiquity.  Nor was she the first artist to have work dismissed through the scandal of nakedness.  Olympia, Manet’s response to Titian’s The Venus of Urbino, caused uproar because of the seemingly self-satisfied glare held by the painted courtesan.[1]  But while Olympia, as Rebecca Schneider puts it, “challenged the pretext that she exists only to be possessed by the owner/viewer/consumer of her image,” was there any feminine agency?[2]  Schneider continues: “it is worth noting that regardless of both pretext and anti-pretext, regardless of gaze and supposed counter-gaze, the frame of ‘art’ remained intact.  Olympia’s disdainful glance existed under Manet’s authorizing signature [emphasis mine], and under the more invisible signature of those who determined the membership in the category of decided, ‘great,’ or canonical art.”[3]  The point being that wherever one’s opinion falls when scaling degrees of rebelliousness in Olympia’s apparent look, “neither ‘Olympia’ nor the model Victorine Meurent who posed as Olympia with supposed self-possession could co-sign the painting or wield even an ounce of art-historical agency.”[4]
            Despite the momentary disapproval Manet felt, there is no debating that all of his work, Olympia included, enjoys membership in the art-history cannon.  Schneeman’s piece Eye/Body, for example, and feminist performance art like it, on the other hand, maintains a position of relative condemnation even as almost four decades have passed.  Schneider pinpoints why this was/is the case:  “Nudity was not the problem.  Sexual display was not the problem.  The agency of the body displayed, the author-ity of the agent – that was the problem.”[5]  What occurred was a destruction of the traditional artist/art binary.  “In Eye/Body Schneeman was not only image but image-maker,” writes Schneider.  The result?  “She [Schneeman] found herself excommunicated from the ‘Art Stud Club.’  George Maciunus, father of Fluxus, declared her work too ‘messy’ for inclusion.”[6]  Maciunus was using vague aesthetic descriptors for purposes of exclusion; Schneeman was hitting a nerve in the masculine art concept.          
            The body in art is not valid singularly when fulfilling this role.  There is, however, uniquity when feminist performance art, like Schneeman’s, combines the explicit body (in the form of the artist’s own physique) with conscious establishment of embodiment.  This art challenges notions of gender in relation to the patriarchal politics within the art world in specific, and the social situation of the feminine body in general.


[1] Rebecca Schneider, "Binary Terror and the Body Made Explicit," in The explicit body in performance (London ; New York: Routledge, 1997), 25.
[2]Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 27.
[5] Ibid., 35.
[6] Ibid., 35.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Rough Draft Form of Jazz as American Exceptionalism



Equality, Individualism, Freedom, Frontier: The Exceptionalist Narrative in Jazz




     Tocqueville was an unknowing prophet of Jazz. He outlined the strengths and weaknesses of America’s politics and culture in the 1830s, and established the basis of the concept of American Exceptionalism, a concept that would apply directly to a peculiarly American music eighty years later. If democracy is anything, it is the dissonance of society and the individual, of equality and freedom. These contrasts, and the expansive promises of the mythic Western Frontier, created a specific society in America that made Jazz an unavoidable musical outcome, one that was as exceptional as the nation from which it was born.
     
     Any sociological inquiry into any aspect of American society requires confronting the Exceptionalist discourse that surrounds the United States of America. This is the case with music as much as it is with any other area of study. Developing an American sociology of music while ignoring themes of egalitarianism, individuality, or the frontier, would suggest that the art music of America arose devoid of societal influence. This is in conflict with the Adornian perspective of the art dialectic. Bolaños describes this in The Critical Role of Art: Adorno between Utopia and Dystopia: “Far from being a means of reconciling the internal contradictions of society, art participates in the dialectical dynamism of society and culture; it realizes itself as a product of this dialectic and, as a result, mobilizes itself a counter-culture of well accepted culture or ideology. Art remains negative... it is a critique of ideology.” Art, in the form of music in this case, both influences, and is influenced by society. Jazz, as the unique American art music, both influences, and is influenced by American society. The prior portion of this sequence is the focus of this paper.
    
     The exceptionalist narrative is easily revealed in the Jazz idiom through a stylistic analysis. This might be the most important connection between American Exceptionalism and America’s art music because it lies in the subconscious of the art form. It lies in the technique and sound-nature of Jazz as genre. It is there in the unaware fetish-character of the Jazz performer and composition. This is the covert affect of the social mind’s historical idealism. The material conditions of America, its actual historical situation, could be a better place to begin the analysis, however. America is as exceptional in this instance as it is in the prior. Where ideology might have a greater affect on the idiomatic themes of a musical style, materialism can explain why a national art music arose where and when it did. Idealism and materialism are ultimately entwined instead of divided and autonomous; both need to be to discussed in order to fully see Jazz as the musical form of American Exceptionalism. In this paper, the themes of individuality, equality, freedom, and the frontier (which I argue are the main themes in American ideology) will be applied to Jazz in both previously mentioned directions. How did this ideology aid in creating a specific social setting that made Jazz inevitable? Where do these themes appear in the style and fetishes of the Jazz idiom and its musical language?
     
     There is no doubt that calling Jazz, “American,” is an applicable totality of description. Some argue, however, that doing this is really an oversimplification that removes the African roots of the music and gives the European nature of the music precedence. Scott Deveaux, in his essay “Constructing the Jazz Tradition,” feels the African influence needs emphasizing to balance this narrative out. He writes:


There is a sense of triumphant reversal as the music of a formerly enslaved people is designated a “rare and valuable national American treasure” by the Congress, and beamed overseas as a weapon of the Cold War. The story of jazz, therefore, has an important political dimension, one that unfolds naturally in its telling. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane provide powerful examples of black achievement and genius. Their exacting discipline cannot be easily marginalized, pace Adorno, as “mere” popular entertainment, or as the shadowy replication of European forms. The depth of tradition, reaching back in an unbroken continuum to the beginning of the century, belies attempts to portray African Americans as people without a past—hence the appeal of an ambiguous and convincing historical narrative: If the achievements that jazz represents are to be impressed on present and future generations, the story must be told, and told well... for all its pedagogical utility, though, the conventional narrative of jazz history is a simplification that begs as many questions as it answers.

Deveaux’s argument is contextually valid, but for an analysis of jazz as American Exceptionalism, he misses the point and creates a harsh dichotomy of competing interests. Jazz is exceptionally American because of the minimizing of this dichotomy (or at least the perception of minimization). If the theme of equality in America’s ideology had a structural effect on what would become America’s music, it is here that we find its greatest presence.
     
     There is no universal equality in a nation that has within it legally instituted slavery. There can still exist a relative equality between those outside of that state of servitude, however, and it was the value of that equality within the American democracy that lead to the abolition of slavery and its influence on music towards the rise of jazz. Tocqueville, resuming his prophetic role decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, hints at the qualities of democratic people that lead them to favor free institutions. He writes in volume two, part four, chapter one of Democracy in America, entitled Equality Naturally Gives Men the Taste for Free Institutions:

Equality, which renders men independent of one another, makes them contract the habit and taste of following their will alone in their particular actions. This entire independence, which they enjoy continually vis-à-vis their equals and in the practice of private life, disposes them to consider all authority with the eye of malcontent and soon suggests to them the idea and love of political freedom. Men who live in these times therefore advance on a natural slope directing them toward free institutions.

In the years following Tocqueville’s visit, American society followed his suggested trajectory. Post-abolition America is the beginning of the culture of equality that led to the creation of jazz. James Lincoln Collier writes in the opening chapter of Jazz: the American Theme Song, entitled The Inevitability of Jazz in America, “the United States housed a black subculture, constituting at that time about ten percent of the American people… these people had developed for their own use a musical system that had proven attractive to white Americans.” Collier points specifically to the city of New Orleans as the breeding ground of this music. What factors made it form here first? He explains that “music and dance were a regular part of the social life of New Orleans; and because blacks and whites there lived in closer physical contrast than they did in many other places, they were thoroughly aware of each other’s music.” An exceptional ideology of equality led America from slavery to a state of racial interaction that resulted in a music that personified this same ideology.

     Collier mentions how blacks and whites were “thoroughly aware of each other’s music.” This “awareness” indicates the unnecessary dichotomy of “African,” and “European” in the critique of jazz as American Exceptionalism. Jazz music is American (and exceptionally so); it combines elements of both continents (Europe and Africa) into a new dynamism. Europe’s influence can be seen in instrumentation; the main solo instruments of jazz are the European saxophone and trumpet. Western harmony is essential to jazz; it is, like most other Western musical styles, a constant cycle of dominant to tonic resolution. The basic harmonic block of the “jazz standard” (ii7-V7-I) is tertian harmony direct from the Major Scale (which is the basis of Western tonality). Africa lends its own influence in the form of rhythm and polyrhythm. This in its simplest form is “swing,” or a playing of two eighth notes with a feel of three. Africa is heard in the blues structures of jazz, its utilization of altered scales (such as the Blues Scale) and the improvised solos of microtonal voice-like phrasings. Jazz has other idiomatic characteristics; but remove one of these, and Jazz ceases to exist. These elements of jazz are present because of American Exceptionalism in the form of the exceptional ideology of equality in the first modern democracy.

     Egalitarianism exists side by side with individualism within the Exceptionalist doctrine. These two concepts exist side by side within jazz as well. Where egalitarianism provided the social structure that allowed jazz to form from pre-jazz American music, individualism had its affect later on in jazz’s existence. This aspect (individualism) of American Exceptionalism is evident in the rise of the solo in jazz. Collier points out the importance of the solo in the second chapter of Jazz: the American Theme Song:


In the minds of most people, at the heart of jazz is the improvised solo. Critical attention is almost invariably devoted to the analysis of solos by the great jazz musicians. Discussions of ensemble work are rare indeed in jazz literature. So much is the improvised solo seen as the essence of the music that listeners feel cheated when they discover that a solo is not the sudden outpouring of an open heart but has been memorized and repeated night after night, or even written out and played from sheet music.

Jazz, as American art music situated in modernity, minus the solo, ceases to exist in any form worthy of critical analysis. The improvised solo is the essence of jazz.

     There are specific historical bases for a marked rise in individualism within America and subsequently within America’s music. An analysis of the first recordings of jazz music indicates the absence of the solo. The first quarter of the 20th century yielded only an ensemble form of early jazz. Collier designates this as a function of European or white influence, “the Victorian nineteenth century was the great age of the massive ensemble… it was the time of the large marching band,” and describes the occasional solo in music as “the spice in the stew,” whereas “the meat and potatoes was the ensemble; the larger, the better.” What changed? Again, Collier answers:

What happened, I think, was that by the middle of the decade, the new spirit of modernism, with its crying-up of freedom, emotionalism, and expressiveness, had escaped bohemian and artistic circles and was rushing into the mainstream. The call was no longer for community, but for individualism.

He continues:

It is all here: the call for freedom of spirit, the virtues of primitivism, belief in living spontaneously. Jazz, and by implication all of art, was to arise from the individual expression of feeling. Indeed, Ornette Coleman has said flatly that in jazz “the essential quality is the right to be an individual”—in essence, to do what you want to do.”  

The individualistic aspect of American Exceptionalism has its root, as we have seen in Tocequville’s comments, in democracy. Jazz was initially purely equal and democratic in its ensemble structure, but gave rise to the individualism of the soloist; we see this in the popularity of Louis Armstrong or Sidney Bechet. The zenith of individualism in jazz corresponds to America’s transition into modernity. Collier juxtaposes the numbers of Thoreau’s Walden (“the quintessential call for individualism’) sold upon its initial release in the 19th century to its acceptance into the canon as “required reading for anybody with intellectual pretensions” in the 20th century. Facts like this indicate that individualism was a strong ideology throughout American society; it was correspondingly strong within America’s music.

     Individualism is not the only Exceptionalist theme that relates to jazz as soloist’s music. Frederick Jackson Turner argued the effect of the frontier on American ideology; this theme finds its musical counterpart in jazz. Albert Murray, in the introduction to Ken Burn’s documentary Jazz, describes it this way: “When you see a jazz musician playing, you’re lookin’ at… at pioneer, you’re lookin’ at an explorer, you’re lookin’ at an experimenter, you’re lookin’ at a scientist. You’re looking at all those things because it’s the creative process incarnate.” “Pioneer,” “explorer,” “experimenter,” and “scientist” are all descriptive of people on the edge of knowledge, adventuring into the unknown… the frontier. It is often considered by the jazz aficionado that there is risk involved in a player’s presence on stage and that he does not in fact know what music will come from the instrument next. Collier lends his insight to this idea:


It is startling how frequently jazz writers speak of an improvising soloist’s “risk” or “accepting challenges,” as if he were climbing a mountain in a blizzard. We have wanted to our jazz soloists as Hemingway heroes, and we have waved as banners alcoholism and drug addiction as proof that they were tormented geniuses—as if the suffering itself certified their genius. Beiderbecke’s remark, quoted by Jimmy McPartland above, is instructive: “That’s one of the things I like about jazz, kid. I don’t know what’s going to happen next.” By 1925, not knowing what was going to happen next had a great appeal for young Americans escaping the well-ordered life of the Victorians. And the jazz solo seemed the embodiment of that idea.

The nature of the frontier (the risk, the unknown, the need for innovation and self-reliance in order to survive and conquer), which Turner argues was the primary force in shaping America’s ideology, permeates America’s music as well.

     Freedom, which I consider the pre-occupying meta-narrative within American Exceptionalism, exists within jazz as well. Freedom allowed jazz to form. During the rise of jazz, and the subsequent Jazz Age, the nation’s views of freedom created some specific social structures that allowed this music to take hold. “Feminism was an integral part of the new spirit of jazz,” writes Collier. Because jazz was ultimately a dance music, the new found freedoms of women created an excited group that was now able to do these dances (Collier 2001). The United States of America as a capitalism economy created a freedom of industry that allowed for a productive entertainment industry to reproduce and spread this music (Collier 2001). Economy also created a spirit of technological innovation that gave America the phonograph and other listening tools (Collier 2001). Freedom as an ideology of Exceptionalism provided one of the strongest catalysts for jazz popularity.

     Freedom also had its influence on the sound of jazz. As the 20th century progressed into its second half, America saw a rise in the value of freedom. The 1960s produced riots and protests about race relations, women, and war. As a response to this focus on freedom, jazz gave birth to a subgenre called Free Jazz. The connection is direct. Free jazz is essentially the musical form of the dissonance that exists between equality and freedom. It is the musical form of democratic society. Ornette Coleman, one of many proponents of this music, embraced the term “free jazz” with the release of his album Free Jazz: a Collective Improvisation by his double quartet in 1960. This music focuses on group improvisation; the ensemble creates a music based upon the free improvisations of the individuals within the group. It is democracy as music, for sure. It is as dissonant and hard to grasp as the concept of a democratic society itself. The idea that equality and freedom can exist in equal parts is a paradox of American Exceptionalism. Free Jazz is the musical form of this paradox.

     Separating each of these concepts (freedom, equality, individualism, and frontier) is a tool of analysis. The reality is that the interaction and combination of these create the Exceptionalist discourse as a whole. Just the same, these ideas are not exceptional to America: the dynamic created by their relationship and the specific material conditions of America, is exceptional. Seymour Martin Lipset considers American Exceptionalism to be a “double-edged sword.” This comment indicates the intrinsic dialectic of this discussion, but Jazz as American Exceptionalism has more than one edge as well. Howard Levy comments on this in his essay The Search for Identity in American Music, 1890-1920. He writes:


I would like to summarize the question of American Exceptionalism by touching upon some of the aesthetic issues running throughout. The separation of art and vernacular music had been a chief obstacle amidst the search for musical identity. The imperious old elitism of Horatio Parker that looked down on such musics as jazz and ragtime is now quite archaic. But an anti-elite elitism remains virulent.

For him, to consider jazz as American Exceptionalism is to “oppose its fusion with art music and, in effect, to circumscribe it and ghettoize it.” Certainly, as the Exceptionalist discourse in the political and social sense has lead many outside of the nation to question the rationale of American action, it has brought into discussion questions of jazz’s right to be pedestaled within America’s musical culture. Adorno commented in harsher terms on the nature of jazz elitism; he questioned the music more severely than any musicologist or social theorist yet. He wrote in Perennial Fashion—Jazz:

The aim of jazz of jazz is the mechanical reproduction of a regressive moment, a castration symbolism. “Give up your masculinity, let yourself be castrated,” the eunuch- like sound of the jazz band both mocks and proclaims, “and you will be rewarded, accepted into a fraternity which shares the mystery of impotence with you, a mystery revealed at the moment of the initiation rite.”

He saw nothing positive about jazz, nothing exceptional. Instead of a frontier hero, there is a fraternity of eunuchs. No doubt this opinion is held by others, not only about jazz, but about America as a nation. But Jazz, through all these examples, and for good or bad, becomes the musical form of American Exceptionalism.

     In the 1830s, Tocqueville wrote about the exceptional characteristics of democracy in America. He discussed concepts such as freedom, egalitarianism and individualism. He wrote about what these ideologies did to American society and polity, and in what way America was different than any other nation. American Exceptionalism is not the impossible and irrelevant question of “good” or “bad,” but a lens to view the issues and nature of a specific society. If that lens is used to look at music in a critical sense and see what arises within it because of those ideologies, then the only result could be jazz. Equality gave jazz the solid ground to grow on through the adaptation in equal measures of African and European music. Freedom created an audience for it and an improvisatory swinging style. Individualism and the frontier gave rise to jazz as a soloist’s music of modernity. These combinations of ideology as American Exceptionalism direct different outcomes in various spheres, but within music they made jazz unavoidable.


Works Cited


Adorno, Theodor W., Richard D. Leppert, and Susan H. Gillespie. "Perennial Fashion - Jazz." Essays on      Music. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California, 2002. Print.
Bolanos, Paolo A. "The Critical Role of Art: Adorno between Utopia and Dystopia." Kritike 1.1 (2007): 25-     31. Print.
Collier, James Lincoln. Jazz: The American Theme Song. Oxford UP, 1995. Print.
Deveaux, Scott. "Constructing the Jazz Tradition." Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History. New York:      Oxford UP, 1999. 416-24. Print.
Jazz. Dir. Ken Burns. By Ken Burns. 2001. DVD.
Levy, Alan H. "The Search for Identity in American Music, 1890-1920." American Music 2.2 (1984): 70-81.      JSTOR. Web. 07 June 2010.
Lipset, Seymour Martin. American Exceptionalism: a Double-edged Sword. New York: W.W. Norton,      1996. Print.
Tocqueville, Alexis De, Harvey C. Mansfield, and Delba Winthrop. Democracy in America. Chicago:      University of Chicago, 2000. Print.